Five Years of Drehmal

Hey everybody, Keeko here. Been a while since you got a blog post from me, but here I am! And yes, you're reading that right: Drehmal v2.0 came out 5 years ago. That may not seem that surprising to you guys, but to myself and the other devs, we think "Wow, it felt like 10!"

In all seriousness, 5 years is a long time and a milestone for us. It puts things into perspective: the trajectory of Rift and I's lives changed 5 years ago, and those years have been spent cultivating a team of extremely talented and passionate individuals who are relentlessly dedicated to creating art, like us. We also fostered an incredible community that, all these years later, are still excited to see whatever we put out. Lots of things have changed since 2.0, and while it hasn't always been the smoothest ride for us, ultimately we made something unlike anything else that has reached an absurd amount of people (OVER 200,000 DOWNLOADS ACROSS ALL VERSIONS!!!). And some of those people have had lifechanging experiences where they realized something about themselves or changed the way they thought about life. All that, for a Minecraft map? That's pretty special.

P.S: Stick around to the end for some future update tidbits.

Considering all of that - 2.2 was very, very taxing on us. I can't speak for other devs (but you'll hear from them after I've said my piece), but I had started feeling that burnout only a year into 2.2 development. It was when we decided to bring forward our story overhaul plans, which was our worst instance of scope creep. I was able to keep steady and contribute for the year after but I was very much dwindling. By the last year, I often felt frustrated and at my wit's end that this update still wasn't out. What made it extra difficult was that we released the private Alpha in April of 2023, which was the first time we had people outside of the dev team play the map. That felt like the finish line to me... but we still had to reach Beta 4 months later, and then full release 8 months after that. And then I thought it'd be fine to start on 2.3 right after!

Of course, as a creative, all I could see was 2.2's flaws at release. All the little things that a handful of people complained about were sticking points in my mind. Those mistakes I made as a team leader that led to problems in the design. It weighed on me very heavily.

What made it even more difficult for me was seeing that 2.2 just didn't reach the same level of popularity as 2.0 or 2.1. This was for a multitude of reasons, most out of our control. 2.0 released at the start of the pandemic, 2.1 not long after, and at the height of Minecraft's resurgence in popularity. 2.2 released as the pandemic was fully winding down, Minecraft was getting negatively received updates, and at this point a lot of people had just kinda forgotten about Drehmal. Should we have done more marketing? Yes, absolutely. Did 2.2 still get a ton of attention? Yep. Did it still sting, just a bit? ...Yeah, yeah it did.

Now, there's a pretty common, fundamental belief about art: it always reflects its creators, in some way or another. J.R.R Tolkien wrote a short poem that eventually became The Hobbit in WW1, and his experiences on the frontlines directly translated into The Lord of the Rings with Saruman's industry and the dark clouds of Mordor. Maddy Thorson, one of the creators of Celeste, came to terms with her gender identity during development and that reflects very heavily in the game.

But Drehmal's a different sort of beast. It had a clear, unifying vision, but it's also the brainchild of two dozen authors. It reflects all of our beliefs. The dangers of imperialism, authoritarianism, and capitalism. It touches on individualism, environmental destruction, and the beauty of the natural world. It speaks on love, death, family, friends, discovery, revelation, the fear of the unknown and the fear of others not like us. It has tales from characters from all walks of life. And the slew of interpretations you could have about its less clear stories multiplies the narrative depth. Drehmal is so, so much more than myself or anyone can really quantify or imagine. I mean, how could the collective passion of 20+ people be?

Though, Drehmal's done something weird in my eyes. We reflected onto it, and in some ways, it reflected back onto us. You can boil down Drehmal's main plot into two parts: immense ambition and crushing failure. During 2.2's development, we had immense ambition - heaps of it. And at the end of it all, in 2.2's postmortem, I felt a sense of failure. I felt like I failed myself and I failed my team, both because of my burnout and my perceived poor popularity of 2.2. I'm not saying the dev team is an imperialistic empire with plans for world domination (yet), but... there's a weird poetic symmetry in it, isn't there?

I hadn't realized something, though. So let me take a stroll to Drehmal's post-credits and snag something I'd been neglecting. Something I just hadn't thought about.

"...they were at peace. They were satisfied. They were happy with the world they crafted, even with all of its flaws."

"Despite that, they were simply pleased to have been there."

"Thank you for your love."

Of course Drehmal isn't just about death and sorrow and defeat. It is so much more than that. It's acceptance. It's willingness to do better. To make a better future. It doesn't matter that 2.2 was deeply flawed in my eyes and it doesn't matter that it didn't get as popular as I'd like. We made something incredible that brought joy to so many, and we learned countless lessons during its creation. We reflected onto it, it reflected onto you, and now it reflects back to us.

