Reija from Agwilika Rhe is one my longest lasting characters. I’ve been coming up with video game ideas since second grade, but it was some time in the late 90’s in high school when I came up with characters and other elements that have managed to hang around even to this day. Those earlier pre-high school ideas were really cheesy, with titles like “Happy Ghost” and “Potion Ocean” which for some reason I can still remember. Reija was one of those characters that came from that high school era.

The left image is the very first drawing I made of the character and one of the earliest examples of the Gwil/Agwilikan race. I have this vague memory of drawing it during English class… I was such a slacker at times. Reija has always been one of the main characters of Agwilika Rhe, though I did change the name of the story to “The Heart of Dragons” for a while until naming it back.

In that original drawing, she was accompanying Nesa Kylal, a young princess-type character. Reija was then the personal guardian of Nesa. However, at some point I grew disdainful of a having this little kid character and wrote Nesa out of the story, leaving the main characters as warrior guardian Reija, the sorcerer Anjil, and Crinos Kylal, adult daughter of the current Kylal leader. Remnants of Nesa did live on: the first Agwilikan’s name is Dominesa Kylal and nesa is the word for stars in the Agwilikan language.

I don’t know exactly when I started it, but Reija may have been the first 3D character model I created. It first came to be in an old application called Milkshape and was imported into the Unreal engine (Unreal Tournament ’99 I think). Over time she developed into what you see in the image on the right. Looking back at early images, I think I’ve been using a variation of the same clunky hand mesh from the Milkshape model on all of my characters, only just recently having attempted to model a better hand.

May 24th 2021 update: After all these years I decided to update the romanized spelling of her name, to Reija instead of Raeja. I did this to more closely match the name Reina, which is rather close to my heart. The native spelling of her name remains the same.