There's an itch somewhere in the back of my mind that I haven't been able to scratch for a long time. It's that kind of creative problem solving itch that comes up whenever you look at something and say "I can make that, but better." It's a pernicious feeling, one that gets deep under my skin and shows me everything I don't want to see about the experience I'm having.
This feeling only comes up when there's a game or related experience I'm having that is fun or enjoyable in a lot of respects, but falls flat on its face in others. It's like a guilty pleasure; I'm having fun with the game and also having my way with the game at the same time. I don't often go back to a poor quality game unless it's particularly bad. Each time that happens it calls to me and says "why do you like me when I'm like this?"
I think the first time I scratched this itch was when I started modding Minecraft. By all accounts Minecraft is not a bad game. At worst, it was an incomplete game with a lot of potential. So much potential in fact that I could take what appeared to be a basic block game and make it better. Not just better though... I could do something so worthwhile with it that I could make the experience my own.
For context, Minecraft is nothing like it was back in the early 2010s. Today you can easily mine out the bottom of the world with a max-sized beacon and a pickaxe enchanted to the hilt. Most players have multiple double-chests full of cobblestone or dirt or whatever other resources they can get. There's a huge variety of biomes to explore and multiple mobs to see or fight. Minecraft itself is a complete experience. I don't want to work on that.
Minecraft in its early days was wholly unfinished. This was an era where you could spend gobs of time and in-game resources on building a castle, only to have it consume your entire being for a month as you struggle to gather everything needed for that perfect idea of a castle you had. You have to go mine individual blocks of stone, farm sheep for wool, grow a farm and chop each individual log for wood, and building all of the infrastructure for a base in a starting area could take as long as the build itself.
I played Minecraft for a month before really diving in with code. Three of those weeks were spent thinking about just how bad the experience felt. Every single thing in beta 1.5 was time consuming to a fault. I could get what I wanted in the game... eventually... sort of. The selection of blocks was limited, tools were slow, and anything resembling progression just wasn't there.
It's telling that I played a game that had such an ugly presentation for 3 weeks before diving into anything. I absolutely loved the game, and hated it at the same time. It was wonderful, ugly, amazing, and tedious. I very much wanted to play the game for everything that it was worth, not for what I was getting. Comparing beta 1.5 to the current 1.16 version, I would say that you had about 5% of the experience that you do now without accounting for mods of any kind, content or server.
There were four main problems I kept running into. The first one was simple: there wasn't enough variety in the blocks of the game to let me make the builds I actually wanted. That was also simple to fix: install mods that had a variety of blocks to play with.
The second problem was one I didn't find a good answer to, at first. Building anything was slow, tedious, and boring. It wasn't the building itself that was slow, but the gathering of resources. Creative mode was not a good solution either, as anything I built felt like it was just a free floating construct instead of a castle that had any meaning.
The third problem was with Minecraft's combat. Everything was too simple, and too obnoxious at the same time. I had resolved to solve that problem after I had worked on the second, but found a great alternative later. A combination of mods that encouraged exploration and the Little Maid Mob gave combat a more strategic element, one that had me working as a commander of an army storming a castle instead of a lone idiot waving around a sharp stick. The Magic Maiden modpack was my favorite way to play purely because of the maids and the dungeons.
The fourth problem resolved itself over time. I came to learn that Minecraft wasn't a game that lent itself very well to goals. I guess this was more of a problem that kept me wondering why the heck I kept playing a "game" that had no real win condition. This isn't something that beating the dragon fixed, as you just went right back into the world afterwards. The problem resolved itself by becoming irrelevant, and I carried on.
The second problem is the main motivation behind Tinkers Construct. I wanted to improve the game in such a way that it made it fun for me to play. I wanted to dig out an entire quarry or a mineshaft by hand, but a single diamond pickaxe with no enchantments was unacceptable. I could feel something deep inside my mind gnawing at the prospect of building a castle in a real way... the right way. Something that didn't stink of horribly horrible horribleness despite the lovely castle I was living in.
My first attempts were rather bad, I'll admit, and there were a lot of times I felt like I could keep doing better than I was already doing. That single minded push to make this thing better was so much better motivation than I could possibly describe here. It wasn't a consuming motivation either; things came in, code went out, I evaluated and shared with the internet, and it started over again. The feeling of building something was fun, but it didn't scratch that itch.
I don't think the itch was really scratched until I had finally built the Smeltery and everything that it represented. Mod version 1.3.0 was when I felt like I had made something worthwhile. I was proud, I was happy, and most importantly the itch had been scratched. No longer would I have to spend buckets of time gathering resources for a castle. I could spend what was the right amount: one bucket of time on resources, five buckets of time on building. The balance was perfect, the progression was sound, and the feel of Minecraft was right. All was finally right in the world.
My motivation for improving the mod dropped pretty quickly after that. There was still a lot left to do, however, and Minecraft itself could still be improved. I would say that version 1.7 was where the game felt 50% complete compared to how it is today. Unfortunately, Mojang broke the game in half underneath the waves and I wasn't done with the work I wanted to do... but the game was done with me. I'd had enough, and I still haven't been able to motivate myself to work on Minecraft again.
If I did want to work on something like Tinkers Construct again, I think the following would have to be present:
1. The experience is fun and memorable
2. The experience is fundamentally flawed in a way that is disappointing or maddening
3. The act of solving a problem with the experience itself is a worthwhile endeavor.
Drawing out the potential in a game is usually the goal here, but I have been known to do this for some other things. It's like I want to see the good in the world, and if that good doesn't exist in the creative work I'm looking at then I want to make it myself.
I definitely don't want to make Tinkers Construct again. Let's make something else instead, and let's do it from a different perspective. There are so many older games that I look at and think "I want to play a better version of this game". It's easy to say that a game hasn't aged well, but it's a lot harder to say why it hasn't. You can point at technology, at being a product of its time, or just made from a team that didn't have enough skill to pull it off.
To that I say: I will do better. Let's get started.
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