About

Every year dozens of people from across the Minecraft community come together over the course of three months to put on Love Tropics. The event always starts with a meeting——several actually. We discuss our goals for the event, what charities we could support, themes, hosts, minigames, and much more. More meetings and a lot of planning later and we arrive at the point when we actually start making things.

Dozens of builders, artists, modders, and moderators dedicate an honestly astounding number of hours to make Love Tropics happen. And the event is truly only possible because of this, the support of its most dedicated community members. For every event a new map has to be built, charity specific features implemented, stream assets created, schedules drawn up, and mingames designed. It's a lot of work, but it's worth it.

The impact of Love Tropics cannot be quantified by only amount raised, we strive to not only host a charitable event, but an educating and entertaining one as well. Amazing educators dedicate tremendous effort to ensure we can present accurate and engaging facts about the causes we support and talented designers and developers ensure the content of our stream is engaging and entertaining. Love Tropics isn't just the money and the event, it's also the memories and friends we make along the way. That being said, with well over $200,000 USD raised in the past 6 years, Love Tropics has definitely succeeded in it's goal of helping the Tropics and their people.

My Role

I wear many hats at Love Tropics and have my fingers in many pots however the bulk of my impact lies in the events minigames. While minigames have always been the primary part of my role how I've gone about filling that role has evolved over time. The first year, aside from some minor QOL features, I worked on one minigame: Survival Games. This was before it had grown into what it is today: Survive the Tide (Our signature game). It was a simple and very classic experience, players start in the middle, move outwards in search of loot, then are forced back to the center by an encroaching border. It was rudimentary and required a server restart to reset the map but it was fun.

Five years on and my role at Love Tropics is a far cry from what it used to be. Over the years I've found myself more involved with the event as a whole. I do little direct develpoment work now, our outstanding modding team having all but perfected our data-driven minigame system. That has left my role in the content creation side of Love Tropics as one of design and building. And I'm okay with that! It's been wonderful to take a step back from development and focus on the design of our minigames.

For Love Tropics 2022 I was in charge of rebalancing our signature game: Survive the Tide. In short, Survive the Tide is a classic minecraft Survival Game with rising tides and viewer controlled donation packages. This meant I was in charge of: Fixing our loot tables, rebalancing all three maps, fixing game pacing, and all while ensuring player and viewer enjoyment.

The first issue was pacing. The game felt too slow with a small number of players and too fast with lots of them. With the help of Gegy, our resident minigame-modder extraordinaire and Mojang developer, we managed to implement a system which multipled the speed at which game states advanced based on players alive. It worked fantastically and even our test games with less than half the usual number of players still felt exciting and well paced.

The second challenge was loot. Shields were too strong, potions were useless, and bows didn't matter. On top of that, certain members of the community had become skilled at the game and dominated lobbies. Of course we could have simply nerfed the broken items, limited how often those players could participate and call it a day. We didn't. Instead, in an eye opening meeting with Moesh, PvP minigame master and Mojang QA specialist, he proposed the idea of refocusing loot around ranged combat, along with a focus on lingering potions and overall 'sillyness'. This led to the defining doctorine of STT 2022 gameplay being 'chaos'. After a lot of tweaking loot tables we managed to create balanced gameplay through chaos. It was beautiful.

And finally the maps. Three different maps, three different years, three different scales. All paired with new mechanics and new loot. It was ... tough, to say the least. The first order of buisness was to take the bright orange and white color scheme used to denote navigation points in STT3 and bring those to STT2 (An abandoned city with all it's features) in order to increase player mobility. The second was to expand road infrastructure and pathfinding in STT3 in order to guide players towards monuments and away from empty space. And the third were all of the too-many-to-get-into-here changes which overall improved navigability and the player experiences across all three maps.

So, did it work? Yeah, for the most part it did! There were a few hiccups——unexpected interactions and whatnot——but the changes which we came up with definitely served the goal of making Survive the Tide better and the stream more enjoyable. And at the end of the day, when players are asking, again and again, if we can play more Survive the Tide, well there isn't a feeling more rewarding than that.