Summary

FTB Interactions is a minecraft modpack focused on the interactions of hundreds of independently created mods that might not be initiatially obvious to players.

If you aren't familiar with the modded minecraft community, put simply, many developers ranging from hobbyist to professional modify the game to add new content such as items, monsters, or even entire dimensions. Early on in minecraft's history, this was pretty simple, but as the modded ecosystem grew some mods were found to be redundant, had great cosmetic content and no sense of progression, or were just buggy. Modpack developers started bundling mods together with a certain theme or purpose in a similar vein to how some developers offer opinionated frameworks so players can focus on just playing games.

Technologies

Languages	Libraries / Frameworks	Other
Zenscript, Java	Forge	Minecraft

My Role

I was one of the lead modpack developers for FTB Interactions. The majority of my time was pairing together mods of various complexities in new ways, to emphasize that a modpack is more than the sum of its parts (hence the name of Interactions). As a result, Sareth and I wrote a lot of scripts to make this a reality. If a certain configuration within a mod wasn't accessible (eg, changing the melting point of a certain material, or changing the power generation formula for a Steam Turbine), I worked with the developers or maintainers of those mods to get an API for other modpack developers to customize their mod.

Other minor responsibilities I also had included items such as evaluating creative assets like main menu art, music, designing ingame documentation, working with bug testers, and other production issues that came up during the modpack's lifecycle.

What I Learned

So much. So so much. It was basically drinking from a firehose and I was incredibly blessed to have a really patient co-lead in Saereth. It was my first major open source project if I can even call it that and I had a little taste of what development was like from a gaming perspective. While for most purists it might not count as actual software engineering, since it was a lot of scripting, I did get familiar with basic CS concepts such as loops, data structures to make the most out of the scripting capability we had. In addition I learned a lot about researching documentation and how to properly submit an honest-to-goodness useful GitHub bug report instead of "please fix".