Plants! 
Plants on the Minecraft Marketplace.
Education
We created a free and informative piece of content. Why? We believe it's important to offer an alternative way of learning, to give people more opportunities of staying engaged with a subject they are passionate about! Plants are vital to our existence and we want the Minecraft audience to experience this in our interactive map.
Fun plant facts scattered around the map
We created a world where the player didn't feel like they're learning but they really are. A gardener guide takes you through the map and teaches you about the different aspects of the plants - the plant cells, the anatomy of a plant, and photosynthesis. You can then go and take a quiz where you have to pass 5 questions in order to move on. The next stage of the experience is roaming free around the garden where the player can take additional quests and learn even more!
The big fat plant quiz
Art & Design
A lot of work went into the creation process. We starting to collaborate and work on a plan. Most plans change and this was project was no exception! Our goals were to create an interactive experience with various plants for the player to grow and learn about. We planned out what we wanted the user to learn and how they would learn that piece of information. By using creative builds, models, and animations to keep the user excited!
A tree in progress
@Yamin lead the artististic process by creating the models and worked with the team to help texture the different plant variations. You will find the models spread around the map - and they all look amazing! We have all kinds of plants, fruit trees, bushes, cacti to pretty flowers that help attract pollinators.
The finished plants
One of the gardener's animations using smooth keyframing from Blockbench
One of the gardener's animations using smooth keyframing from Blockbench
The technical process
Behaviours and Redstone are key to any map! I had an awesome time working on the technical process of this map. As I have an allotment myself, I was able to take my learnings from creating my own garden to bringing this into the virtual world of Minecraft, which was super rewarding! The features I created were the growing mechanics and allowing the user to interact with them, adding the sounds and various animations so that they work in the game.
@SpookedCow was the genius behind the Redstone and wrote the various commands that allowed the user to hear the gardeners beautiful voice at the right time. This took a tremendous amount of patience and I don't think spooked quite liked her voice by the end of the project after hearing it so many times! Spooked created the pathfinding of the gardener who would navigate through the different areas and challenges.
The first animation mechanics for the plants.
Animation of a venus flytrap.
Voice Acting
@jelliobean wrote the script for the gardener. We knew we wanted the gardener to talk in the game. At first, we got some of our designers to have a go at the voice acting but it just wasn't right. We finally decided to get a professional voice actor to read the script, which sounds amazing and really fits in with the character! Here's a demo of 2 variations of her voice and tone.
The Release
It was fantastic to release our free educational content as part of the back to school promo with Minecraft. If you'd like to read the Minecraft blog post, click here!
You can check out our other highlights here:
Flappy Dragon
SkyWars
Pet Mobs
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