Minecraft: The Search for the End

I finished a project! I know, right? Pretty out of the blue. That's because I started it a year ago not really considering it as a project, and decided today it was and finished it!

The Search for the End is... well, a fictional glorified documentary, I guess, of a Minecraft campaign I played in 2011. It started out as a "Race to the End" with my friend Jon, to see who could get to the End Realm and beat the end boss first. I won by a landslide because Jon slacked off on his writing. It was a lot of work to play the game, take cinematic screenshots, separate the mission into segments, come up with a literary way to explain what happened, and in my case, Photoshop some of the screens. But I still bug Jon to finish his story.

The thing I like about this story is the way I tried to 'translate' the odd mechanics and culture of Minecraft into a story with lore that made sense. For example, I keep the origins of the player (In this case, a man actually named Abelhawk based on my Runescape toon) mysterious, but I leave hints as to his origin. Take the first line of the first entry for example: "I awoke in a forest this morning without knowledge of what happened to my ship or crew. It appears that I will have to go on in search of 'The End' alone." This is rarely spoken of again, and adds to the effect that every singleplayer Minecrafter feels while playing: that he is absolutely, terribly, alone.

I also allude to other aspects of the game through storytelling. Of course I take liberties, but most of the story is accurate. I even explain away my character's knowledge of the game as something he gets from books he finds. It was really fun to make this, and I still treasure the world that was built out of it. I intend to make a sequel now that it's a year later and there are other stories to make up about it.

A couple regrets: Each entry begins with "Day #:". I wish I would have just put "Entry #", because the timing on some of them is messed up. I eventually just forget about it anyway and say "Months ago..." even though there are only 35 entries, and thus days, total. I also came up with names for the entries, which I put in the alt text of each entry. So you can see them just by hovering your mouse over them.
Also, there is a continuity screw-up that I might fix involving a desert. That's all I'm gonna say. If you don't notice it, it won't bug you like it bugs me. Yeah, I'll have to fix it sometime.

Anyway, enjoy...