Furcadia - The Making of Furcadia.com

What is shown throughout Furcadia.com today did not come easily; in fact, stages of preparation and discussion littered the minds of those involved with the redesign for months on end, before the actual design concepts even began to stir. Furcadia.com (originally designed by Marah~Fae Fireheart, then slightly redesigned by Ra'aya, Seraphiel, and Cameo), was in need of an extensive facelift and several issues were debated throughout several in-game meetings and e-mails. Our design team included three key figures: Lacklustre, the main artist for our dragon centerpiece and its corresponding Primes, Gar, who utilized his talents within 3D art and created our navigation buttons and manipulated the dragon's wings to fit properly within design, and Cameo, who was responsible for the web design concepts and implementation.

While these three figures were responsible for the majority of the design, it could not have been completed without the expertise of several others: Emerald Flame, for organizing this tremendous task, sanctimonious, for his critiquing and scripting assistance, Farrier, for his JavaScripiting concepts, Cironir, for writing the main introduction and several text-bits for the secondary pages, Shadowborn, for writing an extensive amount of the Prime-featured stories, Talzhemir, for her research with effective color theories, and everyone else who continues to make Furcadia possible.


Preparations for the main design were springing up quickly, and several previous designs were considered within the process. Several ideas were sloppily sketched out on paper, whenever they sprang to mind.	Original sketches and concepts are not always the most beautiful to map out, and many of us came to realize that we had a long road ahead of us. We began to simplify the previous Furcadia.com pages into sections, later depicted by rune symbols.	Soon, with the help of Talzhemir's research, we were able to divide our seven sections by specific, matching colors. We wanted Furcadia.com to be attractive and brilliantly colorful to the eye, thus a rainbow-like color scheme was incorporated.

Pressure began to build as Furcadia's debut in the first edition of Massive Online Gaming magazine crept up upon the design team. News of Furcadia would be printed within a magazine in less than a month, and concepts were still being documented and toiled with! Would it (or rather "could it") be finished in time? Luckily, it was! As excited readers piled to Furcadia.com, they were greeted with a fresh, new design.


While Lacklustre spent over seventy-hours on the showcased dragon, it was Cameo's responsibility to map out an appropriate design. After several layouts and a background color change later, there was success -- the anticipation and wait finally subsided: a layout was approved!	Gar busily worked on many ideas for both the navigation that is entangled upon the dragon's wing, but also the secondary, section-specific pages. The idea of vines was toyed with and eventually kept, for the secondary pages, to create a different feel. Finally, smoke was added, encircling the main navigation.	Above, shows our current design in action. Furcadia's community was stunned as they refreshed the old index page, only to find a completely redesigned look! Debuted first was the main index page, along with the credits and download page. Within the next few months, the divided sections were redesigned.

For nearly five months, the present Furcadia.com design was envisioned, planned, discussed, created, and implemented for all of Furcadia's community to enjoy. While the design itself was kept strictly secret from the public eye, due to our excitement and wish to dazzle the anticipations of the community, those creators involved share a special bond extracted from their dedication. Furcadia.com continues to attract players from all over the world, enticing them to download Furcadia -- it goes without saying, that the redesign was a phenomenal example of what Furcadia players can accomplish by working side-by-side.