additional context; Katie Scott, a former exec at ubisoft, will be the “Head of Vanilla Minecraft” in 2026. this source writes:

Scott left Ubisoft in November, but her role as vice president of the company’s global creative game office saw her specialize in “competitive, live service, and free to play experiences to create games with lasting impact, high retention, and monetization results.” She also writes that she focused on “live service strategies and ambitious retention and monetization” in Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six games

now that sounds bad on paper, but it’s unclear to me what exactly she’ll be doing in this position. best i could find was this linkedin post advertising the position 7 months ago, which reads:

Join us in shaping the future. Minecraft isn’t just a game. It’s a platform for creativity, learning, and building community. We’re seeking a senior leader, based in Stockholm, to guide our talented teams toward Minecraft’s evolution. Help us build a better world through the power of play.

my interpretation of this is that she’ll still be under other managers, and wouldn’t be making any big decisions alone. regardless, this is not a good look for Mojang, especially at a time where the community are getting impatient with Bedrock’s issues.

doesn’t seem to be much activity in this thread, which doesn’t give me hope… reguardless, I thought I’d make some pixel art for this

I don’t mind if these actually get used or not, since making these designs was pretty good practice - I’d be happy to whip up a higher res version of any of these and/or make tweaks if there’s interest, though

for the first icon design, I tried to follow the gooped-up AI button layout as closely as possible while making it look like something you could actually hold, and I kept the general colour scheme the same - originally, I was going to keep the same orientation, too, but figured out quickly that it was too hard to be worth it at this scale

in the second icon, I removed the random squiggles / half-buttons and fit stuff in places that made sense for a real controller, though I didn’t follow a reference for this to try keep the controller generic - this is my personal favourite

the third is my attempt at mixing the lemmy icon’s features with design 2 - it turned out better than I expected, but I’m not sure how much it reads as a lemming, especially at smaller scales

to change it up, the fourth design has the lemmy icon in a gamer headset, which is technically more inclusive to people who don’t use controllers, but also loses some of the recognisability from the previous icon (there’s a twitter joke in here somewhere)

finally, the fifth design is just number 4’s lemming before I covered up the ears - I mainly included this since there’s no reason not to