Potterworld - Chailey Sechrist

PotterworldMC

Company/Studio: Droobledore LLC
Role: Head of Game Design
Team Size: 135 people
Timeframe: July 2020 - Present
Platform: Minecraft/Proprietary Engines

PotterworldMC focuses on creating a magical experience for players, traversing an open-world with a wand, broom, and their wits, players are able to explore a multitude of towns, villages, and even a stylized recreation of London, all of which are filled with secrets, and quests. Players have the opportunity to brew potions, grow powerful flowers, and bake magical treats to assist them on their journey as they level up. Players also have the opportunity to engage in our limited time events, such as Halloween, Spring, Valentines, Pride, Winter Holidays, and more, all of which give players the opportunity to compete and challenge each other in shorter, separated experiences.
There are also a wide variety of other activities that the player is able to engage in, all of which results in the player gaining experience to level up. This includes attending fictional classes taught by real staff members, entering Dungeons or Gauntlets, which are a combination of raids and multiplayer puzzles, and competing against each other in dueling, broom racing, and more.

Click to learn more about Potterworld!

Responsibilities

Successfully managed a team of 20-70 people in the creation of a popular Minecraft server that has been enjoyed by about 500,000 players total.
Managed several teams of 20 to 30 people to coordinate overall game vision.
Mentored over a dozen new team members and helped integrate them into our team and workflow.
Led and produced over three dozen gameplay releases for a live service MMORPG containing quests, activities, and limited time events.
Coordinated with other departments to ensure a steady cadence of releases.
Mentored by leading professionals from AAA game studios.
Spent over 4,500 hours actively working on gameplay releases.
Quickly mastered a proprietary engine and used it to create game content.

Tools Utilized

Proprietary Engine - Google Suite - Trello - Wekan - Jenkins - Discord

Reflection

I have been a part of the Potterworld Staff team since 2020, initially joining asa Game Designer. Since then, I have grown so much as a Game Designer and Producer, having been mentored by AAA professionals. I am now the Head of Game Design where I guide and support team members in designing and organizing quests, activities, and events. My focus on the team currently is project management and task coordination.

During my time on the Leadership Team, I have led over three dozen releases including ARGs, live events, quest releases, expansions, and more. I have also mentored and trained over a dozen team members in our Proprietary Engine that is used for our development. These projects have spanned from 2-3 months long to a year and a half long in terms of development time.
I have grown as a leader from my experiences working with a very diverse team. Members range in ages as young as 14 and as old as 50. We also work remotely, and therefore we also have people from all over the globe which presents its own challenges when navigating time zones and language barriers. I have had to navigate hirings and dismissals within the team as well as public relations with the community. Another huge piece of my experience on this team has come in the form of learning interdeptartmental communication. Our server functions with six core teams to create experiences for our players and cross-team collaboration is vital in any successful project that we create. As such, Game Design often requires us to coordinate with other departments to ensure that resources are being directed towards specific releases, and to ensure the workload is balanced across the teams.

Each project presents its own opportunities and challenges. You can find a list of my history of contributions and responsibilities for each project I've lead below.

Project Title

Details

Reflection

Anniversary 2025 Courtyard Celebration

This was a small event where the player has to collect different ingredients through 11 different minigames and then use them to bake cupcakes. They complete orders with the cupcakes to earn clues to locate the 11 candles hidden throughout the world.

Project Length: 1 Months

Role: Project Lead

Game Design Team Members: 9

Total Project Members: 20

Release Date: May 17, 2025

As a server we have shifted to focus a lot of our energy from the game design team to working on a major update. Due to this, a lot of our previous capacity for events has diminished. This was a short term project that required focused energy from team members for a shorter period of time to still provide content for our players for the anniversary of the server. It went pretty smoothly however I did allow it to increase in scope a little more than I probably should have for our time restraint.

Gameplay Update 1.10.4 - Discoveries Expansion

This update release 109 individual discoveries of various types for the players to discover. We also introduced a new category called "Characters" in addition to the existing 3 categories of "Restricted", "Landmark", and "Domain". Also added 7 new shops across the world with their own unique experiences or items to purchase.

