Says that community can develop the game better than the company

Jan 31, 2012 21:41 GMT  ·  By

The developers working on indie hit Minecraft at Mojang have stated that one of the core priorities for the game in the coming months is the creation of a proper APi to support full modding for the game, mainly because the community can create more content than the team that created the title.

Jens Bergensten, known as Jeb to the Minecraft community, told Gamasutra that, “We really need to open up the game for other developers to add mods, and share mods, and run servers more easily. So, what I mean is I will work less on features, and more on the engine part of the game.”

He added, “It kind of feels silly of me to sit and work three days to add a new animal to the game when there are thousands of people who would like to spend three days to add an animal to the game, so that’s why I changed my priorities.”

Creating a full API for Minecraft means that the community created around the game will be free to take their own experience of it in whatever direction they want, independent of the ideas that Markus Persson, aka Notch, or someone else has about it.

Bergensten says that the two major groups vocal on the game forum are for and against the role playing and the adventure side of the game, and having an API would allow them to develop or eliminate as much of it as they want to make sure that they are playing the Minecraft they are envisioning.

At the moment the developers at Mojang do not have a clear launch date for the API.

The company is also working on a new game called Scrolls, which faced some initial opposition from Bethesda, combining card collection and role-playing game mechanics.