What happens when you combine a minigame tournament with an adventure map? Introducing WMCT: a story-driven event for Bedrock Edition that has just begun its second season. We spoke to the event’s founders – lead developer PrimeStrat, and lead creative Roman – about this unusual approach to event creation, and to talk about all things Season 2!
WMCT and its unique story-gameplay blend “selling point” came about as somewhat of a “happy accident”. “Both of us have always been inspired by adventure maps and games when we were growing up, and we also watched a lot of YouTubers who told stories through their videos,” Roman tells us.
“I used to be more of a Minecraft content creator, and I would make minigames for my viewers to play,” adds PrimeStrat, known as Prime for short. “Roman came and offered to make models, which evolved into making an event.”
The first season of WMCT was made up of six unrelated games, with a story added retroactively to connect them together. Whilst Prime did have some event knowledge, having previously watched a number of events across both Java and Bedrock Editions, Roman came into developing the event with a completely fresh perspective on the event scene. “I didn’t know anything about events,” Roman says. “I’d never played an event, and I’d never watched an event. As far as the story goes, it was an unintended consequence of the fact that I didn’t know that we were making something that didn’t usually have a story.”
This lack of knowledge doesn’t appear to be the cause of any regrets, with Season 2 being very intentional in blending story elements with tournament gameplay. “It’s more fun if you feel like you’re doing it for a reason,” Roman continues. “With a lot of events the objective is to earn points and that’s okay – but you could also earn points and save the universe.”
The concept of good versus evil is a key component to the event. “We have this fictional company called WMCT that’s based in Missouri,” Roman explains. “They’re working on this portal technology, but a researcher gets overeager by the results achieved in a first test and decides to add another variable. That ends up ripping a hole in the fabric of space-time.”
Having a hole in the fabric of space-time is about as bad news as it sounds. “The Harbinger, the monster which has come through the hole you created, is purely evil and set on destroying everything. Your main goal in Season 2 is to overcome this monster, set things right, and to banish it back to the Forgotten Places, which is the name for the outside bounds of the universe.
“To do this, you’re sent away to three different worlds that produce the fabric of the universe itself. The leaders of these places are like: ‘Well, you messed up. You need to do me some favours and play these games, and then I will help you defeat this monster.’”
Each season of WMCT has one set storyline – similar to how an adventure map is played from start to finish – with the difference between individual events being who is playing in them. “We explain the multiple events as being similar to playing AAA games,” Roman says. “Everyone has their own experience of the game, but the story is the same for everyone. The ending of Season 1, for example, was that everybody explodes in the laboratory. But then we have those same people return for Season 2, which wouldn’t make sense if they exploded. So it’s more like those sixteen people could be anyone, but all we know is that the events happened. The story remains the same, but the playthroughs change.”
With the added complications of storyline, developing a season of the event is no quick or easy task. With a new storyline comes the need for completely new minigames to fit said plot – with all of Season 1’s games scrapped in favour of bringing in something fresh for Season 2. Portal Tag is the only game played in both seasons, though even that has had a hefty rework since the original.
“I’m going to say it took roughly nine months to make the season,” Prime says, “but you could argue it was a year.” It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing either. “We used Minecraft’s PDB files a lot,” he explains. “Those files allowed us to manipulate the game similarly to how Java datapacks work – and Mojang removed them. It bricked our event and we had to redo it from scratch.”
This wasn’t the only limitation that stemmed from developing an event for Bedrock Edition rather than Java. “Building is terrible on Bedrock,” Prime tells us. “We don’t have World Edit, we don’t have Axiom. We don’t have a lot of these really good tools. There are people that have made World Edit variants, but barely any of them can be used on servers. We needed an efficient way to build with all of our Bedrock custom blocks, so I developed a mod on Java Edition using Fabric, that loads Bedrock packs and puts the custom blocks onto Java.”
“I’d also like to shout out Chunker, which is made by Hive Games,” Prime continues. “This is a software that allows you to transfer Bedrock or Java worlds between the versions. Chunker actually supports custom block IDs, so we just had to make our Fabric mod use the same IDs by loading the Bedrock pack. That way we could build and use all the fun tools on Java, and transfer it to Bedrock with Chunker with no real issue.”
“In Season 1 we had to build on Java using wool and a texture pack to mark where custom blocks would be,” Roman adds, “so we were very limited on how many custom blocks we could use. But with the build mod it was very easy. I think we have six hundred custom blocks in total for Season 2. We could never have done that with wool in a texture pack.”
So what are the plans for WMCT into the future? “Our goal is to host at least one event per month,” Prime says. “There could be more, there could be less. We hope that Season 2 will have a formally disclosed last event, after which we can say: ‘we’re going to go offline for a couple months and then we’ll put out Season 3.’”
“I’m looking forward to doing some seasonal events this season,” Roman says. “We had a lot of fun with the Christmas event a few years ago, and also with the scuffed event last year, where we just made everything awful and really bad, but also really funny. I’m also looking forward to new seasonal events that we haven’t been able to do before, like Halloween, summer, or a Pride one, for example.”
“I coded some special settings for each of our games,” Prime adds, “so if we really wanted to, we could just double power up spawn rates in a game or something crazy like that, without having to rearrange much. I think my favourite one to look forward to is another scuffed event, but Christmas is a close second.”
The main WMCT event isn’t the only thing to get excited about. “We’re starting a new event that we hope to release this summer, called WMCT Game Night, which will be like a board game night,” Roman reveals. “Six players will be competing with each other, but it’ll be more casual – something we can host every so often on a more informal basis. We’re not going to come up with any new board games, but you can expect to see some classics in there.”
Whilst Game Night will be a much smaller event, and therefore likely to be open to directly invited players only, there are still plenty of opportunities for Sphere News readers to put themselves forward to play in WMCT. “We have our roster events, which are exclusive to our roster of content creators,” Prime says, “but every other month we’ll host a community event. Everyone is more than welcome to apply for that. Our first one for Season 2 is a Valentine’s-inspired event called the WMCT Date Night. It’s pairs of people competing, with a couple little tweaks and cosmetic changes.”
If you’re interested in playing in any of the community events coming up, or want to stay up-to-date with the latest WMCT news (after all, Prime and Roman have told us that Season 3 is already in development!), you can join the community Discord, or follow WMCT on X or Bluesky.
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