Project Length: 5 Months

Role: Project Lead (Oversaw a Sr. Member as another Point of Contact)

Game Design Team Members: 4

Total Project Members: 33

Release Date: December 13, 2024

This was a bit of a larger scale project as we essentially doubled the number of discoveries on the server. Previously, discoveries were mostly towns, buildings, or the occasional small details such as a fast travel shortcuts. We decided to add characters as well to help bring the world to life. This was a challenging project as we had a lot of lore written by our lore team which had not yet been implemented anywhere on the world. When adding content, we have to be really careful to not accidentally contradict other concepts in our world and when adding this much at once, it is very easy for things to slip through. We had to be very thorough in the review process of all of the writing.

Winter Waltz at Galdrakademia

This was a large event where players travelled to a school long lost to legends - Galdrakademia. They could skate across the Fjord, dine in the Great Hall nestled into the roots of Yggdrasil, and perhaps even become the first outsider in hundreds of years to learn Galdrakademian Magic, a brand new system of magic for all to enjoy. The event had 7 main story quests, 8 side quests, and 6 activities as well as the seasonal games and content that returned from the past.

Project Length: 3.5 Months

Role: Project Lead (Oversaw a Sr. Member as another Point of Contact)

Game Design Team Members: 15

Total Project Members: 52

Release Date: December 8, 2024

This project was really really hard. During the time that I was leading this event, I was actively knee deep in my capstone project VeloCity at the same time and balancing both of them was proving to be more difficult that I expected. Fortunately, one of our senior members was assisting which helped us balance the workload. Our original scope for this project was already ambitious and as team members started missing deadlines and other departments requested extensions, the original timeline because unrealistic. We ended up delaying release by about one week which was spent doing additional testing prior to release. The content turned out amazing and players throroughly enjoyed the event, but we learned a lot about interdepartmental communication as a leadership team. We also had a complicated situation with a team member which resulted in me having to handle removing a member from the team which is never an easy thing to handle.

Return to the Haunted Hollow - Halloween 2024

This was a large scale event where we returned to a previously loved event location and brought back old content from the last time we were in Haunted Hollow in 2021. There were 16 main quests, 7 side quests, and 1 dungeon included in this release. Additionally there was a week by week ARG component for each week of the event culminating in a live event experience.

Project Length: 3.5 Months

Role: Project Lead

Game Design Team Members: 16

Total Project Members: 56

Release Date: October 12, 2024

For this project, we brought 10 old main quests and 7 side quests up to standards. When beginning this project, even though we had recently done the same thing for Valentine's, we once again underestimated to complexity of updating the quests which required us to rebuild most of them. We also created 6 new quests that pushed some boundries with our tech as we included multiplayer elements that required complex innovation in order to achieve our goals. However, by far the most challenging part of this event was creating a dungeon experience that was a ghost hunting experience similar to Phasmophobia but in minecraft that was replayable with 24 ghosts who each had unique behaviours you had to watch out for.

Gameplay Update 1.10.2 - Riddle Expansion

This update added 131 daily riddle quests as well as 15 other quality of life improvements and bug fixes across our various existing content.

Project Length: 1 Months

Role: Project Lead

Game Design Team Members: 11

Total Project Members: 17

Release Date: September 7, 2024

This release was actually relatively calm as it was a lot of small things bundled into one release however the sheer amount of riddle quests we added meant that we spent a lot of the actual projects duration in testing. We had to make sure that though the tech was relatively simple, when we recreated it 131 times by hand that they all still worked and didn't create any new issues. There were a lot of small things that came up however we had enough team members to split up the tedious work. The main challenge was just really needing to be on top of people with their deadlines since this wasn't a particularly fun project - moreso a tedious one.

The 9 Hells Expansion [1.10.0]

This gauntlet had previously been released for Halloween in 2023 and we rereleased it after it had been reworked to be permanent content. It is a primarily combat focused co-op experience where the player faces 3 complex boss mobs with different abilities in order to progress and win rewards at the end.

