Do you know who is the most listened to musician on Youtube, perhaps the whole internet? No, not Bieber, Beyonce or that catchy Dispacito thing. No, it's Kevin Macleod. You may not know the name, but go to his website incompetech.com and you will find nearly every background tune from every vlog or amateur video, and plenty of professional ads, too. Very simply, Kevin lets people use his vast library of compositions for their projects, royalty free, and that may have made him one of the biggest assets to amateur creatives since, well, Youtube.
My thought was, could that be extended to other things? We have royalty free models and code floating around, and game engines and graphics software are moving into open source or amateur-friendly EULAs bit by bit. I want to try to provide something similar for the story side of things. Plenty creative people seem to look for writers to write stories for their games, comics, whathaveyou. Why not do it like Macleod and create a story universe for people to freely use?
So I created Embassy of Time... a few years ago. Yeah, life ain't easy, and things take time. But I recently finished the second draft of the first (free) big story, one that stretches across time and space, and across genres, from spy thriller to occult cyberpunk to historical intrigue and more. Hint: It's about time travel.
While I work on the next major draft, the second one is currently here. It's a story about how a young girl in a small town gets entangled in a war across time and space, and the second draft is close enough to the final story that I feel like reaching out to other creatives about it. Need a background story for your historical RTS? Have Embassy factions duke it out and focus on your programming rather than scouting for affordable writers. Got a space horror FPS style you want, but need a backdrop for it? The first chapter is set at the destruction of Earth as dark forces descend on the galaxy. Need a story setting for spies to chase a McGuffin in a mystery game? There's... well, you get the idea.
This is something I have never seen really attempted before. Shared writing universes, yes, but I am designing this universe and its stories specifically to help new creatives have something to build on (which, btw, includes writers; people can write stories based on this, if they want). If you want a free and deep background story for your game or other project, one that ties it subtly (or not so subtly!) to a bigger, (hopefully soon) recognizable story universe, let me know, I will work with you and learn what I can do to suit the third draft even better to people's needs.
Sincerely, Henry.
