StarQuest

This was the most fun I’ve ever had. StarQuest was a groundbreaking Minecraft Server, effectively a new game unto itself, that I created in 2013. The server and community are still active at a much smaller scale today. I was the lead for the development of versions 1-3. I assisted at a high level on version 4, and versions 5 and 6 have been developed by my successor. Version 7 was developed by his successor. The complete story of my time at StarQuest is available in the SQ Blog Archive, which is a mirror of a blog that I wrote as SQ was being developed. If you’re deeply curious, reading that is the best way to get a sense of how this happened; it’s the unedited perspective of my teenage self.

StarQuest featured a number of custom planet worlds as well as a space world that connected them. Players constructed customized blocky spaceships and could fly the spaceships on the planets and between them through space. The major innovation that allowed the server to work was the world-transition system, which allowed for realistic-feeling planets in a game that only features 256 meters of height. While in a planet-world, flying a spaceship up to the height limit would cause your ship to be teleported to the space world, which featured forced-perspective models of each planet. You would find yourself in your ship in space in “orbit” above the planet that you had just left. You could then fly to the location of another planet and, by approaching its planet-ball in space, you would be teleported to the upper atmosphere of the cooresponding planet-world. The spaceship-flying system was a highly modified version of an existing plugin called Movecraft, which was a brilliant piece of technology in itself. As we expanded and grew we also added more custom extensions for things like advanced machinery, laser pistols, and more.

At StarQuest’s height, we had enough traffic to require each planet-world to be hosted on a separate server, and we used a proxying system called BungeeCord to route traffic between each one. As we were all self-taught high schoolers, we had plenty of challenges getting this to work; our first experiences with SQL were very memorable, as were all of the race conditions that we encountered.

Over the course of StarQuest I employed a few other developers (mostly just by sharing the profits that we made, there were no formal salaries). For two summers the company was able to pay to fly George out to visit “headquarters”, and the second summer Caleb was able to come too. We also had a lot of intern-types in the role of “junior developer”; for many of them StarQuest was their first real programming project, and a lot of them were quite good. In addition to the development staff we had many moderators and administrative staff, all of whom were volunteers.

That’s the short version. If you’re interested in reading more, from my perspective as events occurred, the development blog archive is here.

Big shoutout to the following people who were a huge part of the project and with whom I worked very closely:

• Caleb Weber, aka Moneybags: Longtime partner and an extremely good person to develop ideas with

• George Higashiyama, aka Littlewolf: Founding partner, currently at Microsoft SharePoint

• Mike ???, aka Sentientbot: Bringer of wisdom from industry and willing to put up with us, currently at Tableau last I heard

• Ben Kirby, aka Deacs: captain of all things media, now a successful youtuber working on K-pop

• Ginger_Walnut: My successor, the leader of all of those who took up the project after I left