NEPAI was a Minecraft map that started development in I want to say 2021. It told the story an urban explorer type going into the depths of a massive underground research facility that trained AI to create various products for them. This mostly involved various Portal-styled "tests" where it would generate scenarios, though quickly the player would break out of the intended area and into offices and workshops and things of that nature. I decided today to look back on this project since despite never coming out I likely spent hundreds of hours building and adjusting the NEPAI map while I was working on it.
NEPAI was intended to replicate the puzzle solving of Portal and exploration Half-Life in Minecraft. While the map had large explorable areas with many hidden things to find, puzzles were often simple, either being simple parkour courses or "find the button" style challenges. Not exactly the most cerebral thing in the world. Even worse, much of the exploration, one of the most important parts of the map, proved unnecessary due to a lack of fighting. Many of the rewards were specifically for combat, such as arrows and upgraded gear, but with how infrequent combat encounters were, there was minimal incentive to seek out better gear. Not helping this was the fact that Minecraft only gives you so much to work with for armor and attack strength without enchantments, meaning that once players were able to get enough diamonds to craft armor, there was often no point to continue exploring, even more so if the player simply found it in a chest, as happened in the late game.
To resolve this, I had briefly made it so that players would lose everything around a third of the way through the game, much like in the first Half-Life. I decided against this in the end since not only were the parts of the game that required you to play without your resources less interesting, they also made it so keeping items from the start of the game was pointless, leading to less incentive to think creatively with one of the few actual custom mechanics, breaking windows with the sharpened brick.
The sharpened brick was the first item you got in the game, similar to Half-Life's crowbar. It could be used to break certain colors of grass and do little else. While often not super useful, it could be used to bypass several "find the disc" puzzles in the game, and allowed access to a secret room earlier than usual. While mostly used for small stuff, it allowed for the game to be more interesting by allowing players to interact with the enviroment.
Another similar custom mechanic was the ability to place down various "keys". These would often be the most hidden items in the game, but would allow you access to high-quality loot, such as enchanted weapons and diamond gear. I believe that some of these were a little too well hidden, and ultimately suffered the same problems as exploration elsewhere in the map. But despite this I'm proud of the mechanic for calling for further exploration. It also allowed for more people to potentially replay or redownload the map to find the supplies, but ultimately since the map never properly released that never happened.
The story of NEPAI was inspired by Portal and the Super Mario 64 Personalization AI trend that happened a few years back. Most notably, the channel Super Mario 64 Beta Archive's interpretation of the idea. At the time I thought that the idea of SUper Mario 64 having some sort of insane technology in it was really cool, especially with how it was shown, and early drafts of the story were basically "what if that but in real life?", down to having NEPAI stand for "Nintendo Expiremental personalization AI", which was later changed to something else. This would go from it having complete control of the facility and only the facility to basically having the player prevent a gray-goo scenario by blowing up the entire facility and destroying the panels that the AI had been using to control the world.
Much like in Portal, after activation the AI killed everyone in the facility, however, instead of flooding it with neurotoxin as in Portal, the AI just locked most of the doors preventing people from leaving the facility. This could've been communicated better, with skulls and bones showing up as you went further into the facility, but ultimately it's possible the AI simply went through and got rid of most of them. There was also a scrapped idea to have people surviving in the facility similar to Rattmann, but I decided against this because it didn't make sense for people to be surviving 20+ years underground without some sort of life support.
During the map, the AI starts out deactivated, either because several vital systems had gone down in the years since it was first turned on, or because someone was able to actually get in and deactivate it, don't remember if I ever thought that through beyond "make the player activate the AI after seeing behind the facility like in Portal 2". and the actual ending of the map was never implemented. It would've likely been forcing the player to activate several buttons and perform parkour to reach those areas, but due to a variety of factors the map never was finished. (More on this later)
NEPAI used a variety of different mapmaking techniques, from custom map-arts and armor stands to player heads and simple command blocks. NEPAI taught me a lot about making maps, much of which I haven't used since. Sure, I've used player heads occasionally to help my builds, but aside from that I've done very little. I haven't played Minecraft much either as a whole after the cancelation of NEPAI, to be honest, and when I did it was on much earlier versions, meaning I missed out on using many of the techniques I learned.
NEPAI came to an unfortunate end after I had a falling out with a person who I had invited to playtest the map. That, a lack of interest in continuing to play Minecraft/work on the map, and generally wanting to work on other creative pursuits would mean that NEPAI would never release in a completed state. NEPAI took at least 2 years to build, and ultimately while it's a shame that nothing ever came of it, sometimes I'm glad I didn't end up releasing it properly, as it likely would've released to little to no fanfare, something that would've likely really gotten to me at the time.
The map can be downloaded here, for those who may want to experience it. This isn't the most recent version, but it's the version I had on hand. For a video lets play where I largely shit on the map, you can find that below.