Happy 2024! Devlog

Hello everyone,

It's actually been a little while since the last devlog! You will have noticed that we released a ton of new content in the meantime, with the release of the diamond league arena, the release of the story mode dungeons (the mines, the bridge, the city, the palace) and vast updates to all of the already existing story mode dungeons, as well as updates completing Primis and The Oasis. I hope you are all enjoying all the new content as it takes shape before out very eyes.

I won't cover everything that got updated or tweaked here, since it's too much, but I will quickly mention that the crowdin master translation file has been updated, that the official EliteMobs resource pack now uses FreeMinecraftModels for handling the custom models and that the antiexploit has been updated to use far more advanced and lightweight ways to check if a mob is in a mob trap through EasyMinecraftGoals.

However, instead of reviewing all the stuff that we have done, I want to look forward into what the first part of 2024 will hopefully look like for my projects.

Before I even begin, I want to highlight that this is what I am personally going to be working on. The rest of our team is still hard at work, focusing on the story mode dungeons and on a yet unannounced dungeon.

First off, once I am done addressing some leftover bugs, the first thing we will be working on updating and improving are the documentation and webapp. This will be a real overhaul, aiming to make it so each system is clear enough and provides enough examples that anyone can look at the wiki and find it easy to create any kind of EliteMobs / BetterStructures / FMM / ETD / ... content. Simultaneously, I will be updating the webapp to make sure that all of the content can be generated through it, and making sure that experience feels good.

Then, the goal will be to add furniture/craftable decoration mechanics to FreeMinecraftModels. Right now, it can technically do this kind of thing through external plugins, but I want people to be able to use the plugin even without any other plugin being installed.  I have very limited experience with it, but I believe that this is something ItemAdder does as well.

As you might imagine, the plan with it is to provide furniture / decoration packs, in the same style that I do for my other content, but this has the added advantage that we can use this furniture in existing and future EliteMobs and BetterStructures content. Thus, I also plan to make at least two or maybe four BetterStructures packs dedicated to structures that contain items with some kind of specific custom model decoration(s) object(s) in them. We also plan to add several decorations to existing EliteMobs content. This can mean skulls, skeletons, carts, tables, sacks, backpacks, stacks of coins, ballista munitions - anything that might make a map feel more alive and add some flair.

Some of it might be functional, such as a wardrobe with an actual chest inventory on it, while most of it will probably be decorative, with potentially an animation if you interact with it, such as a little globe model that spins if you interact with it.

Once we have this made, the focus will turn to making a lot of youtube videos. I will make installation guide videos, showcase / trailer videos and content creation videos (as in how to create content such as bosses, items, dungeons, etc). I will also be making some videos more focused on the creation process of making plugins, basically video devlogs of how a certain feature was made. I am a big fan of youtubers such as Sebastian Lague, and I would love to emulate doing something similar to his work for a few of the features I've added.

The objective will be to both showcase what we have made, since right now there is relatively little visibility of our work, but also provide good video tutorials on how to create your own content, something I am sure will be huge for some people who have been interested in creating their own content but have thus far lacked a guide they could more easily follow.

And finally, at some point here, I also want to make sure that I have a good website that everyone can use. Up until now, this is merely something that would've been nice to have, but nothing too important. However, the current downloadable content count across all of my project is over 50, and neither Patreon nor itch.io have good ways for me to organize the posts in a way that is easy to navigate or read about.

To be clear, I will still be using Patreon and itch.io, and I want to also start using subscription-based alternatives to Patreon on top of that as to not overinvest on this platform, but at this stage we need a good way to read about all the different content we've made, and for that we need our own website.

I also have my 3d printing things happening in the background, I am still working on that but it will be a side thing, so I can't really provide a hard estimation of where it will end up fitting in the timeline.

So, for the start of 2024, much of the focus (aside from the planned dungeon releases) will be on custom models and making really solid documentation. Once these are done, I will probably run a poll, but I suspect we will be working on custom elitemobs enchantments and procedurally generated betterstructures content.

I hope you are looking forward to the releases! I think 2024 will be a big year for us, fingers crossed!

Happy New Year,

- MagmaGuy