Bloxhead7

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Bloxhead7
Bloxhead7.png
Date JoinedLate October 2018
GamesEchokia, Knoria, Fidese, Tactics, Miner's Galore, Outerlands, Daisies, Card Battle Advanced, Taelrador Dungeons, Ivy, Senasia, The Blue Shadow, Bionic, The2nd
Known for
  • Inventing the Loria genre in DiamondFire through the creation of Echokia
  • Hosting games that prioritize overall longevity but sacrifice ease-of-hosting

Bloxhead7 (also known as Blox) is a member of the Warlords community responsible for creating the Loria genre through his debut game, Echokia, and creating the first successful High Afterlife game, Knoria. One of the original members of Warlords, Blox has had a long presence in the DiamondFire-Warlords community dating back to RP Wars. Known for his conventional and successful games, Blox has become one of the most distinguished creators of Warlords despite having made comparatively few games compared to other members.

DiamondFire-Warlords Biography

DiamondFire

Blox joined DiamondFire sometime in 2016, after his brother found the server amongst many options on a server list. He already had some experience with Common RPs, from large freebuild creative servers such as MC Central. However, he came to DiamondFire with no experience in Executor RPs, and as such did not do anything of the sort during his initial days on the server. Quitting the server after some time, he'd rejoin on or around May 2017, and gradually make new friends within the community that would keep him on the server, several of which would be future Warlords members. For instance, becoming an active writer in the DiamondFire Stone Library, coupled with prior interactions, maintained a close friendship between himself and clumsycapy (then known as thecoolkid26), SenorConejo, and n5Q (then known as Kcolyz). He had also met dylan34481 and TheZipCreator through the server.

RP Wars

Sometime during Late 2017 or Early 2018, chunghhoids (then known as TheLoyalHorse) created the first significant Executor RP in DiamondFire, known as RP Wars. Blox was not a player of the game, and rather became a spectator. Whilst watching the match, he became highly interested in the concept but never had a chance to join. By the time the game dwindled in activity and countries became available to play, chunghhoids opted to clear the plot. clumsycapy (who was a player of RP Wars), alongside dylan34481 (who spectated with Blox), would work with Blox on the same plot to create RP Wars 2. Although the project was abandoned prior to ever being hosted, it gave Blox some experience in developing games, which would be of use in the near future.

Kingdoms

Sometime after the failure of RP Wars 2, SenorConejo had created his own, improved version of the original: Kingdoms. Although the game saw various player swaps as some players became inactive, Blox became a long-term player of one of the four countries, located in the mesa. In Kingdoms, he created a relatively strong theocratic state that fought a brutal conflict against indigenous peoples from nearby regions. A major early blow came to his country when a sizable army of indigenous peoples destroyed his first settlement nearby a major river, forcing Blox's civilization to retreat across the river and use it as a natural barrier. Blox would become inactive on DiamondFire sometime after and would miss out on the rest of Kingdoms Season 1.

The Early Boom & Echokia

After Kingdoms Season 1 concluded and the Early Boom was in full swing, Blox would make a comeback to the server. Witnessing the rise of new, experimental concepts as well as inspiring himself on other non-Minecraft games such as Hearts of Iron IV, he would create a new game that completely defied the standards of Executor RPs in DiamondFire at the time: Echokia. The game operated more as a grand strategy political simulator than a civilization-creating simulation. The mechanical differences between it and the Developmental games that dominated the RP scene back then were massive, with modern-era warfare, complex diplomacy, and naval war (among other things) being introduced. Echokia was a fundamentally different game, and the first of its kind on the server. However, being first also meant that Echokia suffered from a critical lack of foresight. Many of its mechanics were clunky or otherwise inhibited the progress of the game. Notoriously, the time it took for a country to declare war depended on the ideology of its country: fascist countries could declare war in a matter of two turns, whereas democracies took almost a whopping dozen turns to justify a war. In contemporary Loria games where a declaration of war could be done in less than a turn regardless of country, this mechanic was clearly problematic. It was evident during the gameplay, as well: as SenorConejo played a massive democracy, he found himself unable to intervene in any conflicts due to the massive amount of time needed to declare a war. Meanwhile, clumsycapy, who led an authoritarian Econilist (the game's equivalent to Communist) country, easily invaded and took over a small country in the early stages of the game. Nevertheless, the game was arguably a considerable success. Many aspects of the game, such as diplomacy, ran as planned and the game saw roughly a dozen people play. However, it would not take long for Echokia to end, as Blox would soon after enter another period of inactivity that would kill the game with him. The game had left its mark, however, and a team of three players (clumsycapy, SenorConejo, and UltraCraftGames) would go on to create a Loria game that would improve on Echokia's mechanics in every way possible. The result was Belloria, and the subsequent burst in popularity of Loria RP games would finally bring the Executor RP concept to the mainstream DiamondFire public.

