Restarting life in another world

 

My Blockheads #2 | Restarting life in another world

New phone, new Blockheads

As I have recently switched phones ( iPhone 6 ➔ iPhone X ), the data saved in the Blockheads app of the old iPhone 6 could no longer be retrieved. This put a halt to my plans of basing the current series of posts on that device's app, where I have played for years.

Alas, without being able to share the rest of my previous world, Theodocosm, I will now bring whatever lessons I have learnt there over to the brand new world that I will be playing at!

This must be why The Blockheads did not grow to be a popular game. Despite its functionality and the variety of environments it offers in its worlds, progress could not be saved across devices, unless you have enough Time Crystals to make the world a multiplayer one, which either requires you to watch many hours of advertisements, or to cash in on them using real currency. Deleting a world is no joking matter, especially if you have poured in countless time and effort into building it up...

Actually, while I am at it, I might as well try the multiplayer option to see whether my world can be salvaged. 

No! There is no getting it back and I cannot go on multiplayer unless I choose the local network which is only a temporary measure. I can only delete the old world... 

Getting started on Blockheads

Tip: click on the picture to enlarge it.

Step 1: World Creation

Figure 1

An offline, virtual and free world greets the player when the game opens. I decided to name the world "Edensia" (Figure 1) to pay tribute to my ideals for this world, which is to become a paradise where my Blockheads (the blocky humanoid character that a player controls in this game) would not have to worry about survival and be able to free to do as they wish, just like the Biblical Garden of Eden. I understand that this name might sound a little cliche, so I might rename it as I go about playing the game.

Step 2: Character Creation

Figure 2 Figure 3

One of the most peculiar functions of this game is how a player's characters are born. Every Blockhead must be warped in via the portal for the game to start (Figure 2). Before warping in the Blockhead, I got to customise the Blockhead's name, appearance and clothing (Figure 3). These are purely for the visual appeal, and have no bearing on anything in this game on single player mode, as far as I am concerned. I decided to warp in a man and name him "Alephus" (Figure 2). The inspiration for this name was out of a desire to name my Blockheads in a sequential pattern that would save a lot of my time and my energy in trying to find a unique name. The name is taken from the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph. I like how you can add suffixes to common words to create a new combination of letters that sound like names and to add a deeper meaning to the name

Step 3: Expand your horizons (literally)

Figure 4 Figure 5

The game's tutorial will start once the character has been warped in through the Portal (Figure 4, see Figure 3 for what the Portal looks like). Instead of being only able to see the Portal, the view has now expanded to part of the surrounding landscape. I am now able to see the sky, the dirt, the trees and my Blockhead. As I tap on any icon, the corresponding description shows itself.  However, not to worry! The game tutorial launches automatically and I was soon having a "Survival 101"-themed crash course on how to survive on this blocky world. I will first have to walk around to see what materials I can work with (Figure 5).

Step 4: Dig (or pick something). Craft. Repeat.

Figure 6 Figure 7

In the tutorial, not only will anyone be able to explore a bit more of how the game works, specific instructions will be pumped down to help them learn about the most basic functions of the game. For example, the first thing that the tutorial will ask you to craft would be the Workbench. A Workbench is a tool that is essential to crafting, as it converts materials to other useful tools and items. The tutorial also tells you what materials are needed, what tools you have in your inventory (the square spaces that can be filled with items at the bottom of the screen) and how to use the tools to get the materials (Figure 6, 7). Through the tutorial, a player will learn: 1. How to warp in a Workbench at the Portal using dirt. 2. How to dig to gather dirt or to make a cave. 3. How to dig for flint and what flint looks like. 4. How to use the flint to make tools. 5. Where to find sticks and ways to gather them. 6. Using the sticks to craft a campfire. 7. Using sticks to craft out a Craft Bench. 8. Using the Craft Bench to create baskets.

Now that I have learnt the basics of this game, what should I do?

Anything! This is a world where you can explore at your own pace by controlling your Blockhead. It is important to ensure that the needs of each Blockhead is taken care of so he/she survives and you are able to control him/her to play this game. The tutorial also helpfully suggests that you can refer to the Achievements (located at the pause button) to look for things you can do if you ever run out of ideas for what to do in this game!

Look out for more posts under this series to see what I am doing with this sandbox game! For the terms that are unique to this game, I will try to explain them and include more pictures of them so that everyone will be able to understand how I can have so much fun in this game.

My Blockheads #1 | New series, new world

Welcome to a new series of blog posts dedicated to gaming! The game that I will write about is the Blockheads, a (mostly) 2-dimensional virtual world that is built by, unsurprisingly, blocks. It has much resemblance to Minecraft, an immersive sandbox game where players can craft their own world in the game's servers. In fact, I started out playing this game around 5 years ago as I wanted to feel how building my own world is like but could not afford to get Minecraft.

