Ghorfa, Website and language

Ghorfa was a guild of people playing Sand People from Tatooine. Yes, those Sand People. They would show up in places there shouldn’t be Sand People and get bystanders involved (think, flash mob of Sand People…).

This website was built around the invision forum system, which has an interesting dichotomy — you can’t change the files directly, but you can replace every image in the default templates and insert javascript into the base that would appear on every page. So really, if you are clever about it, you have nearly total control over the site, but you have to work around what’s already there without changing it.

That’s my favorite, because it forces me to think through new ways of doing things that I might otherwise take for granted.

Of all the game sites I’ve done, I think this one might be the most visually fun. I ran around for about an hour on Tatooine to get screenshots, and then pulled elements out of them to make all of the icons, the background, the buttons, the colors.

Alongside the visual elements, I picked up the language that was considered “canon” and expanded on it as we went, giving the Sand People an actual language to communicate in that others couldn’t follow unless they learned it from us as we went.

Koroght Uli-akhu, Ootman!