Community Celebration: Terra Swoop Force

“If you’ve never heard of Terra Swoop Force before, oh boy, have I got a story for you! There is a science company called Geo Descent Labs, who were doing experiments trying to figure out what was going on at the center of the earth. Thirty years ago, to learn more about the planet, they sent a two-person team down to the center of the earth in a bore drill. However, when it got there, they lost communication with the drill and the crew and they haven’t heard from them since. Thirty years later, you’re working for Geo Descent Labs, so we’re gonna strap wings on your back and fly you down to the center of the Earth so you can find out what happened to that two-person team!”

- Joe Arsenault, Noxcrew

“Terra Swoop Force was originally meant to be made in a day, we were meant to stream the whole thing in just one livestream. As we were creating it, we started letting our minds get a little ahead of ourselves and it started becoming a little bit bigger, and then eventually we said ‘All right, all right, let's not do it in a day.’ Eventually it took eight months to make because we kept wanting to add more and change things.

Before that livestream, Minecraft had this kind of levitation potion and we very quickly worked out that you could sort of model a glider on top of that kind of Minecraft character and that you could slowly fall down as if you were gliding. We started making a glider map because of that cool mechanic, and then shortly after, Minecraft released elytras, which were wings that players could use to fly at fast speeds. That kind of inspired us to make something a little bit bigger because the elytra mechanic was such a fun thing to play with.”

- Stefan Panic, Noxcrew

“So when Noxcrew sit down to design a map one of the first things that we do is build a scale model of our experience inside of the world, just to kind of feel out how things are going to react to where we put them and do we have the right sight lines, is this right size, do we have room for everything. That’s something that the whole team pitches in on – not just our level designers, but art and mechanics, our audio guys, our musician, and our writer will all hop on. Even social media and marketing people, everybody just gets on together and we jump around in a Minecraft world for a little while and try to feel how our experience is before we create it.”

- Joe Arsenault, Noxcrew

“Noxcrew’s creative philosophy is, to just have fun. Honestly, at the end of the day we want our stuff to feel like Minecraft. Funny, engaging, and immersive. We want the player to be rewarded for exploring somewhere that they didn’t think there would be anything, we want to surprise them with unexpected jokes. I think it’d be hard to sum up our creative philosophy in one word or even one sentence. We just want to have fun and we want our players to have fun.”

- Joe Arsenault, Noxcrew