Warlords

By the time Blox had returned to DiamondFire, the Loria Boom was already in full swing. His contributions on DiamondFire would end with Echokia, but his efforts did not go unnoticed. His game, alongside the friendships he had already made with other Warlords players, would make him one of several to be invited to Warlords shortly after the server's original founding. Once on Warlords, he had set out to begin his next ambitious project. Echokia 2 was set to be one of the first major projects on all of Warlords, and would see substantial improvements on the original. However, as Echokia was under development, the server would be irreversibly soft locked by SenorConejo after he ran a command that constantly kept the server overloaded. In 8 days, Warlords 2 would be open to the community, but the damage had been done, and Echokia 2 was gone. Blox would eventually accept this loss and put his energy into making games within the Developmental and Afterlife genres. Two major projects would result from this: Miner's Galore and Knoria.

Miner's Galore and Knoria

Two of the most anticipated games in early 2019, Miner's Galore and Knoria were both fairly ambitious projects. Miner's Galore, for its part, was a fairly non-traditional Developmental game for its time that saw the player run a mining operation and subsequently upgrade their equipment and hire new units as they collected resources. Miner's Galore went through several changes in anticipation of its release, but the project was eventually scrapped. Blox ultimately decided to focus on Knoria instead. Knoria, an open-world medieval fantasy Afterlife, not only had more potential but certainly had more popularity. However, compared to Miner's Galore and even Echokia, this game was a completely new challenge. Creating an entire fantasy world with detailed builds for the players to explore would not only be incredibly difficult to set up, but also to actively create as a player continued to explore. Despite the tall obstacles, he still managed to release the game, and its attention to detail made it the first successful example of a High Afterlife game to exist.

Return to Lorias

Around the same time period as Knoria's development, Blox would also toy around with creating another Loria project. First came Tactics, a simple Loria game that saw the implementation of a rigid (purely stats-based) battle system. The game, made to give players a chance to earn the new BloxBux currency and further promote it, would become a major game in its own right as the BloxBux Era of currencies went into full swing, but would gain new prominence as TheZipCreator's Wargame would further develop and popularize the rigid battle system. Afterward, he'd develop Fidese, his first major Loria to be hosted since Echokia. Fidese, like Tactics, saw a massively increased use of statistics in its game. Unlike Tactics, the battle system was non-rigid, but just about every other metric (economic, industrial, political, diplomatic, among others) was quantified into some number. This allowed the player to see how well their country did in every field, and be able to quantitatively visualize any growth or decline in their country on a particular aspect. There were drawbacks, such as the system's complexity scaring some away from playing the game and confusing those who did play Fidese, but these drawbacks were ultimately outweighed by the benefits, as Fidese became a well-received game for its time.

More Projects Through 2019-2020

In subsequent months, Blox would create smaller and less ambitious projects within frequent, months-long periods of inactivity. Such projects include:

  • Ivy and the World of 2142, a futuristic game made outside of warlords, but brought in due to the success of Chains-Ascent
  • The Blue Shadow, a Napoleon-era historical Loria that would never make it past the initial development stages
  • Taelrador Dungeon, a dungeon crawler Afterlife that takes place in a large map full of countries. The game remains under development.

The Second Renaissance and Beyond

During the Second Renaissance of Warlords, Blox continued hosting Knoria, with plenty of positive feedback. Alongside Knoria, he'd continue improving tactics, adding more single-player modes as well as allowing players to create their own units. Moreover, during the Second Board Game Boom, he'd create Card Battle Advanced, one of the more popular card games of the time. However, the abrupt end of the Renaissance with the death of Warlords 2 would also bring all of Blox's projects to a halt. His time making games on Minehut Warlords and Aternos Warlords was limited, and over the next two years, only three major projects came: Age of Nations, Bionic, and Senasia. Bionic was a rigid deck-building combat game, but despite a lot of work being put into the foundation, never garnered much attention and would end up being mostly unheard of. Both Age of Nations and Senasia games were Lorias, though they had drastically different approaches. Age of Nations was a player-driven Loria that allowed players to create their own country using a set number of points, similar to how some non-Warlords Country RP games (such as World of Clans) operate. However, this game would never be hosted. Senasia, on the other hand, worked as a direct continuation of the improvements Blox sought to make in Fidese, and the game became his next major Loria project. The project took over a year to release, and Senasia would mainly be hosted in late 2022 as well as 2023, becoming one of the most well-received games of that year.