Copyright: Ogardonix
Once again, I asked you on twitter what you wanted to read about Judith Gyrran this week and your reply was, that you wanted to know, how the project came to be.
The first idea for Judith Gyrran came to me, when I watched Barbarella for the first time, while being drunk. Pretty unspectacular, I know. I followed that up with a few episodes of Buffy – The Vampire Slayer and a tiny idea of a science fiction heroine popped up in my brain. I wrote some notes on it and worked on other projects for a while.
But I kept coming back to it, changing the basic concept, adding more details and giving it a small plot outline. Very early on I decided that the story is best told in an episodic format. Since I was working on a fairly long science fiction novel at the time, that seemed to be the best approach for me, but I never came around to write it, since I didn’t feel that a book would be the best format for that story.
It was at that moment, that Christian Biever from Ogardonix approached me with his idea to create a Choose your own Adventure videogame. I was already working on Ralin: Dwarf Wars at that moment, gathering first experiences as a videogame writer, so I was totally up for this. An episodic Visual Novel would be a great fit for Judith Gyrran, I thought.
So I sat down and put more work into the concept. One of the most defining ideas was, that I wanted to create a heroine everyone could identify with. I looked for James Bond and Doctor Who for some inspiration and decided that a heroine who could change their look drastically between episodes would be the best way to achieve this. I was fascinated by a character, that could change very drastically during the storyline. It would also make it easier to tackle topics of racial diversity, so I was all for it!
The basic plot for the first episode was ready fast and during the writing of it, I developed the entire plot for the season of six episodes. There are many details that were filled in later and are still being filled in, but overall, the plot structure is complete. Episode 1 is making great progress and episode 2 is already in early development now.
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Sven Wohl 