inspiring curiosity to dig deeper

Minecraft invites players to explore. On Minecraft.net, though, only 10% of visitors reached halfway down the page. I wanted the opening scene to give them a reason to keep going.

My role combined UI/UX design with technical art. I designed the layered parallax experience and built its Blender rendering and asset pipeline, working with engineering, art direction, and technical art collaborators to bring it to the web.

project vision

Transport visitors into the Minecraft universe on our most globally accessible

from scene update to shipped assets

I built a Blender pipeline that turned an updated 3D scene into a complete set of responsive web assets, named, organized, optimized, and packaged for delivery.

1 click · 10 seconds · 196 assets

Once the scene was ready, a single click rendered and packaged 48 assets in 10 seconds. That run covered six layers at eight viewport sizes; editing the scene happened beforehand.

Composition previews were part of the same workflow, so we could check the artwork before importing and publishing the files.

Procedural terrain, foliage, and texture controls let us try different versions of the world without rebuilding the scene.

responsive artwork

one scene. eight viewport sizes.

The compositor cropped each layer to fit both the viewport and the artwork itself. Six layers at eight viewport sizes produced the 48 assets used by the responsive experience.

crop for the viewport

Width crops fit the composition to each device, from ultrawide desktops to small mobile screens.

crop for the layer

Height crops follow the bounds of the sky, scenery, and foreground.

prepare the handoff

The workflow produces composition previews and exports named files into organized folders.

technical art

build the controls, then shape the world

I built controls for terrain, foliage, instancing, and texture changes so we could revise the scene and regenerate its web assets. The underlying setup stayed intact as the artwork changed.

a reusable tool for art direction

We could add to the asset palette and try different terrain, lighting, or visual treatments without starting from scratch.

Desert / scene variation

Plains / scene variation

Tundra / scene variation

engagement results

4.5× as many visitors reached halfway down the page

45% reach, up from 10%
A 35 percentage-point increase at 50% scroll depth.

The new parallax hero was nearly three times taller than the previous key art. Even with that extra height, more visitors reached the Minecraft stories, products, and services further down the page.

That gave content such as Realms, Marketplace, and news more chances to be seen.

curiosity carries into consideration

In A/B testing, traffic from the Minecraft product marketing page to the Vanilla product detail page increased 18%.

Applied to the annual traffic baseline, that lift projected to 3.2 million additional product-page visitors per year. This was a projection, not a measured annual total.

what I took forward

This project showed me how much the first scene can do. A glimpse of Minecraft’s world gave visitors a reason to explore before they reached the product details.

Keeping that invitation intact on smaller screens took as much care as the desktop composition. The framing and motion could change, but each version still needed to feel like stepping into Minecraft.

Visit the parallax live

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