Project Length: 7.5 Months

Role: Project Lead

Game Design Team Members: 4

Total Project Members: 12

Release Date: July 27, 2024

This was a longer term project that was pursued on the backlog for awhile and once it got close enough to being done, we prioritized pushing it through the finish line. As this had been released previously for a seasonal event, the bulk of the tech was done - it just was a matter of repurposing it to be used on the world. We had a pretty limited team for this as a lot of the required work was complex magic and mobs which we only had a few people qualified to work on which meant we had to wait till they had capacity to work on it.

Gameplay Update 1.9.3 - QoL Improvement

This release introduced 40 new daily riddle quests, 42 parkour skips, 2 fast travels, 8 discoveries, and about 10 other misc bug fixes and quality of life updates.

Project Length: 8 Months

Role: Project Lead

Game Design Team Members: 13

Total Project Members: 28

Release Date: July 19, 2024

For this release, this was another passive project where I really just had to check in with people periodically because it was a longer term backlog project. There was a lot of moving pieces to keep track of but as long as I was tracking everything, it wasn't too intense. The main challenge was not getting distracted with other projects and forgetting to check in with team members. Especially since this was a lot of easy tech we had some of our newer members working on this to practice, I really didn't want them to feel ignored and so I pushed myself extra hard to check in.

A Magical Voyage - Pride Event 2024

This event brough two fan favorite pride events of the past and combined them into a new experience that brought back content from both old locations. It had 3 main quests and 6 side quests/activities.

Project Length: 2 Months

Role: Project Lead (Oversaw a Sr. Member as another Point of Contact)

Game Design Team Members: 14

Total Project Members: 39

Release Date: June 8, 2024

For this event, I took a step back and let one of our senior members take the reigns as they wanted an opportunity to lead an event. I mostly took on a mentoring role where I taught them how to do a lot of the release preperation and cross department communication. I was incredibly proud of the work they did and felt confident entrusting them to lead projects in the future after this release.

May the Fourth Event 2024

This event took place in the same location it has for the past few years with some additional content and small edits to increase the enjoyment for players.

This Project Length: 2 Months

Role: Project Lead

Game Design Team Members: 14

Total Project Members: 67

Release Date: May 4, 2024

During this time, myself and the other game design leadership members were struggling with a bit of burnout from constant nagging of team members and elements of the leadership teams bureaucracy. We decided we wanted to take a step back so that we could reconnect with where we started as game designers first. We did a ton of coworking and worked on content ourselves in addition to overseeing team members which was more work but more rewarding to reset ourselves.

Return to the Enchanted Valley - Valentine's Event 2024

For this event, we returned to an old location from 2021 and brought back a bunch of loved content from that event. We had 10 main quests and 9 side quests/activities.

Project Length: 3 Months

Role: Project Lead

Game Design Team Members: 10

Total Project Members: 52

Release Date: February 23, 2024

For this project, we brought 8 old main quests and 5 side quests up to standards. When beginning this project, we definitely did not realize how much work this would take as most of these quests had to basically be recreated from the ground up due to how outdated they were in 3 years of changed standards. We also built 2 new quests and 4 new side quests. I was incredibly excited to work on this event as the 2021 version was one of the first events I got really involved in when I was just a junior member.

A Spectral Invasion - Halloween 2023

This event had an intro quest and 7 repeatable activities which rewarded tokens. Players then used those tokens to fight different ghost mobs. They had to fight each mob a certain number of times in order to unlock different spells for a halloween specific wand that was able to be used in a special limited time gauntlet.

Project Length: 4 Months

Role: Project Lead (Oversaw a Sr. Member as another Point of Contact)

Game Design Team Members: 6

Total Project Members: 45

Release Date: October 14, 2023

During this event, we faced a lot of different challenges. I actually wasn't originally leading this event, but I ended up stepping in after another lead got pulled to work on a different project. Due to this, the concepts had already been approved and requests put in. The scope was a bit ambitious and I was the one who then had to handle cutting content and managing the team members. We also had one team member who had recently finished tech training however they were not quite as equipped for the size of project they took on which required more oversight than initially planned. Similarly, we had another team member who kept going unresponsive for days at a time which delayed the progress of their content significantly.