{"id":701907,"date":"2025-12-03T15:55:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T12:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/judas-developer-log-discusses-origins-of-main-character\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T15:55:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T12:55:10","slug":"judas-developer-log-discusses-origins-of-main-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/judas-developer-log-discusses-origins-of-main-character\/","title":{"rendered":"Judas developer log discusses origins of main character"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ghost Story Game<\/a>s has published the second developer log<\/a> for single-player, narrative first-person shooter Judas<\/em>, which dives deeper into the game\u2019s creative process and ideas that led to the creation of main character Judas, as well as shares a few seconds of new footage. <\/p>\n

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Creating a \u201cJudas Simulator\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

People often think our games start with the story, but we pretty much always start with a core design element. In BioShock<\/em>, it was the Big Daddy and Little Sister bond. In Infinite<\/em>, it was the companion character, Elizabeth. In Judas, it\u2019s the dynamic narrative. We asked ourselves, \u201cHow do we tell a fully realized story where the characters can respond in real time to even the smallest choices the player makes?\u201d Figuring out how to do that on a systemic level took many years. Eventually, the pieces formed around our main character, Judas.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe project began with us wanting to tell stories that are less linear, that react to the player and unfold in ways that no one\u2019s ever seen in one of Ken\u2019s games,\u201d said\u00a0Judas<\/em> lead narrative designer Drew Mitchell. \u201cThat told us a lot up front about what we\u2019d need: namely, characters with strong, competing objectives, who each had a stake in everything the player did. Starting with that framework, we spent a lot of time thinking about those characters, their conflicts, the right setting to force them all together, and the systems underpinning it all. For a long time, there wasn\u2019t even a set protagonist\u2014just sort of a cipher, a blank slate.<\/p>\n

\u201cEventually, the story and world started to coalesce into something specific, and we needed to figure out who the player character should be. As a rule, you want to put your heroes in the last place they ever want to find themselves. So, what kind of person would really struggle to deal with all these relationships and warring interests? And I remember that was the point where Ken came up with this monologue that kicked everything off.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ghost Story Games studio president and Judas<\/em> creative director Ken Levine said, \u201cI often come up with ideas when I\u2019m out on runs, and one day I thought of this speech that would define this character that we were trying to figure out. This speech popped my in my head as I was struggling through the third mile.<\/p>\n

\u201cI only eat at vending machines, because I don\u2019t like interacting with waiters. Restaurants are more complicated: there are greetings and \u2018hellos\u2019 and \u2018Is this table okay?\u2019 And I\u2019m thinking, \u2018Why should I care what you recommend? You\u2019re not me!\u2019 But I\u2019m not supposed to say that, so I just have to count the seconds until the interaction can end, devise social<\/a>ly acceptable ways of saying, \u2018Go f*** yourself.\u2019 Because for me, conversation is a prelude to failure. Vending machines never ask me a question that I don\u2019t know the answer to. The exchange is reduced to the transaction: money in, product out. Why can\u2019t people be more like that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Judas Concept Art<\/em><\/p>\n

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This stream of consciousness became the touchstone we kept coming back to for the character and ultimately the entire game. \u201cJudas,\u201d as she came to be known, understands machines in a way she can never understand people. That became her greatest strength\u2026 and greatest weakness. We put her in a science<\/a> fiction world, a colony ship filled with robots\u2014a futuristic setting that makes someone like her extremely powerful. But it\u2019s also a world where personal success hinges on how well you can conform to the rules, because dissent would lead to the failure of the mission. That makes her an outlaw, a pariah\u2014a Judas. That tension at the heart of the character came to inform everything about the game, which we stopped thinking of as a first-person shooter and started calling a \u201cJudas Simulator.\u201d Everything comes back to that core idea of you interacting with the world as Judas.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere I think Judas<\/em> differs the most from BioShock<\/em> or BioShock Infinite<\/em> is right there in the name,\u201d said Mitchell. \u201cThe game is named after her. Booker and Jack were strangers in a strange land, just like the player. Judas is a native of the Mayflower. In fact, she\u2019s at the center of the events that set the story in motion. She\u2019s got history with this world and the people in it\u2014most of it very, very bad. Her story is about so much more than getting off a sinking ship, and it gives the player so many ways to determine how her journey plays out.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always a risk to hand the player a really defined, really vocal character to control. You always worry about creating dissonance between them. So, it\u2019s been great to see testers stop and ask themselves, \u2018What would Judas do here? How would she react?\u2019 It shows they\u2019re in conversation with the character and taking her and the journey seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Mayflower<\/strong><\/p>\n

We want to communicate this world as best we can, not only through lore, but visually. A unique challenge in creating our colony ship setting, is that it\u2019s a much older space to craft for player exploration. Rapture and Columbia existed as they were from their foundings. But the Mayflower is decades into its voyage, and it\u2019s changed immensely since its departure.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the beginning of its journey, it was a more practical, conventional, modular starship,\u201d said Ghost Story Games studio art director Nathan Phail-Liff. \u201cBut over the course of its mission, due to conflict between factions of people and ideals, it\u2019s changed into what you see now. And we\u2019re working on communicating this through the environment. Like with any city with significant history, if you start digging up the street, you would find layers of the city\u2019s past. Older eras of street long buried, forgotten, and built over by the roads upon which you now walk. With the Mayflower as a generational starship, we want to imbue this world with the same sense of time, history, and credibility; this is a civilization that went through eras of conflict and rebirth. And having the characters and the architecture of the world reflect those layers of the onion is a powerful mechanism for visual storytelling.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis allows players to act as a sort of historian and architect as they explore the Mayflower. Through uncovering more, you\u2019ll make increasingly informed decisions with the story and characters on your journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another factor in creating this setting is that the world itself is dynamic, not just the story and characters. Just like with the dynamic narrative, we had to train the system on what makes good environments by using sophisticated tagging and rulesets to populate the world with believable design elements.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe basically identify the puzzle pieces and buckets of content that we want to make up the setting of the Mayflower,\u201d said\u00a0Judas<\/em> lead artist Karen Segars. \u201cOne example is living quarters. We don\u2019t just have one type of space\u2014we have different categories: VIP Pilgrim Quarters, Regular Pilgrim Dorms, all the way down to Violator Quarters. The art team creates the set pieces and materials for each of these quarters and the design team does deep dives on how all those pieces can fit together in a variety of layouts that feel grounded for the theme<\/a> and support gameplay. When assembling the layouts in game, the system has to understand the various buckets of puzzle pieces and the hierarchy of the content so it can stitch it together in a meaningful way that supports the storytelling. More exclusive and fancier places can have high ceilings, giant windows, and grand lobbies. But the Violator space is in the lower, grungy, underbelly of the ship and you have to take what we call the \u201cStairway to Hell\u201d to get to them\u2014separating these spaces both visually and physically.\u201d<\/p>\n