Thanks, Drehmal. There's still plenty I could learn from you.

Thanks to our community for sticking around with us for so long, and making insane art, creating one of the best wikis I've seen for any game, and being generally obsessive about the lore. Thanks to our Patrons for continuing to support us despite having nothing to show off. Thank you for the past 5 years, and here's to 5 more.

That's enough of my sappy sob story - I'll hand it over to the other devs who'd like to have their own piece.

Rift - Co-creator

Hi All! The last time we spoke like this was in our Two Year Anniversary post... I can't believe it's already been three years! At the time of that post, Keeko and I had been working on this iteration of Drehmal for three years, and now that number has DOUBLED!? Yikes.

Everything I could say about 2.2 as a whole was said by Keeko, and every sappy thing I could say about Drehmal I already said two years ago. So I just want to take up this space to reflect on and show some appreciation for our community.

In these past 5 years, our community has built into something I'm equally as proud of compared to Drehmal itself. Through Drehmal we've seen so many beautiful friendships and relationship blossom (Congratulations to Nat & Decker on their engagement!). Through Drehmal, we've also seen both the map and the community help people accept and love their true selves. Even if 2.2 only got 500 downloads, and even if only 5 out of those 500 had that experience, then to me all of the time we spent on 2.2 would've been worth it. You are what makes Drehmal special. This community for a niche little Minecraft map, is in my unbiased opinion, one of the best communities on the entire internet. Thank you for giving Drehmal that honor.

We wouldn't be here without the support of all you who love Drehmal. From our ever-loyal Patrons who send us money every month still, even while we don't have a lot to give them in return aside from our thanks - to all our wonderful friends who chat every day in the Drehmalcord.

Keeko already dished out some thank-yous, but I'm here with even more:

Thank you for sharing us with your friends, whether they want to hear about Drehmal or not. Thank you for being so kind as to help others who are experiencing Drehmal for the first time, and for being extra diligent about spoilers.

Thank you to our speedrunners, watching you break our game is an absolute honor. After all, only the best games get speedran.

Thank you to all our deranged madmen who keep the lore channel alive with 63-page documents of theories and 100+ message long discussions, who make me feel like all of the late-night internal lore discussions and debates were absolutely worth it.

Thank you to our Russian players for giving us the largest volume of traffic our website has ever seen in a single day (50,000 sessions!). Благодарим наших российских игроков за то, что они обеспечили нашему сайту самый большой объем трафика за один день (50,000 сеансов!).

Thank you again to our Patrons, I promise your donations are being put to good use. Thank you to our moderators who keep the server clean from Steam Gift Card scams in the speedruns channel.

Thank you to Decker, our Discord admin, for keeping the whole server held together, running smoothly and securely for us. You are a huge part of the reason why this community is what it is.

MASSIVE thank you to our Wiki curators, k182 and Phyxonerceus, for spending hours upon hours cataloging everything in the map with corresponding detailed articles. You've created an incredible community resource that has made Drehmal more accessible for hundreds of players, and that is a feat that many games do not have the privilege of claiming.

Thank you for loving yourself, for playing our silly, dorky little map.

Thank you for your love!

- Rift

Red Medic - Builder

Although I haven't been part of the dev team for long, Drehmal has been a huge inspiration for me in the almost four years I've been around as a player, and is one of the main things that's led me down the path of studying game design and world-building on my own. Being on the dev team now is one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to do, and I'm incredibly grateful to have been a part of all this from Timebreak to the future.

HiscottiBiscotti - Artist

I was asked to join the team in January of 2022 as a texture artist. At the time, I didn’t know how much of an impact it would have on my life. I’ve met some people who were- and still are- very important to me, not just in the dev team, but in the broader community as a whole. My time on the team has seen a lot of ups and downs, a lot of stress, and a lot of personal growth. My art has improved drastically and it’s been a genuine joy creating for a community as enthusiastic as this one. I want to give a special thank you to my patrons, commissioners, and everyone else who’s supported my art. At the end of the day, art is all that’s left in history. Architecture, paintings, pottery, literature... Creation is a thread that ties humanity together. So to everyone who’s contributed any art of or for the map, no matter what it is or how detailed, thank you. To me, you make this community complete. Humans were built to create. No matter how skilled you are, no matter what your medium is, never stop creating, never stop making art.

MoutonDemocrate - 3D Artist

Hey y’all, it’s Mouton. I’m taking a bit of this post to talk about my experiences with Drehmal and the effects it had on me. I don’t know if this’ll be useful to anyone, but I hope you’ll at least read it.

