Power Bingo
Hello there awesome people!
My name is San and I'm a Redstone Engineer at CubeCraft. A Redstone Engineer is someone who works together with the Design team to create entertaining minigames for the official Bedrock Marketplace.
The task of the Redstone Engineer is to 'make the minigame work'. We do this using command blocks and functions.
First thoughts and brainstormingSome of the old Java CubeCraft players might remember the original Bingo minigame released back in January 2018. The game is no longer available but was awesome to play, alone or with friends.
Some of the Designers felt a bit nostalgic and came up with the idea to recreate Bingo for the Marketplace.
Almost scraping the projectAt first, we didn't think it would be possible to recreate the Java Bingo game due to Bedrock's many limitations in terms of commands. However, the idea always remained at the back of my head. We needed a way to overcome three major problems:
- The Bingo card couldn't be a map like in the original game.
- The world generation had to contain all the items on the card within a reasonable distance.
- The world needed to easily generate.
Picture of a Bingo card.
World generation and a way to include all Bingo card items were a much bigger headache.
The first idea was to hope that custom dimensions would be possible at some point in the near future. In these custom dimensions, we would have small biomes with all obtainable Bingo card items. This idea wasn't going to work since Mojang had no plans for custom dimensions.
The next idea was to have a custom 300 by 300 biome that contained all obtainable Bingo card items. The only problem was that you'd need a way to regenerate the terrain when the player was done playing. This idea wasn't a success either.
A final idea was to have a 250 by 250 floating island which would contain small biomes with all obtainable Bingo card items. Regenerating the island would take time but wasn't impossible. All problems were finally solved and the project was ready to get started!
The prototypeTo make sure that the ideas actually worked, I had to make a prototype. A prototype is basically a small version of the project to test if the ideas are actually possible. The prototype had to contain all of the following systems:
- Bingo card generation
- World generation
- A system that detects if you got an item on your card
- Teleporting from your card to the map & the other way around
- A system that prepares the player before the map starts
. After a quick troubleshooting session, the prototype was ready to be QA'd again and barely had any bugs left. The prototype was a success!The behind-the-scenes from the prototype.
The preparationsTo get the actual project started, we needed a builder to build the three giant islands. These islands had to contain every single item that you could collect on the Bingo card, so attention to detail was required. Even the smallest things such as missing red flowers could make a Bingo card impossible because one of the possible items is orange dye.
To help the builder explain what it was I exactly wanted, I made a couple of sketches and a list of all possible items that you can get on a Bingo card.
An example of a possible layout for an island.
The width, length, and height for an island.
The main Bingo card idea.
Production processThanks to @dxde , the islands were quickly finished! As you can see on the picture below, they were all put close together. The actual builds are cloned elsewhere in the world.
The three islands, as well as the vanity shop in the top left corner.
The world was ready to be converted into a Bedrock world. Now it's up to the redstone engineer to make the game work. Bingo was the most complicated project I had ever worked on, even after making a prototype. There were many different systems that had to be taken into consideration. There was even a system to spread all the mobs around the islands!
Throughout the production process, some features were added:
- Power-ups were added to the game to spice up the gameplay. @bethharrison2134 is responsible for those awesome models!
Example of the power-ups.
- 1.17 was released, so we updated the islands to contain loads of 1.17 features such as axolotls, copper, goats & much more!
Example of a cave on one of the islands.
- Even the name was changed from 'Bingo' to 'Power Bingo'!
The behind-the-scenes of Bingo. A lot of functions were used as well.
Quality AssuranceThe finished map can't be released without any testing, that's why we're so thankful for the quality assurance team. They play every single map we release to make sure there are no bugs in any of them.
Bingo was QA'd many times. 3 regular QA's and 2 sanity QA's. A sanity QA is usually the last QA before the project gets released. In this QA, no detail can be missed, not even a spelling error.
The page where the QA team reports bugs for a project.
Trailer
You can find this any many more of our projects on the Official Bedrock Marketplace!
If you want to contribute to our servers and Marketplace projects, feel free to check out our application thread!
Thank you so much for checking out our Power Bingo Marketplace Highlight thread. We'll be doing these from time to time! Keep on being creative out there & stay safe!
