Plot | Art | Music | History Rambling
fair warning: this page is going to be kinda just ambient blind rambling rather than anything actually meaningful

Our history and the way Campfire Stories interacted with it is rather complex, especially with us still growing up throughout the time we were developing it.(we started working on CFS at the age of 15 in 2019!)
Generally speaking, the timeline is as follows:

Sometime in 2018, we (and someone we used to know) started coming up with ideas for a sorta jokey UNDERTALE AU, which would be called "NOLOGIC". A few ideas we had for this would stick around for a little while, such as the general "plot" of the game, and some character designs. To give the absolute bare minimum amount of context (because this whole project was kinda embarassing), Temmie and Toby were this AU's Sans and Papyrus. ...Their designs basically directly caused Ember's design. Of note are:

  • skirt (taken from Temmie's design) changed from alternating yellow-blue to orange
  • Toby's hoodie (which was just sans's hoodie but red)
  • Instead of being a Tem or a Dog, Ember would be a Wolf, and would have Temmie's hair but brown and with bangs covering one eye because it was easier to draw it like that
  • Later in life Ember's hoodie would recieve a logo on the chest of her hoodie (this has since been replaced with a purple and yellow heart)

...yes, that's essentially it. there were no other major changes to the design lol

But anyways back on track, in late 2018 CFS would start trying to be written, but to no avail, as we couldn't really write like, At All back then, and the project kept falling apart for reasons we would rather not go into.

In 2019 we would actually begin focusing on figuring out what CFS would even be. (yes, our "dream project" STILL didn't even have a plan yet. genius!), and eventually we would settle on this weird story about Ember being contacted by this weird like, cyclops demon guy (named Sparkplug, iirc?) through a mirror??? and then Ember would have to help him and his team infiltrate a castle to take down The Bad Guy. Believe it or not, this was not us trying to take Deltarune's concept and run with it, we legitimately just were that uncreative

Around 2020, we would have an unusual dream that would begin the ACTUAL ideas for CFS, where Dunes (Sparkplug's replacement) would come to Ember's world, instead of the other way around, and right before Dunes's arrival there would be some kind of mass flooding that happened and Zoe would have this weird like. Apartment Complex themed boat that everyone would survive the flooding on??? and the whole story would kinda just take place on said boat for like The Majority Of It, but there wasn't even actually a planned story for this, so it was kinda just the concept of an idea at this time.

In 2021, not much would really change, other than the boat plotline becoming less of a prominent part of the story, and the flooding would be like, the main "problem" of the story, rather than the setting. Eventually there's an idea for like, "a mirror multiverse" that starts leaking into Ember's universe and Dunes appears and Ember's like "well okay this is weird but i'm fine with that", and then there's TWO MORE DUNESES THAT APPEAR (one that's purple (lake), one that's yellow (ogden)) and so the four of them (along with Zoe) try to figure out how to get these "Mirrors" (species, i guess) back to their homeworlds??? Things started going off the rails with this one honestly.

2022 rolls around, that "mirror multiverse" idea evolves into them trying to fight against the mirror multiverses from invading??? because Mirrors Are Evil Now I Guess??? but the three aforementioned mirrors (Dunes, Ogden, Lake) are Good Ones, Actually??? This one just outright Sucks. Thank FUCK this never went anywhere. After that we went back to the drawing board, and eventually came up with this idea where Zoe's dad would be like, a billionaire and would unintentionally cause the end of the world, and Ember Dunes (who is just Here, For Some Reason) and Zoe are tasked with figuring out how to stop the world from ending, but oops actually the story is canonically within another universe and it's Ember writing the story and the game crashes and Dunes is like. a virus on Ember's computer that just berates Ember for being a bad writer??? What.

Knock knock, it's 2023! Campfire Stories stops existing as a story, and is converted back to "the concept of an idea" because we kinda hated the way All of these ideas were going. CFS now is nothing more than a codename for a new project, which would initially be called "CFS: Dream Expedition", implying a series of short stories in game form. But, as expected, the CFS naming (and multiple-stories idea) would be dropped, and the one story so far would just be known as "The Dream Museum Project". It would kinda weirdly keep the CFS abbreviation for it just because it was "expected" of us to (by ourselves, mind you). This idea, too, would never get past the general "i've got an idea, i swear!" phase.

Then comes 2024, CFS would kinda just... stop existing entirely at this point, being nothing more than a memory of the past outside of some vague ideas plotted on paper once-in-a-blue-moon, primarily due to some complicated issues that happened in our life around this time.

Finally, 2025 arrives. CFS is brought back as, well, these pages on our website! We refined the story to the key ideas, and built out from there, FINALLY having an idea we're actually happy with. You can check out the Plot page for more details on that.

For better or for worse, Campfire Stories kinda indirectly caused our entire modern existence, as a LOT of things thought up during its creation (such as Ember herself) would go on to influence many aspects of our life. Most notably, Emby's design and name! ...technically Ruby's too for a while, as Ruby was temporarily "Dunes (Headmate)" in a really weird and confusing way that's way too complex to go into here??? But aside from headmates, CFS would also cause us to get into making music and art, too!