Hytale in 2016, 30 old screenshots from early development 🧵

My vision for the minigames tab (which would come after the mods tab): our own official Hytale minigames, with community-made games sitting right alongside us. That means the community would be part of the big 3: Minigames, Mods, and Servers. It's important that we don't see the great minigames getting lost in the noise. The bar for putting a game on the tab will be higher than for other tabs, as you might imagine. Think the classic Halo custom games scene: a small set of deep, replayable minigames that talented authors built right inside the game (Infection, etc), the kind of stuff people came back to for years. DotA literally started as a Warcraft 3 custom map. Whole genres can emerge from community modders when the right tools are in place, and players can just jump in with their friends. The recent contest made me realize we have a problem with current minigame mods; they're a bit complicated to just jump in and play. It should be super simple. We'll fix that with the minigame tab and other changes to the in-game mods browser page. The idea is that you don't need a team. You don't need infrastructure. You could build a fun minigame or a short adventure over the weekend, hand it to us, and it will go to players if it's approved. Players would be able to support the creators behind the games they love, so if your thing pops off, that's a real win for you. No servers to rent, no ops to babysit. No paywall or monetization in the face of players, just optional support for official cosmetics at our cost, that's all. No need for modders to think about it, they just focus on making fun minigames. This can greatly help community servers too. A server team can drop a polished minigame into the tab as a gift to players and as a doorway back to their full server for anyone who wants more (progression, community, etc). Build it once, ship it through us, let the players come to you. How players hop in: peer-to-peer with friends in one click for instant casual play, or in a session we host and manage the queue for players. Same Play button, two lanes underneath as options. A few notes: - This is the direction, not a release date. Specifics when they're locked. It will take a while to get there. - Quick session-based games live on the minigame tab. Persistent worlds and progression-heavy experiences live in the Server Browser. Different surfaces. - Curation matters. I'd rather ship a few great minigames than 10,000 forgotten ones. Let me know your suggestions!