Experiential

Right before the start of the global pandemic, I started a Minecraft server. Initially, it was just me and two other friends but when the pandemic hit it soon grew to around a dozen. Up to that point we had just been playing the base game. It was relatively unstructured and lacked depth so I decided to instead start a new world for us where I built dungeons, wrote lore, and ran a great deal of quests and server events. I accomplished this using a set of third party tools such as Worldguard and Worldedit which allowed me to make structures which could not be broken by players. This second world ran for about a year and a half. I have little pictures of that world save for the group photo to the left with the city of Auroria pictured in the background.

Eventually the storyline I wrote came to an end and I started a new world with a similar model. This process continued for a while though none of those worlds were as popular or long lasting as the second one. The world I am most proud of however, was one of the last. That world I thankfully have a few more pictures of, one of which is the cover for this page.

That world, which I referred to as Primordial, was set in seemingly endless, still, and very shallow ocean that stretched all the way to horizon. In this ocean could be found no resources with which to build nor any food. The only structure of note was an overgrown brick tower which stretched past the sky and up and out of sight. This tower, Scala Dei, had a single elevator at its base. Riding the elevator would take players to the first of what I had planned to be many levels. Each level had monsters of increasing difficulty which upon death would drop resources. The gameplay loop would thus see players climbing the semi-sentient tower higher and higher all while growing incrementally stronger with each run. Unfortunately being the most complex world I had built to date, it took a great deal of time and effort to built each level and I only managed to complete three before interest waned and I no longer had the energy to maintain the project because of school. Still, being one of my most detailed projects to date, that world holds a special place in my heart.