Contest and Character Design

I recently participated in a game writing contest (my first) that included a character design alongside a short cinematic script of 2–3 pages. The prompt was post-apocalyptic, and we had one week to write a scene and design a character.

The character I created was a young physicist named Emma Derey. At 25, I discovered she was the lead science officer in a brutalistic, industrial city run by a large corporation, inheriting the role from her physicist father. She also happens to be, aside from prodigious in her field, five months pregnant. Thus, immediate stakes are balanced against her multifaceted responsibilities and intellectual formidability.

Still, I didn’t feel particularly inspired by my entry. I’d more or less forced my way through it. But treating the entry as a practice in observing fundamentals, the project became an exercise in crafting a complete mini-story, something self-contained, conflict-focused, but suggestive of a larger world. Even if the result felt a bit rote or compressed, I tried to ensure the details at least were somewhat drawn in, and that I'd put an appropriate amount of time and effort into the design. In the brief time I spent developing her story, I became rather fond of her.

So, in a somewhat self-promoting spirit, I wanted to share her here rather than let the design end up forgotten in some folder on my hard drive.

Below is the original design document and the script, which includes background on the character and a list of 20 barks in sheet format (per the contest requirements). It’s still in its raw form and hasn’t been meaningfully revised.

LOG 7 _ The Convoy .pdf

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