Blockwood - WIP

Blockwood is my custom Minecraft resource pack that I started making for fun. I play this game a lot - perhaps too much - and I was curious what the game would look like if recreated in my style. It’s a huge project that I’ve been working on in my free time for a bit now, and while I’m not sure it’ll ever be finished, it’s been a really fun and interesting challenge and has made me consider and think about my designs in a new way. The first textures I wanted to make were the sword and pickaxes because of how absolutely iconic they are.

I initially created the designs in Procreate on my iPad. I switched to Illustrator afterwards, as I had a lot of issues with semi-transparent pixels. You can see some screen tearing here and odd visual glitches. However, after remaking them in Illustrator, the issue was resolved!

Afterwards I moved to the dirt/grass block, which gave me a lot of issues. I said before, this project forced me to think about my designs in new ways I’m not used to. Dirt and grass are everywhere in the game. Everywhere you look you’ll see one of those. In my initial designs, the texture was too eye-catching. While not normally a bad thing, this made playing the game feel really disorienting and distracting. I spent a lot of time working through the design, trying to find the right mix between looking good and being able to fall into the player’s peripheral vision. Eventually, I landed on this design - which my friends lovingly call “the beans”.

I also created a few other designs related to dirt/grass, such as the path, coarse dirt, and packed dirt.

The wood was the next category of blocks I wanted to tackle. Most of them are pretty similar, so I knew that once I got a solid log and plank design I was happy with, I could apply it to all the different wood types with just changing the colors. My log designs haven’t changed much over time, this was largely the first design I went with. I’ve thought about going back and redoing it - I don’t know if I think the logs look cohesive with the rest of the pack - but I’m happy enough with how it looks for now. The planks have evolved a bit over time, however, as I decided to make the colors less contrasting. They get pretty overwhelming when they’re all close together.