Developer Diaries: One Day in London #2
In the second issue of the development diaries, the OWL-studio team shares how they worked on one of the main characters of the visual novel One Day in London.
The story of the Many-faced Harry is an internal meme of the studio.
There was a time when we were actively looking for a screenwriter. The person we started with couldn’t continue working on the project. Finding a replacement turned out to be unexpectedly difficult: we sorted through a huge number of candidates.
The plot of the story and the main characters were determined by our first screenwriter. When we finally found our “Golden Feather”, Ilya Nekrich, the story continued its development, but a lot had to be changed.
Creativity does not tolerate outside interference. Ilya created the story from scratch, retaining the main idea and part of the events from the original version. Some heroes have changed their names, some have changed their character.
Harry was originally conceived as an adventurer and a rake, a frivolous but cheerful character. He got involved in occult stories out of pure interest – and infected his best friend, Jeremy, with this interest.
When Ilya came to the novel, Harry’s life and image changed dramatically. He became the way we know him now – a veteran warrior, honest, sarcastic and sometimes tough. This is the only character whose image had to be completely redrawn – he desperately did not fit into the new concept.
But old Harry was nice to the team, we really didn’t want to leave him alone to vegetate in the archives. That’s how Charles Nesh appeared. He is just like the original Harry in many ways – except that frivolity has given way to roguery, and fun has given way to impudence. According to the character of the hero, we made him a burning brunette and dressed him in a catchy suit.
The players have yet to get to know Charles properly in the third episode. In the Order, many joke about the fact that these two are like two sides of the same coin, twin brothers, but Harry hates these jokes.
