Cinnamon Flavored

2018 - 2025

Summary

Vanilla+ modpack with over 250 hand tweaked mods, focused on modernizing the core Minecraft experience, while meticulously curating a seamless vanilla aesthetic and feel. It accomplishes this by completely redesigning the combat and exploration systems to be deeper, more challenging and rewarding, and giving the player plenty of opportunities to tackle new gameplay challenges only by expanding on the existing vanilla design.

Started out as a passion side project, but grew over years of refinement and became a work worth sharing :).

Engine: Java/Minecraft
Platform: PC
Role: Solo developer

Showcase of the current work area, focusing on textures and models

Mod list organization map (v0.99e)

Design objectives chart

Current mod testing grounds with custom models and textures from several mods

My contribution

Solo dev

Modpack dev: With so many different mods altering so many features across the game, my main task has been to standarize features and ensure they all interact seamlessly with each other: creating models and textures for many items that needed to fit the aesthetic, configuring and rewritting code to balance and integrate features, and writting mods from scratch to fill in gaps in content created by the additions, all to take the modpacks redesign into account.

  • Game design: The ultimate goal has been creating a bug free, well-rounded vanilla experience where all systems interact with each other, and integrate seamlessly into the vanilla experience. As core aspects of Minecraft, the modpack focuses on facilitating creativity and player expression in building and adventure, and having these features expand as the player takes on progressively more difficult combat challenges and exploration.

  • Texturing: Special care was taken into the textures to ensure the aesthetic remains consistent, and all mod features fit vanilla the style, while modernizing old vanilla textures.

  • Community collaboration: To ensure all features work flawlessly, I have worked with moddevs to create dedicated versions of their work. This results on a more curated experience, tailored to this specific environment and mod configuration.

YaBoiCinn player skin.
Kat player skin.
Current project working stage: 3D item models.
Supplementaries Mod custom 3D item models.
Combat and tool item models.
Cats! New models and textures!
Custom farm animals originated from MushirMickeyJoe's work.
Player holds any lamp type with a slight tilt...
...and raises torches to light up an area!
Skeletons and zombies by creepermax123, with a few minor touches.
Sunflower fields.
Armor models, with reworked armor part system.

Postmortem

What went well

  • While still playing and feeling like the base game, the modpack succesfully expands core mechanics adding more opportunities for player expression and decision making, that fit seamlessly into the game.

  • The textures curated in the modpack perfectly replicate the vanilla style, and in some cases provide a fresh coat of paint.

What went wrong

  • With the project growing in scope and attempting to cover so many aspects of the game at once, development time grew significantly, and the Minecraft version it was built on is now outdated.

What I learned

  • This project served as a sandbox for design principles and mechanics, and how they affect the overall experience. It became a good environment to experiment on how different mechanics interact with each other and how they fit into a game’s design.

  • To ensure the aesthetic of the vanilla game was preserved, I became proficient in pixel art and the cubic style of modeling, that were limiting enough that I had to come up with creative solutions in design.