The game is done. Unless a serious bug pops up, updates are not to be expected. However, I can still post something here.

I may post a few things about the character’s backgrounds from development perspective.

Wendicka Lovejoy is in many ways a reflection of myself when I was about her age. A bit blunt in expression, but not as uncaring as she appears, yet high IQ, but socially less intelligent. I must say though that Wendicka has more nerve in doing dangerous things than I have, and I also chose a female character to make sure Wendicka would be, what I am not. The fact that she’s a tomboy doesn’t really change that.

Wendicka is indirectly name after a girl I’ve been in love with, but with whom I never entered an actual relationship. The girl’s name was not Wendicka though. This was the result that when Wendicka’s first draft was made over 25 years ago, I was not really ready to fully go for that in public. I shall be honest that I was not the one who made up her surname, however I guess it does signify my feelings at the time.
I must note that that there is very little Wendicka has in common with her.

A few other things that signify my relationship with Wendicka were put in two subtile hints you’d only understand if you know me personally.

• First of all, Wendicka’s birthday. It’s mentioned by Briggs during the game’s prologue that Wendicka was born June, 19th, 2975. I was born on June 19th, 1975. Coincidence? I think not! Wendicka is exactly 1000 years younger than I am. Now I need to note that (although I didn’t know this when I set this up) J.K. Rowling pulled a similar stunt as her birthday is July 31th, which is also Harry Potter’s birthday. Harry is by the way 15 years younger than Rowling.

• The other subtile hint is the flag in Wendicka’s bedroom. Wendicka says she doesn’t know the flag (how could she?), but that she always felt a strange connection to it. The flag is the flag of the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant. The very place where I was born and raised, and where I’ve always lived all my life. It’s always for that reason why I always state that I do NOT live in Holland as Noord-Brabant borders to South-Holland but is not part of it. (It is part of the Netherlands, though. Nope, Holland and the Netherlands are NOT the same place, and anybody saying elseway is either a liar or ignorant).

  

Wendicka has a difficult relationship with her father, John Lovejoy. Well the relationship between me and my parents is… Nah, I better not talk about that. Wendicka THINKS religion is the reason for this, while the true reason is her father being overprotective over her. My own situation is different, but misunderstanding is definitely one of the keywords.

Like I said, Wendicka is not me. I did put in a lot of measures to make sure she would not become a female version of myself. Of course making a woman out of here, even though she’s a tomboy, is one of those. Wendicka is also a lot more (vocally) violent in her denial to have feelings for Yirl while everybody knows better. I don’t remember denying my own feelings as violently as she does, but I did try to deny them when I was young, although I always did a poor job hiding which girls triggered my feelings. Wendicka’s relationship with Crystal was never existent in my own life until I met my ex-girl-friend. This is because Crystal was supposed to be the main protagonist of Star Story II, but the two stories never really worked out and that was why my ex-girl-friend (back then not my ex) proposed to combine the two stories and make the two girls act like surrogate sisters. This appeared to be the thing I needed to make Wendicka not only come out at her best, but also to give her another factor to create a distance somehow. And Wendicka is much further in computers and technology than I am. And last but not least, I am Dutch and Wendicka is a US citizen, although she’s never been on Earth and doesn’t know anything about the USA and she more feels like a civilion of the Interplanetairy Federation (the latter can of course be brought back to me being pro-European-Union).

Wendicka is not the only character I wrote about that shares a lot of similarities with myself. Scyndi Scorpio from the Secrets of Dyrt also does, but that shows in a different manner than with Wendicka. I’m not going to choose whom I like better. You don’t ask a parent which of his/her children he likes best. :P
The character Jim Sernio (who is mentioned in Dyrt) also shares similarities with me.
Writing about Wendicka was a safe way to “expose myself”. Wendicka is not me, making that people will not blame me for her faults. But there’s more. Writing about myself, the real me, will undoubtly lead to people in my direct environment to be heavily offended. Although the way Wendicka responds to certain situations is based on how I’ve responded on real situations like that, or the way I would have responded or I would have liked to respond, the people around her are not the same people I met, and although some of the problems she’s faced are not that far of of my own, they are different in many significant ways. Fiction was an easy way for me to deal with this. Also Wendicka is not me, and somehow this also made things less confronting.

Life has never been easy on me, folks, and I found myself in story writing in order to let things go. I guess that’s better than using drugs in an attempt to forget stuff, or seek my gain in fake-prophets, or even suicide. Writing is a form of art, and so is coding a computer game. Art has always been a brilliant way to express the inner side of your soul.
Wendicka Joane Lovejoy was born out of an attempt to dig deep within myself. Straightforward, sarcastic, but at the same time, deep down a very sweet and insecure girl hides behind that mask.
Not all my characters have a deeply worked out profile like this, but I always seek to have a few in very prominent roles. I like characters that are not really what they appear (it’s for that reason that one of my favorite Harry Potter characters is in fact Luna Lovegood).