The Dystopian Conundrum

It started its life as a concept for a competition entry.

I was taking part in the Renderosity Pin-Up contest and the idea was to create a Dystopian themed pin-up but rather than just doing an image I had an idea to do something a little more than that. My idea at the time was for the image to be either a wanted poster or maybe a propaganda poster for the partisan side of the conflict.

I spent a few days sketching out ideas and got to work creating a character to be the subject for the entry and Robyn or at least a basic version of her was born. But from there things escalated quite a lot and quickly.

As I was creating the first draft, I had an idea about two kids from opposite sides of the war meeting and having to both protect each other and work together to survive a civil war. This idea kept moving and morphing until the basic idea for a Dystopian fiction was born.

Now of all the genres that I could have chosen to write a story about, there are none that I understand less than dystopian fiction. I’ve seen Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent etc but I didn’t want something like that, I wanted more of a break of near future society/civil war scenario rather than the big evil/post apocalypse kind of deal.

Thankfully I know a few people who do like this genre of fiction, so I started asking them what it is about dystopian stories that they truly like and started some basic drafts based on them. Additionally, around 40 percent of Islands was told/set in a game that was fairly close to the kind of scenario I wanted for the story, in a way I get to harvest the experience from a failed story to fuel a new one, which I’m pretty happy about.

While this was taking place I thought in greater depth about the character that would be partnering Robyn. I decided that I wanted a fair age difference between them, so I decided that while Robyn would be late/mid teen the character at her side would be much younger, maybe 8 or 9 years old. The idea being that while Robyn is almost an adult but mentally and realistically still a child but by comparison to her partner she would feel and have to act like an adult.

I set about creating Virika, the 8/9 year old that would be beside her, Virika is a quite slender character, I wanted her to be directly exhibiting the signs of sustained exposure to a turbulent world. She is quite malnourished and very emaciated when Robyn first encounters her scrambling amongst the rubble of the city.

While creating Virika, I set to work laying out the basic premise of the story and adding in things from other genres that I wanted to incorporate into the mix. I have always liked the weird and wacky machines from Steam, Diesel and Cyberpunk, so I wanted to have elements from those incorporated into the story. Mainly the big walker type machines and drones, I wanted to bring those in so not only would they be running from soldiers, there will also be these massive machines as active elements too. I have done some basic sketches for some of the machines, but need to do some more detailed ones for some of the more extensively seen and used machines before then committing to trying to model some of them. So if anyone can give a good insight on how best to model this kind of machine, any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

Robyn initially was designed (even if by accident) to be like a face of a resistance or partisan army and I wanted to keep that element for the story. Where Robyn is quite directly involved in actively recruiting and promoting the resistance.Fundamentally I want the story to be more like a systematic corporate takeover of a nation rather than a direct plunge into war, where progressive application of pressure and corruption caused the country to descend into civil war. Additionally I decided that I wanted to use a deck of cards system, similar to the ones the US used in the Iraqi war. Where high ransoms are offered along diplomatic immunity in some cases for the capture of high value cards. Which leads to a continual battle of trust, even amongst the resistance themselves, where people can easily be persuaded to betray everyone for the right price.

This still left me with a role to fill for Virika’s side of the story, I decided that having her be the child of a high ranking member of the oppressive regime would give me the dynamic I wanted. Where Robyn finds herself discovering Virika (or V as Robyn often calls her) scrambling through the rubble of the city and finds herself having to protect a child she so deeply wants to hate. The basic premise is to tell a story of how conflict and war distorts and steals innocence from those trapped within, especially when they happen to be children.

The story is going to be told retrospectively and live but I want it to feel like a diary but of course one that has the feel of being told by someone potentially only 15 or 16 years old, so there will be no thesaurus for this one!.