When I was a Freshman in college, I set out to start developing my own games, in hopes of one day opening my own game studio. Right from the beginning, I started out as ambitious as I am today; and while my skills have matured and evolved over the years, all my knowledge and efforts can be linked back to my first game: Minecraft Hunger Games.
As a Freshman in college without any direction, and or, formal learning of advanced computer science topics, creating a PvP Minecraft server seemed daunting at the time. While I did have access to Minecraft's internal game engine, it's important to know that Minecraft was still only being developed by 5 programmers in 2013; thus many of the functionality I was looking integrate took much more research. While I was skeptical about being able to finish the project, I still felt that I could develop a large majority of what I originally envisioned. During the development process, I learned
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Looking back, many of the decisions that I made were related to the success and relevance of the Hunger Games franchise, and this was all on purpose. This concept of "knowing your audience" was apparent to me early in development; but I didn't fully grasp the concept until the game moved out of development and into launch. Once the Mod was put one websites for people to play, I got instant feed back about how I could enhance the quality of the game. It was this last phase of development when I realized just how important it is to know your audience. Even though the original build had a lot of depth, getting feed back from players is what put this project far ahead of other Mods. As an example, I got responses telling me how to make the game more like the movie, and advice on how to make the game feel more immersive. These messages were what made Minecraft Hunger Games rise in popularity in the first few weeks of