Oh my word, it feels so good to be telling stories again instead of just building websites. Remember last weekend when I posted about the interactive narrative and the video game pitch that were due this week? Well, thirty-odd drawings, at least one 4-hours-of-sleep night and a new URL later, I’ve got both little projects more or less out the door. Well, at least for now.

Goldworld is the video game project. I’ve made a short trailer of sketches associated with it which I need to recut and upload this weekend – I’ll make another post when that goes up. I’m not 100% certain where it should go on geoffreylong.com. Probably ‘miscellaneous’, until I get enough other game projects to warrant their own silo.
Goldworld begins when seven of the largest cities on the planet suddenly vanish, leaving nothing but giant smooth-sided shafts leading down into the earth. Three types of people go to investigate – the military, fortune-seekers and vigilantes bent on finding out what happened to their loved ones and beating the snot of out those responsible… But none of them expect what they find down there.
There’s an old crypto-history/folklore/whatever concept that there are giant electromagnetic currents crisscrossing the world called ley lines, and where they intersect people are naturally drawn – and that’s where humans build their cities. I took that idea and grafted it onto the old Cortez-era legend of the Seven Cities of Gold and wondered, what if the seven cities of gold were underground? What if they were beneath our major cities? What if they decided to come back?
The result is an idea for a limited online-enabled RPG with touches of Mayan and Aztec flavor smooshed onto something like World of Warcraft. We’ll see what happens with this – the class is voting on game ideas next week. It’s funny. If nothing else, this has proven to me that I’m an artist and a storyteller first and foremost. To me, I just want the ability to go running around in these worlds kind of like Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy or World of Warcraft. My favorite moments in WoW are when you stop running around killing things and just look up at the majesty of the stars, or when your breath is taken away by the beauty of the landscape. I want to build a world with that kind of beauty but with, you know, a plot. So yes. Maybe there’s a place for me in the game world, but I’m still fantasizing about being paid by people to sit in my barn studio back in Ohio and leave the programming to the programmers and game mechanics to the game, um, mechanics.

One type of interactive narrative I can build with my current skillset, though, is something akin to Ghost Train. I’ve only posted the first “chapter” of the story (which is, alas, all there is at the moment) but this is the story that these two come from. Please do swing by and let me know what you think – the story’s up at www.ghost-train.net. When you get to the interactive bits, click on the adjacent squares on the map to get around.
Right. Now, for the rest of the weekend, there’s all the bits I didn’t get to last weekend, plus all the new stuff. Wish me luck!