I first played Drehmal during the pandemic, a bit over 4 years ago. I was bored, and was looking around for content I could play without buying a new game, which my parents used to be really strict about. So when I found Drehmal, I was kind of hyped. I never really played adventure maps before, at least none that took themselves seriously. Drehmal was a slap in the face. Knowing this was made by 2-3 people, all about my age, was as impressive as it was devastating for my self-worth. I already had a bit of experience with creating Minecraft content, so after finishing the map, I DM’ed Rift directly to ask him if I could join the dev team - which, looking back on it, is funny for some reason. He told me that they sometimes held applications for devs, and that in the meanwhile, I could participate in community content creation. So that’s what I did.

During the following months, I got back to making pixel art every night, tried my hand at datapacks for the first time, and interacted a lot with the community. It was great. My first community contest was the Ruins and Remnants contest. It’s the first time I ever tried to build in Minecraft, actually - and I got hired as a builder, fake it till you make it. I made a small little tower, in the middle of a lake, with like, the tiniest amount of challenge I suppose. The crown jewel was a very blocky crossbow model - my first model as well, again, fake it till you make it - which had like, different models for the different charge stages. I got more recognition from the community for the invention of the AvGun than for the build in itself, which was very funny, but considering it was my first build I didn’t expect it to go this far. After two failed attempts to get in the team, one time as a texture artist and another time as a builder, I got officially into the team after a bit under a year of activity in the discord server.

My initiation was decently stressful, despite there being no apparent reason to stress over. I was asked to make two builds and a hovering chair. I made those during my last year of highschool’s afternoons, which I had free because of Covid restrictions at the time. I went into hyperfocus three times for all three of those projects, and they turned out decently. They’re still in the game, as opposed to the AvChair, which most of you should not have heard anything about and which I did not remember until I started writing this. After this, I was officially accepted into the dev team, shown the [75% TOWERS - SPOILER] and what’s after. That kickstarted the hype train for 2.2 that never genuinely left me.

I didn’t contribute a lot to 2.2 - or at least not as much as I would have wanted, though I imagine a lot of devs feel that way. A few buildings, a few models, and a few animations. That was basically it. Unfortunately, I got into the dev team right before starting CPGE (Classe Préparatoire aux Grandes Écoles), which is a 2-3 years curriculum to prepare entry exams to the French Grandes Écoles. It’s also known as a pact between you and the devil, where you acquire a good education and 3 years of fun at the cost of two or three years of hell. During my first year, I tried to give a bit of time to the project, but my terrible grades and rank were pressuring me to work more at school. During my second year, I very literally had no free time. My routine was : wake up, shower, eat, go to class for 4 hours, eat, go to class for 4 hours again, eat, go home, work, sleep, repeat. I never had free time in the evening for anything. Sometimes I managed to squeeze out a few 30 minutes to dedicate to Drehmal, but the pressure of school made working on the map feel bad. I think that’s how I started being burnt out of Drehmal, and Minecraft in general. The only time it felt right to work on the map was during dev nights, which were, for me, during the night. Like, 1am to 5am. And I attended when I could, but still, the effects on my sleep schedule were still noticeable.

At the end of hell, I passed my exams with a decent ranking, and got into a pretty good school. This is the same time I started to work on the installer. I was already the mods guy/girl/creature? on the dev team - probably due to having the worst PC, only rivaled by Egg at the time - and so when the idea of an installer was put on the table, I was all in on it. I was the one who suggested Godot, as I was starting to get into it, and it was accepted. I started working on it during summer vacation. I was actually so into the project that I spent time on it when I could’ve spent it with family - which was stupid on my part and not the fault of the installer project. I continued working on it during the first few months in my new school, but eventually the project was abandoned in favour of a brand new one. It’d be a lie to say I don’t hold a grudge for this decision - mostly because with the delays and my schedule, I would’ve finished it. But at the same time, not knowing about delays, and seeing the state of the installer, it was the most rational decision from the lead devs’ side. It did tank my motivation to work on Drehmal though, or to interact with the community at all. But this is also what prompted me to start doing indie development! I’m a good 8 unfinished projects deep, but I have 4 that are still very real, including 2 that should be coming out pretty soon, so it kinda worked out!

Drehmal was one of the art pieces that helped me most in my artistic journey. This isn’t an understatement, I’m putting it right there with Hollow Knight and Mario Galaxy in terms of how much it helped me get into a creative mindset and understand what kind of things I want to make. I still think the best part about it was that I made a bunch of friends, both in the community and in the dev team. And I’m still working with them! I might be completely unable to play or make anything on Minecraft these days, but I’ve told Keeko that I wasn’t impartial to make a few models and/or animations for the 2.3 project! (Is this redacted ? This feel like it might be redacted)

Anyways, yeah, keep up with us. We’re still going to create stuff, whether the medium be Minecraft, Godot, or any other. And it’ll keep being great, hopefully both for you guys and for us.

