The Making of Terra Swoop Force

One of my favourite adventure maps added to PC Realms in the last year is Terra Swoop Force. It's a brilliant, breathless point-to-point aerial trial, in which winged players zoom down tunnels at scorching speeds, skewering into the centre of the earth.

Or, more often in my case, faceplanting into stalactites. Or fatally misjudging the speed I’ll need to carry me across a lake of lava. Or just forgetting to deploy my wingsuit and pancaking right below the spawn.

I am not very good at Terra Swoop Force.

This introduction is really quite long - but also extremely well voice-acted and very, very funny. You might also think it’s a bit unnecessary. But Stefan (aka Noxite, leader of NoxCrew) would disagree with you there: “In my eyes,” he says, “anything is better when you have context and personal motive - it makes the gameplay even better.”

He says he’s always been interested in the ways that games can deliver story - and this, in fact, first inspired the creation of NoxCrew. Minecraft, being so open and malleable, was the perfect canvas for him to experiment on.

“It was that summer between ending my A-levels and going to university,” Stefan recalls. “I was bored. So I began trying to make an adventure map that was based off a Skyrim type of adventure which had this elaborate questing system. It turned into this huge project and I started advertising on the Minecraft forums and people started to join me. Sadly that adventure map never got released because it just got too big. So we restarted and made something a lot simpler - and we actually released it! It was called Paladin’s Quest: Humble Beginnings.

“It was a very short adventure map - maybe about an hour long, and it had that same questing system. It also had this funny, touching story. People responded to it saying that they’d cried at the end! It was then that I realised how much potential Minecraft has as an experience delivery device. And since then I’ve pretty much had a crew. All these people who joined me for this first adventure map now work together to make all these different projects: adventure maps, machinimas, the Noxcrew Gameshow - and Terra Swoop Force is our latest.”

“Two members of the crew who came up with this idea of a flying map using the levitation effect - because you could make people float and glide down. We made this 3D model of a glider that people could put above their head and hang onto. And suddenly a new snapshot introduces the Elytras and we were like, oh my god, they’ve just released a flying mechanic! And it’s an actual one, not a cheaty one that we’re trying to do with a potion effect.”

Not that this quashed their plans - in fact, it accelerated them. The new idea was to take the Elytras and make a racing map in a single 24-hour-long livestream.

“It eventually turned into a seven month project,” says Stefan. “It’s because we like to out-do ourselves. That’s why we do it. It’s a hobby for us - we do it in our spare hours, and that’s why it took so long. There were about 30 people involved in making that. There was a builder per section of the tunnels. Each tunnel had five different sections to it - so we had approximately 15 builders. And then the artists, the redstoner, the voice actors and so on.”

The result is pretty incredible - not just because it is both fun and funny, but also because it does hugely innovative things within Minecraft. Things that even we here at Mojang hadn’t realised were even possible.

Stefan picks this as the map’s most impressive feat: “Towards the end of the map, there’s a character who talks to you, and he physically takes on all the animations that are imposed by his voice. So if he’s crying, his head swaps out for a head with tears coming down. If he coughs, his torso pushes forward. It was literally a walking, talking, emoting character in the game. His facial expressions were changing, his mouth was opening and closing. That was probably the most impressive thing, because we are literally animating inside the game at that point.