Making a Unique Server

I, like many others in the community, don't have a great deal of experience running a server. I didn't let it stop me from trying. It was a constant learning process from day one. The more I learned, the more I wanted to try new things, new mods, new game types. As i grew into my server and added more content (and more mods) the bugs began to crop up. little things, here and there. Small flaws in mods and the game that could unravel into something much worse. The hunt began for fixes, new mods to replace the old.




Eventually I hit a brick wall. Until I discovered Skript. A brand new world opened up to me, and I yearned to know more.  Ideas begin to spring up in my mind as i learned more about the language. I didn't begin small either. I went full blown nutso with it. I began writing scripts and mods. The first of which was a Zombie Survival mod. similar to dayz/minez, with a few twists. it was more of an experiment really but turned into a very hard game, fun if you like dying a lot. With that mod came the random house generator. It randomly builds a rectangular house of varying materials, adds a two point roof, either facing north/south or east/west, adds windows, a door and chests that can be used for supplies in the game.


 I wasn't done there, the algorithm I used to create the doors lead me to create a weapon system, I could shoot blocks at varying speeds, sizes and shapes towards whatever I wanted to. So I made another minigame, Wizard Wars style, players get on teams, chose classes, attack and kill each other to defend and capture flag areas around a map. Had a lot of trouble with that one, at one point one of my regions plugins crapped out on me. I couldn't detect when a player had gotten close to a flag anymore, so I had to change the way they interact, no big deal, but it unlocked more issues with the program.


I moved on.


Bugs. This time with Essentials. I had added multiverse, and the two didn't want to play well together, not with the custom login script I wrote. I needed the player to go to the hub at every login, it would give them a book they could use to navigate the world, but when I forced the player to the hub, it lost their position in any other world. So I had to fix that, build a script that could save a players old position if they logged out, quit or teleported, but only for some worlds (survival, creative…) Got it fixed, but that led to more issues, warping, tping, all had to be redesigned.


Recovered. Onward again.


The attack algorithm lead me to another idea, a side by side ship battle where the player can control the angle and pitch of several cannons that he can use to fire at and destroy the enemy ship. The idea was simple in design, but wholly complicated when it came to turning it into a game. It was a new learning process, how to make a resetting game.


I kept moving on.


Issues popped up during an update. WarpPortals would no longer save their locations. I was furious, every reset I would have to build new ones. So I built warp portals that tied into my newly built warp system.


Another bug fixed, dozens more to go.


I took a break once I found a good safe spot, relatively free of bugs and issues.


Couldn't find a hunger games / survival games mod that worked well and had chests that spawned random Items, so I built one of those too…


Finding bodies is hard these days, with so many choices of servers. Mine is just one in many. What does it take to create a unique and successful server? A constant strugle and learning process.