Love y’all, be well, hate your government and make art <3

DomeMaster - Lead Developer

My Internet name is DomeMaster, and I’ve always been a dreamer. When I realized that I liked to sing while watching The Voice, I confidently told my family that I was going to be a professional singer. When I learned about politics and saw injustice in the world, I confidently told my teachers that I was going to run for President. And when I played my first Minecraft adventure map, I confidently told my friends that I was going to be a professional Minecrafter. When I said each of these things, I really meant it. But there was always a Realism Gland somewhere in the back of my mind that made it clear to me that these were flashes in the pan. What mattered was succeeding in school. Making it to the next grade and pushing myself to my limits. Anything else was unrealistic.

Needless to say, (at least) one of these dreams has actually come true! And I could not be happier. My association with Keeko, Rift, and everyone on the dev team has completely changed my perspective on life. No longer am I quite as concerned with meeting every expectation society has for a “gifted” student. In its place, I have learned to listen more closely to my heart and all its dreams, no matter how wild.

I am aligned with much of what Keeko mentioned in his post. I felt relief when we finally finished all the features and started getting feedback. I felt burnout during the testing and bugfixing phase. But I have been nothing but elated with the response that the community has given for Apotheosis. You all have made it crystal clear that we managed to make something really unique. Something meaningful! You have given me a taste of the feeling that comes from finishing a challenge that I chose myself, and I am so very thankful.

So that’s it. I’m a game designer now, and I’m not going back, even when I’m also a famous singer and the President of the United States.

Expect many more brain-twisting, paradigm-shifting, heart-wrenching experiences from this special group of developers in the future. There’s already so much burbling behind the scenes, and I just can’t wait to say more to you about all of it soon.

With much appreciation,

Your Pal Dome

WHAT'S UP WITH 2.3?

That wraps up all the dev's messages, so - hey! Keeko here again to talk a bit about 2.3. So, the last official statement about 2.3 was in our “The Future of Drehmal” blog post, where we said the update was indefinitely postponed and we were pursuing standalone game development. The latter half of that statement is still true, but the first half is a little more complicated. Before I get into that, let me talk about the circumstances around 2.3 and why it was indefinitely postponed.

As you all know from the above statements and from playing it yourself, 2.2 was big. Stupid big. It was extremely taxing on the team and left a large number of dev members burnt out, myself and Dome included, who were the primary organizers of the project. Additionally, the pandemic had effectively ended, people were entering college, some were leaving it, and moving on with their lives. There was, very understandably, a lot less time to dedicate to Drehmal. Those two factors slowed development to a crawl.

It didn’t help that 2.3 was still going to be a very large update. Not nearly as large as 2.2, but with our busier and less powerful team, it was going to take more time. And, for me at least, our plans for 2.3 weren’t the most motivating, focusing on revamping, remaking, and touching up all parts of the map to bring everything to a similar quality level. As someone who’d been working on the project since 2019 and had already made all these things, the prospect of revisiting and redoing wasn’t the most encouraging.

But many of us were still unsatisfied with Drehmal. There was a lot we wanted to do, much of it stuff we just couldn’t fit in 2.2 and designed with the expectation it would eventually be added. Really, the highs of 2.2 only further highlighted Drehmal’s flaws, and to let them sit just… didn’t feel right. And, honestly, showing off the game to content creators, journalists, big names that could help us get our name out there almost felt embarrassing. Like, there was a lot to love about Drehmal, but there was also a ton of baggage that made the experience uneven and awkward that, ultimately, wouldn’t require too much manpower to fix.

That means some devs have returned to Drehmal and are now in early development of the next update. We currently plan on including finished features from original 2.3 development, and a small selection of other additions/reworks from those old plans. Do not take this as a promise - it is still too soon to say what form these new efforts might take. Myself and the team are, of course, dedicated to finishing what we started, even if it’s not as grand as we initially hoped. Our fate is bound to Drehmal. We love this world too much to end on what we felt is an awkward note.

Though it would be a lie to say that’s the only reason we’ve returned to Drehmal. At the end of last year, around the start of December, I sent a long-winded proposal of something I’ve been wanting to make for a very, very long time. It’s weird, it’s different, and it’s a little insane. I, however, do not feel comfortable talking about it unless I know 100% for sure we will be able to finish it… so I’ll leave it at that.

Anyway, before I go… you get a spoiler image! You already saw it in the blog thumbnail, but oh well. It’s just one of those little things we already started on months ago.

And that wraps up our anniversary post! It’s been an utterly insane five years and I never would’ve expected it to turn out like this. Thank you to everyone in our community that’s stuck around with us for 5 years, and for those newer folk… stick around for another 5, will you? Who knows where we’ll be then.