BakedOn Entertainment - Online Multiplayer Games » Game Design

Ghostees Writer’s Log: Background

thePuck — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:24:38 +0000

Greetings and Salutations!

Hiya, cats and kittens! I am the writer and class designer for Ghostees!, our upcoming MMORPG, and I just wanted to start out saying hello and that I hope you will enjoy Ghostees. We’re very excited to bring you this new game, and our developers are hard at work to bring you the very best gaming experience possible.

Today we are going to cover some of the background lore of the game, covering the Otherwhere and its connection to the human realm.

Otherwhere

The Otherwhere is a world that coexists with the normal human world, intersecting it at certain places and times but otherwise only perceivable through its influence. In the Otherwhere the dreams, fantasies, and beliefs of the human world are given form and life. As to whether they are given their existence from our dreams, or our dreams are caused by their existence…no one knows.

The Seasonal Realms

For some unknown reason, the cycle of existence of the human world and the Otherwhere are linked. Our seasons are linked to specific regions in the Otherwhere, and as our world goes through its changes the Otherwhere comes into and out of alignment with us. The alignments are closest at certain times, and these times have been traditionally called “holidays” by the humans barely aware of their origins. In the modern era we have forgotten their meaning, but the Seasonal Realms of the Otherwhere are still there, affecting us.

The Aisling

The Aisling, or “Dreams”, are the natives of the Otherwhere. They each express a theme or archetype called an Essence that defines the way they look, the personalities they have, and their abilities.

Essences

These are the living manifestations of our fascinations and stereotypes that have arisen over the course of human existence. We birth them from our minds, and they change as we change, but it is not a one-way street. Our worlds are interwoven, and if their nature changes, so too do our dreams, hopes, and fears. As they live or die, succeed or fail, so too does that realm of our imaginations.

The Autumn Realm

In the 21st Century world, human understanding of the Otherwhere and its seasonal influence has faded, only to be replaced by more “rational” explanations for the holidays. Where once the night of October 31 was a festival that acknowledge the power of death and the coming winter, it came to be a night of monsters, ghouls, pranks, and ghosts. The Autumn Realm followed suit and came to manifest as Halloween, with Aisling as old as dreaming itself remade as vampires, mummies, and witches.

Next Time:

Next time I will give you a sneak peak into the realm-spanning war between the Technocrat’s Great Plan and Grim Jack’s misfit crew of monsters, the Terata. Stay tuned!

Ghostees: First Textured Meshes Arrive

Tricky — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 17:19:24 +0000

For Ghostees, we are using Allied Studios to produce our artwork. Allied Studios has been a dream to work with. They produce AAA quality artwork for not just the mainstream industry but also self published independent developers. We only wanted the best artwork so Ghostees will be an appealing, fantastic world to hang out in and the folks over at Allied Studios really have the talent.

We received our character meshes a couple weeks ago but yesterday the first two textured characters arrived. The meshes were so well done that the characters and their details are easily distinguishable but I was frankly shocked and how great they look with high quality textures.

Ghostees: The Idea

Tricky — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 02:14:29 +0000

While discussing our mad scheme one afternoon, we started to brainstorm on ideas for our virtual world debut. We came up with several but we wanted something distinctly different. Halloween was coming up and the topic eventually turned to a virtual world based on this favorite holiday for many.

But won’t a Halloween based virtual world be too seasonal? We would be swarmed with players for a month and then we would have a ghost town on our hands…literally! I think there are kids out there that are sick of the sticky sweet worlds of Penguins and really want something different. True but how can we smooth out the inevitable spike we’ll see during the holiday?

Simple. Do all the major holidays as expansions. As a holiday approaches let’s build a road to connect the Halloween town to the Christmas town. People that don’t want to be ghosts can be elves. This also smoothes out the load across the year and hopefully appeals to a wide audience. Who doesn’t love holidays anyway?