Retain

Retain is a survival Minecraft server that has kept the same world running for five years. The brief was a website that feels as much a part of the server as spawn does: a home for news, the team and the wiki, and a coin store that players can trust with their money.

The visual identity was built around the new Retain logo — a dark, plum-toned "graveyard arcade" look with chunky black outlines, hard offset shadows and buttons that press down like blocks. The whole site changes with the calendar: winter, spring, summer and autumn each bring their own palette and falling particles, switching automatically on the right date.

The store is the commercial heart of the project. Players browse coin packs with flash deals and a live purchase feed, keep a cart that follows them across every page, and pay through Stripe. The moment a payment clears, a Go backend queues the delivery for a server plugin that hands the coins over in-game — even if the player is offline at the time — and sends a branded receipt email that matches the site.

Behind the public site sits a separate admin panel with two-factor authentication for managing news, the wiki, store packs, staff applications and deliveries. The stack ships as Docker containers behind Cloudflare with an automated GitHub Actions deployment and an IP-gated maintenance mode, so the team could build in public view without anyone stumbling onto an unfinished page.