About

RTX Egg Hunt is a bedrock remake of the classic 1.12 speedrun challenge map Feed The Beast Egg Hunt originally released for Java. It was made in parternship between NVIDIA and FTB in order to showcase raytracing in Minecraft. The map features casual and speedrunner modes, a vast map adapted with RTX in mind, many easter eggs, and multiple unique puzzles and minigames.

My Role

I was brought on to assist with the project roughly halfway through it's development. Other team members were working on the primary mechanic systems so I was tasked with designing and developing multiple small puzzles and minigames across the map. I also implemented a number of animated structures.

While the puzzles were standard minecraft fair, their implementation was interesting in that many of them had to fit into a level in which the player would re-tread their path many times in search of every egg. This proved a unique challenge. The best example of this was a minigame in a large chamber where in order to reach the other side the player had to parkour across a series of moving snake-like block chains. If they touched the ground of the chamber they were sent back to their starting point, which could be on either side of the chamber depending on where they started from.

One puzzle I worked on involved a simple cypher engraved across multiple humerous gravestones. Another involved multiple themed rooms the player could teleport between following a pattern which related certain blocks to one another based on their shared properties (transparency, stickyness, color). The largest animated structure I worked on involved a simple hidden lever puzzle. When flicked correctly, they would cause a series of large pillars to rise from a cavernous lake, allowing the player to access an exposed, but otherwise unreachable, egg.

The most stressful part of the project came when, a few hours before the submission deadline, NVIDIA pushed an update which completely broke all command blocks. This was a big issue. A number of smaller features across the map had been done with command blocks to save time and were now non-functional. Additionally, they were also used in the starting room to allow the player to modify the games settings. I was also the only developer who would be online before the deadline passed. So in an hour I had to get everything moved entirely into functions and make sure it worked properly. Luckily, I got there in the end and the project was packaged without a hitch.