Judas developers Ghost Story Games discuss the origins of its main character

Hi everyone. It’s been a few months since our first dev log. We’re balancing time between working on the game and sharing our progress. Today, we wanted to give you a look at the creative process with some key members of the development team who have shaped the game.

Creating a “Judas Simulator”

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

“The project began with us wanting to tell stories that are less linear, that react to the player and unfold in ways that no one’s ever seen in one of Ken’s games. That told us a lot up front about what we’d 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’t even a set protagonist — just sort of a cipher, a blank slate.

Eventually, 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.”
– Drew Mitchell, Lead Narrative Designer

“I often come up with ideas when I’m 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.

I only eat at vending machines, because I don’t like interacting with waiters. Restaurants are more complicated: there are greetings and “hellos” and “Is this table okay?” And I’m thinking, “Why should I care what you recommend? You’re not me!” But I’m not supposed to say that, so I just have to count the seconds until the interaction can end, devise socially acceptable ways of saying “Go f*** yourself.” Because for me, conversation is a prelude to failure. Vending machines never ask me a question that I don’t know the answer to. The exchange is reduced to the transaction: money in, product out. Why can’t people be more like that?”
– Ken Levine, Studio President & Creative Director

Caption: Judas Concept Art

This stream of consciousness became the touchstone we kept coming back to for the character and ultimately the entire game. “Judas,” as she came to be known, understands machines in a way she can never understand people. That became her greatest strength… and greatest weakness. We put her in a science fiction world, a colony ship filled with robots — a futuristic setting that makes someone like her extremely powerful. But it’s 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 — a Judas. That tension at the heart of the character came to inform everything about the game, which we stopped thinking of as an FPS and started calling a “Judas Simulator.” Everything comes back to that core idea of you interacting with the world as Judas.

“Where I think Judas differs the most from BioShock or BioShock Infinite is right there in the name. The 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’s at the center of the events that set the story in motion. She’s got history with this world and the people in it — most 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.

It’s 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’s been great to see testers stop and ask themselves, “What would Judas do here? How would she react?” It shows they’re in conversation with the character and taking her and the journey seriously.”
– Drew Mitchell, Lead Narrative Designer

The Mayflower

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’s 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’s changed immensely since its departure.

“At the beginning of its journey, it was a more practical, conventional, modular starship. But over the course of its mission, due to conflict between factions of people and ideals, it’s changed into what you see now. And we’re 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’s 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.

This allows players to act as a sort of historian and architect as they explore the Mayflower. Through uncovering more, you’ll make increasingly informed decisions with the story and characters on your journey.”
– Nathan Phail-Liff, Studio Art Director

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.

“We basically identify the puzzle pieces and buckets of content that we want to make up the setting of the Mayflower. One example is living quarters. We don’t just have one type of space — we 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 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 “Stairway to Hell” to get to them — separating these spaces both visually and physically.”
– Karen Segars, Lead Artist

In our previous games we would do all of this by hand, but that doesn’t allow for the dynamism we are chasing. So, we took on this challenge of teaching the system how to be a storyteller and an interior decorator, creating a ruleset that we trust so it can populate the world in believable, compelling ways that allow for reactivity in a way you’ve never seen in our previous games.

Would you kindly?

We would love to know what you would like to read more about in future Dev Logs. So please, let us know on our socials or through email what you’re most interested in about Judas and how we’re creating it.