The ultimate goal of the Gaia Stories is to allow Gaians to create their own stories and games. I hope that I can take this feature to that state as soon as possible.
With the even out of the way, let me continue telling the story of Gaia.
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It was the year 2002. The internet bubble had popped, the economy was in terrible shape, millions of workers were out of the job, and there I was, hanging out with my pals, lounging around playing games all day. The woes of the word was but a faint echo around us.
But even though I was having the time of my life, very soon I was feeling restless. Part of me that need to work was itching to get something productive going. At this point the studio had been producing comics for 2 years, and the dwindling comic book market had proven it difficult to make a living off publishing comics. So every week the 5 of us would gather and talk about potential projects we can do together. After all, we got rent to pay, and my savings ain't gonna last forever.
Ideas range from starting a publishing company to help new artists publish comics, to building one of those illegal manga reading sites such as Manga Rock. A lot of ideas got bounced around, but nothing had stuck.
Then on one faithful night of October 22nd, me, CP, and L0cke were out skateboarding, and we came up with the core idea for Gaia. To clarify, it was L0cke who was skateboarding, me and CP were just posing on our skateboards learning how to ollie. smile
On that night, we figured that since we spent so much time playing Ragnarok Online, wouldn't it be great if we have our own RPG game where we don't need to spend time grinding and leveling up, but instead all our time would be spent chatting and making friends, and that activity would be the reward for getting loot?
The idea felt like a home run. Not because we thought it was some great business idea, but we just thought of all the cool settings, characters, and stories we can design as a team. It was the first idea where every single one of us could contribute greatly, and it's a product that we all would love to play. We were so excited about the idea, we just kept brainstorming for ideas until 5 in the morning. We woke up at 11am the next day, and I took everyone to city hall to register a company to make everything official. We didn't have a name for the new project, so we called our company "Anime Headquarters" as a placeholder.
Finally we had a project where everyone of us could put our talents to good use, and every night we would be designing every aspect of the new site.
Initially we wanted Gaia to have a fantasy setting, mimicking an RPG game. There would be all the basic classes such as knights, thieves, mage, and clerics. Saka quickly churn out designs for all of these classes. Though as time passed, we realized that we shouldn't be confined to one genre. Our goal was to provide as much self expression as possible, and to L0cke's words, "we should be able to be a robot if we want to". Hence we started changing the idea behind Gaia to be a world that is based on fantasy and reality.
Gaia became a world that is born by a fantasy world that was created when a fantasy world was transported and crash landed on earth.
We planned for a couple of towns for Gaia. Starting with Barton town. Named after a local bridge called Dumbarton Bridge near where we lived. We wanted a friendly name that rolls off the tongue easy. Initially we went with Patton, named after the fan sitting in the living room, and L0cke even sketched this town with a giant fan rotating on top, but ultimately Barton sounded more like a city name than a person's name.
Then we wanted a resort and gambling town, out came Gambino. We loved the name because it sounds like gambling, and there's also the famous Gambino crime family that makes good material for our storyline.
Opposite of the common town would be the high end Durem town. This name was completely made up, we just wanted something that no one can recognize yet sounds higher class.
And lastly we knew we would have a town dedicated to housing and building furniture, so we named it Aekea. This one was simple, as everyone is familiar with Ikea.
Eventually we ditched all our ideas for character classes and built out NPC for the Gaia world. We started with Rina and Leon, which were the most stereotypical NPC. We often joke about them being the first 2 NPC that you meet in any RPG game, with the job of telling you the name of the town you visit. Ian, Moira, Sasha, Edmund, and Vanessa were all characters we selected form a huge list of different designs and names. We had endless nights where we brainstorm on the personalities that best represent which town. Perhaps the most fun of the creation of Gaia was the creation of its characters.
At this point we still didn't have a name for our new site. We had ton of sketches being thrown around, and what we liked were names taken from Greek mythology. Names like Orion, Aries, and Apollo were grant and legendary sounding, and upon more research we found the perfect name - Gaia - the goddess of earth. Gaia.com was taken by some Yoga company, so we ended up with go-gaia.com.
After ideation was the gruling development cycle. Using my product management skillz I drew out this big chart showing how much time I was going to put on each feature, and estimated that it would take me 3 months to build Gaia Online version 1. It would contain the avatar system, inventory management, dress up page, barton boutique, a link list, plus integration with a forum and integration with registration system.
It was an extremely ambitious plan because the site would be written in a programming language I had no experience with, as well as using a database system that I never worked with. Though no challenges really mattered to me. We were completely pumped, and I was glued to my seat working 24/7, not allowing anything to get in my way.
I would literally code for 30 hours in a row, then craw to my bed in exhaustion, wake up 6 hours later, and keep going for another 30 hours. Rinse and repeat. I had no schedule on when I would sleep, and food is a matter of driving to the nearest fast food restaurant. I would think of nothing but programming issues as I got to sleep, and sometimes I would interrupt my sleep because I figured out a solution during my sleep, and I had run to my desk and code some more. Oh the power of youth!
Ever since I was a kid, I would hate sleeping. There would be times where I stay awake the entire night because I couldn't sleep, and during high school I would sleep for as little as I could because I was up playing with my computer, discovering new games or going online with my modem, discovering the world of online computing. Working on Gaia was the peak of my crazy sleep schedule.
There were many stumbling blocks that took days to resolve due to inexperience, and at the end, it took me almost 4 months to finally finish Gaia.
It was the morning on February 18th, 2003. I worked through the night as usual, L0cke was still asleep but I couldn't wait to open the site to the public. I went to OCAD, an online comic artist community which we helped host, and invited the community members to check out this new website that we just built. Soon I realized I made a terrible mistake, which was that I didn't reserve the accounts of other founders before opening Gaia to the public, so while me, CP and Vo have the first few user ID's, L0cke and Ling ended up with much larger user ID's, which Ling was very upset about. It's something I regret till this day. ^^;
About 150 new users joined Gaia that day. Overall, Gaia was very well received by our friends, who were all online artists.
Our goal for creating Gaia was simple - make a popular website, hopefully it woudl be popular enough that it can earn some ad revenue and help pay for our rent. That's it. If it can pay rent, then we can keep playing games all day or do whatever stupid s**t we did at the time. smile
Little did we know this project would do the complete opposite of giving us free time to play games. Oh how wrong we were!
-- end of part 3 --
Let me share with you all some early character designs that we never used:
