Sandtray Reflections: Colourful Figurines

When we were building Ellie Finch's PlayMode Academy Sandtray world, she really wanted to have alternative ways that players could use to express themselves; ways that did not require writing.

Enter the versatile and engaging Minecraft armour stand. 

Many players are already adept at placing, posing and decorating them to display a wide range of emotions, populate narratives or convey ideas. We used Blockbench to remodel and retexture them a little to make them bright and colourful, and offer them in several different sizes. 

We also added Speech and Though Bubbles NPCs (you can see them in the hotbar) that can be placed beside any structure, entity or object to convey thoughts in writing, so that anything in the Sandtray world has a way of expressing itself. 

In the background you can see a little of the room that the Sandtray is placed in. My daughter's first contribution to one of my projects can be seen on the wall... a pixel art painting of a Belty cow, which are a breed we have here in the south of Scotland.