Starting it out.

I've been playing Minecraft since before the Halloween Update two years ago, at the tail end of the game's Alpha development. After I was finally exposed to multiplayer Minecraft and a few notable YouTube channels that played the game, I wanted to make "adventure maps".

This isn't the first time I've ever felt like creating custom content for a game. There was this old game trilogy, "Marathon". It was packaged with programs called Anvil and Forge- tools to edit and create completely new scenarios and stories. There was documentation and tips online, and I read as much as a could. It was all about visibility, limitations of the game engine, what sounds, effects and game mechanics could be changed. Fascinating stuff, and it's all out there still, though you might need to use the Wayback Machine to read some of it.

It's too bad that the Marathon community isn't quite as lively as it used to be, although it still survives to this day as an open-source project, known as "Aleph One". There were a handful of really good custom scenarios out there, and the Marathon games are free to play now. Here's where you can find Aleph One and the custom scenarios.

When I learnt that Minecraft had tools like MCEdit, I felt that same urge to create custom content. I started watching video tutorials. I listened to and befriended a few mapmakers as well. Though Minecraft has its shortcomings and frustrations, it has a healthy community, and there is a demand of sorts for custom maps, in particular ones that run "vanilla".

The Minecraft developers have only recently decided to support mapmakers. There were bits and pieces here that have helped before, but only because they tied into the core survival game. There was a time when the only way you could tell a story was with long walls of signs (Books didn't exist yet). Thankfully, they do recognize some mapmakers now, and have since been adding helpful features between bugfixes.

I don't even pretend to be as productive as other mapmakers- people like ColdFusionGaming, Vechs and Jigarbov all have a much better work ethic than I do. I've had several false starts, and some discouraging episodes, but they've molded me into a better mapmaker than I was before.