Hi gang!

Editorial

I got a new skin and it's so extremely different from the previous version that I'm sure you wouldn't even notice any differences ;) But because I don't really do this very often (last time I changed my skin was 3 - 4 years ago) I figured I'd take a look at all the skins I've used in the past (which as you might guess aren't all that many).

Why I'm sharing this on PMC you wonder? Two reasons actually.. Sometimes players ask me about my skin, also because it's not something you'd find on a regular skin site (my current skin was custom made). But also because the recent changes are actually somewhat related to PMC itself. You'll see! ;)

2014 - Shell begins playing

In 2014 I started playing Minecraft and at first, like so many other players, used the default Steve skin. Pretty much the same weekend when I had discovered Minecraft I started exploring servers and quickly noticed that Steve was actually a pretty commonly used skin. If you wanted to stand out a little bit you really needed to get a skin of your own.

So I started looking around the Internet until I came across the skin seen above. I have no idea where it came from, all I remember is that it was called a "gamer skin" (or so I think). Even though; I liked the way it looked (the headphone is nice) and wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts is also something I can somewhat related to in the summer. Win-win :-)

XSlare

Eventually I met up with a player called XSlare and he was a pretty good skin designer. He told me how he had designed / revised the skins of many other players including several staff members of said server. So he offered to customize my skin a bit more and make it look better. Pretty cool indeed!

Being a fan of the server I played on I asked XSlare if it would be possible to add some kind of logo or something else which would tie the skin to that particular server. And guess what? It took him a while but he managed to replace the logo which was already on my shirt with the server logo you see above, now how cool is that?

End of 2014 - Shell changes servers

I had a really good time on this server but unfortunately a map wipe was announced and that seriously demotivated me. Of course it also didn't help that I had only been playing for 5 - 6 months or so but I was quite dedicated, heck I had even been invited to become a member of the staff!

Now, I don't like spam and even though I was pretty sure that no one would figure out what the logo on my skin represented it still didn't feel right to play with this on another server. So at first I switched back to my previous skin, the gamer. Over time I managed to slowly rise up in the ranks where in-game money was concerned and eventually organized a skin design competition "Dress the Shell".

I asked the server community to try and re-design my skin where, if possible, they should also try to once again add something relevant for that server. If possible I wanted two things to be added: a reference to redstone and a reference to the server.

The competition drew in many awesome designs but eventually I got quickly sold on the skin I would then be using for many years to come:

The winner of the competition was BabyCreepersRule (she changed her name a few times already and I lost track ;)) but as you can see it looks pretty cool (at least I think so). It clearly features a redstone dust item on my shirt at the front and at the back, though maybe hard to see, it says EMC which are the initials for the server I played on.

I also really enjoy the hat and the small orange 'feather' (?) sticking out of the side. Another fun change is that my headphone has now been converted into an earpiece. Something I can also relate to because I actually do sporadically use a wireless (bluetooth) headset to talk on my cellphone.

2018 - Shell switches servers again

So eventually a friend of mine pointed my attention to another server which, in our opinion anyway, sat much closer to Minecraft survival gameplay than the previous server did. The previous server is awesome, no arguments there, but some things started to deviate a little bit too much from Minecraft gameplay to our liking. Exploding rabbits which attack you are a fun challenge, but can also turn into a bother while building or exploring.

Alas... this left me once again with a small problem.. Even though I was once more pretty sure that hardly anyone would notice I still didn't want to risk running around with a skin which would somewhat "advertise" another server. Even though it really didn't, I mean... EMC, assuming you even notice, can refer to pretty much anything.

But yeah, I started thinking about the EMC initials and figured that they were really close to "another" Minecraft environment I heavily started to favor in the past months.

Sooo.....


I decided to fire up The Gimp and take a closer look at what I might be able to do with the logo. Of course the main problem is that letters are pretty difficult if you only have a few pixels to work with, and having the letters overlap a little is even more difficult because if you use too much overlap then the whole thing can easily start to look like something entirely different.

Even so, for now I'm happy with the results and I think it showcases my favorite Minecraft forum quite well ;)

And there you have it!

The story & history of my skin :)