How Did I Get Here?

So yesterday I promised the story behind how I joined the Broken Buttons Build Team.

What are they, you ask?  Well, as of July 19, 2013 I hadn't heard of them either.

Setting:  April and I are spending all possible time together between my crazy summer work schedule (during the school year, it's five days a week; summertime it becomes four looooooong days per week).

She has had this notion that we can play cooperative Minecraft maps over a LAN connection in the house.  I'm all for that!  The only way I play Minecraft is with friends!

I had heard of maps like Herobrine's Mansion, but there had been a trailer for a map in particular at MineCon 2012 that I thought was pretty: Kingdom of the Sky III.

(The trailer has since been taken down, likely because there's talk of doing a new one.)

Well, since it was clearly #3 in the series, there had to be a #1 and #2 that made it popular.  Commence the search!

  

KotS I                                         KotS II

Sign us up!  We played through both of these maps together (encountering some broken redstone, but still we had fun just being dorks together, as geeks often do).  Somewhere along the way, there was a link to the BlameTheConroller forums, and a mention about joining a build team.

Build team?  Hah.  I can't build a mud hut to save my life on the first night of Minecraft!

But then, there was April.  She often gets blamed for two important things in my life:  the first Minecraft plushie, and daring me to apply to join the Broken Buttons Build Team.

Little Known Fact:

April and I met in college.

I majored in creative writing.

She minored in it.

Me:  They want builders.

April:  And lore writers!

Me:  Okay...  (not sure what to do with that information)

April:  At least apply.

Me:  Why?

April:  I dare you to apply.

Me:  (Oh, now the gauntlet has been thrown.)

Long story short: I applied.  (After reading all of the rejected applications for lore writer and the one accepted application.)  

I was accepted!

And every time I think about this story, I ask myself: why didn't I dare her to apply right back??

Serves me right for not having forethought.  There I was, getting thrown into a community of people from all over the world who had way more technical expertise with a game I had only dabbled in.  A couple of them took me on a tour of the Kingdom of the Sky III build server, and it was everything I had seen in the trailer, plus tons more!  What in the world was I doing there?

But they needed something: a person who could write summaries with action verbs, blurbs for website headers, and even scripts for map projects.

They now had me.

And my first big project?  The MineCon 2013 map script.  The theme?  Mindcrack.

Cue another

FANGIRL FIESTA!

That's a story for another time, though.  Besides, I had to make April's little creeper before she left!