But why focus on a game that many consider as dying? Well, my most important reasons for playing this are its accessibility and freedom - it is free for all to play (unless you are into Time Crystals which can help you save time crafting, though I personally think this takes away the fun from the game) and I can do anything I imagine inside, bound only by whatever the game has to offer. In a sense, this game is like a canvas where I could express myself through whatever I do with it.

Here is a quick look at what I have done in the past 5 years:

Most of what I have done is exploration of my world, so there is not a lot of crafting going on. This explains why buildings are so sparse in this world.

Towards the left of the Portal, there is a tower with rooms on top of it shaped like a honeycomb (and called "The Honeycomb"). It was intended as a mixed-use space where my blockheads could live and do crafting in. But without enough materials to start with, it would be hard to do anything inside there, so my blockheads spend most of the time outside.

The caves and sky islands underneath and above the Portal respectively are part of a mega-project that was years in-the-making. It was an exploration project to find shorter pathways to the various places in this world and to discover new materials for use in crafting.

I started with underground exploration first. When I came up with this a few years ago, I named the project "Search for Underground Objects" (SUGO). 

• The first phase was just digging around in a systematic manner, and lighting up underground spaces using stick torchlights. The result was a gigantic grid that showed the composition of the rocks underground - limestones, marbles and stones were the most common ones. It looked cool but it was very time consuming, taking me a year before I decided to move on with something easier.
• The second phase was cave exploration, and some mining of the ores to craft out my first few metal objects, such as bronze pickaxes, tin buckets and iron cages. As the network of explored caves expanded, and as I connected and enlarged some caves by digging around, I began to run into a few problems: 
• How to move my blockheads through these maze of caves efficiently?
• What do I do with the stones I dug up?
• How do I avoid losing my way?
• Thereafter, I embarked on my third phase of SUGO, which was to make underground pathways donkey-accessible. This would address the first question. 
• The most difficult part about this was to domesticate enough donkeys by feeding them carrots to serve as means of transport. 
• And for the rest of this phase, it involves enlarging narrow spaces so that they are at least two blocks tall, enough for a blockhead on a donkey to move through. Also, to prevent donkeys from becoming injured and enabling them to move around, large cave networks are connected via pathways to make transport quicker, and the cave structure is modified so that the donkeys can jump their way through them. 
• As a vertical path through the underground space cannot be accessed by a donkey, I made a stairwell connecting the ground to the magma (the diagonal path slashing through the underground space). I named that stairwell "The Syringe" based on its appearance. For those wondering why its top part was larger, it was a remnant of some horticultural experiment to grow plants underground. The experiment ended up in failure since the trees died off quickly and required a lot of maintenance to produce much food, but the concept of riding donkeys downstairs and collecting fruit from the trees at the same time was attractively convenient.
• And for the fourth and final phase of SUGO, it was to make finding my way around these caves easier. This included making a lot of signs to direct the blockheads on the donkeys, and makeshift maps using stone and sand (the blocks of stone were to mark out other positions while the blocks of sand were to highlight the current position. Naturally, the signs would be placed on these blocks). In addition, riding the caves more frequently should help me familiarise myself with the environment.
• Note: I still have not figured out how to mark out where the ores and trade portal are with something prominent instead of relying on wooden signs which can be hard to read if you are moving around on a donkey.
• As SUGO comes to a close, there were some gaps left to close, that being what I should do with all the extra stone. That is when the second mega-project came in.

Introducing how I found all the sky islands: Sky Island Radar System (SIRS).

The concept of this project was simple, built stone pathways up into the sky and see what I would hit. Initially, I was skeptical that it would find anything, and would only be able to link up mountains at best, but the number of sky islands I found with this was astounding.

To start with, I built a vertical column of stone on top of the Honeycomb, then at intervals of around 30 blocks from each other, I built stone paths sideways. In this manner, I linked up many of the sky islands that could be found on top of the portal (there are more than 30 of them shown in this image alone). And the stone got to be put into good use!

This is my two grandest projects that made my current world look like this today. In future posts, I would zoom in to this world and introduce more of the projects I did in this world, as well as the names of my blockheads, the places and the animals.

Update: looks like this is not possible now, since I have switched phones and the world can no longer be played.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention the name of this world. I named it "Theodocosm", which means "the land willed by the gods". Of course, I am the god of this world. Asides from the blocks in this server, I made the rest. There is not much going on here, since I am a solo player, but whatever this world has in store will definitely be interesting, otherwise I would not have played this game for so long.