For a long while, one of the most popular names in the world of Minecraft was "Stampy" or "Stampylonghead", a British YouTuber known for creating content perfect for all ages and audiences all in Mojang's massively popular title. Stampy has since stepped back from making YouTube content all in an effort to explore a new career path in game development, where he currently operates as a producer at the Scottish 4J Studios, where the Minecraft and Hypixel-challenger, Reforj, is currently in production.
During our recent visit to London Games Fest's New Game Plus event, we had the luxury of speaking with Joe "Stampy" Garrett, to learn more about Reforj and the truly immense ambitions for the game. With such a topic in mind, we inquired about how the team goes about reining itself in perhaps putting quirkier and more crazy ideas on the backburner to instead focus on key elements. The answer, in its most rudimentary form, is that the development team doesn't do this and simply lets the creativity flow.
"I don't think we do very well. Like, we know we have the long-term plan. We know there's some big things we want to have, like vehicles. The engine's really good at vehicles. We have vehicles in the engine. They're not in the game yet, but they were in kind of previous demos that were created. So we know what we're going to have. We know we're going to have gateways with these big tentpole things. We know we're working towards them. But in terms of the smaller things, or things we can implement a little bit more quickly, like new mobs or new quality of life features, we're really fast to adapt to that.
"You know, because we're listening to the community so much, any little suggestions or like... 'add furniture or things', I know I'm saying little suggestions and the rest of the team is probably watching this, like I worked two months on that! You know, things that are a little bit easier to implement than things like vehicles. We're very agile and so we can add that stuff quite quickly. We have the big picture, we know the world and we have kind of that line. But in terms of the little smaller parts that we're taking, we're purposefully not locking ourselves down too much. If we spend months and months working on a thing, and then we show it to the community, and they're not interested in it, or they say, 'oh, it could have been like this', we've just wasted loads of time, right?
"So we're literally sharing, you know, if we're working on a mob, we're showing it in gray box stage, or we're showing concept art, and we're getting feedback then before a load of animators are animating it or adding sounds to it. So that's kind of the way we're trying to develop, and it seems to be working."
You can see the full interview with Garrett below, and as for more from Reforj, the game is still in-development and looking for more community feedback to help sculpt its direction and future plans.
