Characters are vital to the development of a game. They create an added sense of depth and sometimes give the player a reason to be interested in the game. through design, interactions, story and simply personality they often times complete the game. More often then not the player is also a character, even if they customise and curate their own character you still have to consider what the players character adds to the story and therefore their character is most likely vital to the player experience.
Before you can even think about designing a character you to to consider their role within your Gameworld. different architypes of characters often are what drive the story.
Character Architypes
- protagonist
Often times the protagonist is the ‘good’ character, likeable and easy for the player to digest. But the term protagonist doesn’t necessarily mean that, it just refers to the main character of the story that the player will follow.
- antagonist
An antagonist is the main ‘villain’ of a story, someone who often drives a narrative as often they are the final goal to any story. Hence they can be important and have to be believable if they are going to be used to drive the entire narrative.
- Narrator
The narrator is oftentimes the protagonist in video games, they tell the story to the player. Directly or not.
Character architypes aren’t one set list of things a character has to have. If anything they should be used as a basic basis only. Creating a character is only ‘good’ or ‘bad’ can be dull, it lacks the depth of any true human being. Yes characters are made up, but for them to be believable they have to represent and display a human range of emotional connections, weaknesses and hardships. Personally I find the ‘Morally Gray’ character trope to be one of the most intriguing, its human, its real.
Tasks
For a warm up and to start considering what my character would look like i used simplistic shapes to create a silhouette. I’ve personally not employed this technique before but now having done so i can see myself using it many times in the future. By blocking out the basic form of your character with basic shapes it can help to make the character less visually cluttered and be more easily recognisable.
For this character i tried to emulate the type of aesthetic i want for my game. This is the first iteration of my character design for the protagonist, I wanted to emphasise the fact that she is a child by putting her in oversized potentially hand me down outfits.
Play:
- Doki Doki Literature Club
This game felt very immersive for me. I really enjoyed the point and click style of game and how it focused more so on story telling. Story based games are very interactive for more players, they’re immersive and give the player reasons to be invested. I do think some of the characters were a bit flat in terms of personality. They all had few key personality types and didn’t stray far from that, at least that’s what i thought for the majority of the game. Towards the end it most certainly became more three dimensional but i wished it had been more present towards the beginning.