Cold Sun's Dawn Website

As an avid fan and player of the MMORPG Guild Wars 2, I tend to express my creativity and imagination with writing characters and stories within that fictional universe. Over time, the amount of characters and stories grew to be a lot of manage, so I decided "why not build a website dedicated to them all?"

The Cold Sun's Dawn website is dedicated to the fictional guild I created within the game, which most, if not all of my characters in that universe are a member of. It serves to catalogue all of their biographies, histories, and stories together.

coldsunsdawn.carrd.co

The website was built with Carrd.co, an app site that allows users to design their own responsive, one-page websites using their editor. While I didn't have to worry about HTML, CSS, or Bootstrap, having a background in front-end web development has given me a keen eye on designing the user experience of the site. Shabby website design is obvious even when using website builder app sites, and not even they can cover that up. It takes an experienced designer to be able to effectively use these tools to build a site that maximizes a user's potential interest. Even if the subject matter may not be that interesting to a user (Guild Wars 2 fan stories and characters certainly is a very specific niche), the design is compelling enough to draw their attention to its polish and refinement.

Graphic design played an important role in the aesthetic of the site. I wanted the site to be reflective of the values of the in-game fictional guild; representative of my characters in their struggles to overcome the game's antagonists. A slightly tarnished sun logo represents the symbolic idea of a fading peace, but the hope that it will rise and shine again.

Each character has their own separate page on the website, containing personal information, background history, combat style, role in the guild, and more. With each section also comes personalized icons that give each character their own unique flair and flourish. Continuing to be mindful of a character's personality when designing the emotive feel enveloping their individual page (and their thumbnail!) is always a fun pet project. For example, Fjorst Laursson is a warrior that's holds a high spiritual regard to a dragon spirit. His page is styled around that belief.

The Cold Sun's Dawn website is a nice central repository that not only lets me practice my narrative writing skills in forging stories for the characters in this game world, but also flex my UX and graphic design skills to temper the site's overall feeling with a sense of welcoming invitation and intrique.

Writing stories, backgrounds, personalities, and plot lines isn't such a simple feat either. It takes an intricate understanding of the game world's lore and knowledge. Meticulous care is taken to make sure that every fine-tuned aspect of every story, character background, personality, etc., makes sense with the lore, or, if not, provides a dang good reason why. If there are only six existing human gods in the fictional world of the game, then it doesn't exactly make much sense to claim that there's a "hidden" seventh one, does it? That's not good writing, especially not to an established and widely beloved series such as Guild Wars. Cross-referencing information and researching in-game dialogue or quest entries is a must when working on writing accurate and lore-friendly entries, even to fan creations.