I made some topics regarding this ages ago (as far back as last march) and feel that this is a good time to resurrect the ideas I had, given that Minecraft has taken a more distinct shape since then.
My idea revolves around one commodity that I feel should be expanded upon: Paper. I feel that we have no natural-feeling method of getting a story into the game (Notch has long said that he wants the game to have some form of story) and we have no way of imparting crafting recipes to the player without them breaking the 4th wall and going to the wiki. (This is NOT a very good method).
So here's what I propose: The addition of story-giving and recipe given pages that will appear in the game environment at random.
Randomly generated ruins and dungeons would be the main placement point for our story pages. These pages can be selected in the inventory slots and one can right click them to read them. They could be a little snippet of a longer story (Collect them all and bind them in a book!) or they could be full stories themselves. Maybe diary entries that explain a bit of what the world is, maybe cryptic messages cluing you in on the end-game goal. Whatever the case, these should still be a nonessential fun thing to be found, not so essential that they become the focus of the game. Silly rhymes, poems, etc. Just flavor pieces, really.
Crafting recipes are a somewhat different matter. The idea of giving the player crafting recipes in-game is essential: This game can't rely on player's doing things like looking at the texture files and the wiki just to play the game. How is a player gonna figure out how to make a cake in the game without that sort of help?
This is where the recipes come in. These would be a variety of the randomly placed papers the player would encounter, only these would be rarer (Recipes as essential as the workbench and shovel should be told to the player in a tutorial, only the odder recipes should be found this way.)
So that's it. There's more to my thoughts, but that's basically the general form of the idea. I trust that you shall have no qualms in telling me your thoughts on my idea.
My idea revolves around one commodity that I feel should be expanded upon: Paper. I feel that we have no natural-feeling method of getting a story into the game (Notch has long said that he wants the game to have some form of story) and we have no way of imparting crafting recipes to the player without them breaking the 4th wall and going to the wiki. (This is NOT a very good method).
So here's what I propose: The addition of story-giving and recipe given pages that will appear in the game environment at random.
Randomly generated ruins and dungeons would be the main placement point for our story pages. These pages can be selected in the inventory slots and one can right click them to read them. They could be a little snippet of a longer story (Collect them all and bind them in a book!) or they could be full stories themselves. Maybe diary entries that explain a bit of what the world is, maybe cryptic messages cluing you in on the end-game goal. Whatever the case, these should still be a nonessential fun thing to be found, not so essential that they become the focus of the game. Silly rhymes, poems, etc. Just flavor pieces, really.
Crafting recipes are a somewhat different matter. The idea of giving the player crafting recipes in-game is essential: This game can't rely on player's doing things like looking at the texture files and the wiki just to play the game. How is a player gonna figure out how to make a cake in the game without that sort of help?
This is where the recipes come in. These would be a variety of the randomly placed papers the player would encounter, only these would be rarer (Recipes as essential as the workbench and shovel should be told to the player in a tutorial, only the odder recipes should be found this way.)
So that's it. There's more to my thoughts, but that's basically the general form of the idea. I trust that you shall have no qualms in telling me your thoughts on my idea.
^^My blog^^