The keyword I think would be backstory. Write more about the character than you might necessarily expose directly in the game. It'll give you a better idea of who they are and enable you to make a much more consistent presentation of their persona... It doesn't have to be positive development. It doesn't have to start one way and end up another but may well be a bit of a roller-coaster... Backstory plays its part in this as do events playing out during the actual game... As for the last thing you've said, I've often been told that writing a character based on yourself is a bad way to become a good writer...

You make a lot of good points, Prin<s>essa. Yeah, my mind just automatically went to 'princess' that time. :-P

Backstory is definitely essential as part of understanding the character and their motivations. I find a lot that when a film is based on a book, the characters are so much richer and deeper, because there is all this extra information the actors and directors can learn about them that never even makes it on screen.

As for basing a character on yourself, heh, Stephen King might disagree with you. Half his characters are writers.  :-P And I did read his book 'On Writing,' it's actually really good regardless of how you feel about his work. He always suggests 'writing what you know', and that often starts with yourself.

At any rate, that's not exactly what I meant. You're absolutely right, your characters shouldn't be YOU and you wouldn't want to put yourself in all of them at all, because honestly that's kind of scary. At the same time, my stories can't help but have my own brand of humour, which the main character would have to adopt in some way in order to portray. So for instance I am working on a story now and two of the characters come from different aspects of my personality. One comes from the troubled uncertain art student I once was, one comes from some tongue in cheek objectively analytic side of me. They are both much more than that, but that's the root of their personality. I didn't plan it that way, it just happened as I was writing them, because that is our common ground. I understand them, because I understand these personal experiences and parts of myself that I draw inspiration from. So far this has helped me create a character I can really connect with, and hopefully one who translates as more authentic to others. You'll have to judge one day.  :-)

And just to mention, I totally agree about looking outside of yourself for inspiration. It's good to set challenges for yourself and write a character who is completely different from anything you've done before, or who is obsessed with something you know nothing about. That means you have to learn all about it.

Anyway, something that I think helps is to imagine having a conversation with the character completely out of context from the game. Imagine talking to them about the stuff going on around you...

That's a good idea, autumnspark. It's a great way to really get to know your characters, imagining how they'd react to a typical situation to get an all-round picture about them. I remember someone once suggested to me to take personality tests as your different characters to get a better sense of them as well.

Princessa, yours seems to be an example of what not to do. I agree with you about senseless violence in a lot of games, but that's more of a genre thing, and there are plenty of story-driven games that don't go that route at all.

The most exciting thing for me in a story-driven game is interacting with well defined, interesting characters that have a personality you can really feel. The first thing to turn me off is if I hear the writer's voice coming from a character (that is if they are talking or behaving out of character), nothing ruins a story for me like that. I know creating a unique and believable character is something everyone struggles with, so I thought you guys could share where you get your inspiration/what influences you in writing your characters.

I guess I'll go first:

To start, I'll have a basic framework in mind for my story which gets populated and fleshed out with characters as I go along. So when coming up with a character, I have a pretty good idea of the role I would like for them to play. However, a role does not a character make and often their roles will evolve as I try to make sure my characters' behaviour and decisions are informed by their personality, not what I want them to do/be. By that I mean, it is most important that their motives propel the events of the story, not the other way around.

Often time I'll just get an idea that sums up a character, like 'He doesn't like talking. Gets straight to the point and is done with it.' Which pretty much tells me exactly how all their conversations will go. And once I know a character's interests, I know the kinds of things they would be thinking about. Also, what helps me in figuring out a personality is to think of someone in the real world similar to what I have in mind, either a friend or someone I met, or an actor's portrayal in a film. I might decide I want them to behave like this, or I might draw bits and pieces from multiple sources, which gives me a very good starting point. Then I'll say they should be more temperamental or more charming, etc, and go from there.

Lastly, I think it's very important to put yourself in the character's shoes, my main characters tend to have personalities that stem from elements of my own, so that makes writing them easier. I'm always digging into the back of my mind, into all those odd things I wish I could say in a given situation but never do, so I wind up living vicariously through my characters.  :-)

How do you guys do it?

Thanks for sharing! I only read the first part so far, but it looks really good and informative.
It totally relates to me, I'm all about the branching dialog.  :-)

You guys have really gotten abstract about all this.

If you want to distill something like chess to its core you are still left with a battle taking place, with the court and troops defending the king and going after the enemy. It's something most people might take for granted, but the pieces aren't arbitrary, they're actually characters. I think we can all agree that checkers has less plot than chess.  :-)

Someone should make a game about tying a shoe! It can go like QWOP.  :-P

The classic example is when a murder suspect says "I couldn't possibly have stabbed Mrs Muggins, I don't know how to use a knife!" and the detective replies "Hey, wait a minute! I only said she was murdered. I never mentioned that she was stabbed!"

Haha! That totally is classic. That could be a good finale sort of lie where the person you're talking to finally gets so nervous they completely slip up and say more than they're supposed to know.

Leading up to it, though, I think you might try giving the player a real sense of the behaviour and way of speaking the different characters have and like Oracizan suggested, have them speak out of character when they're lying. Like having a Jesse from Breaking Bad sort of character suddenly throw out more sophisticated words, or a university professor suddenly speak like a gangster, 'cuz he had 'nuff of your jibber-jabber.

You'll probably want to check out Ace Attorney, that's all about catching witnesses in a lie (also it's a darn great game series!), but it relies on having information that contradicts them in front of you.

Why am I reading this bullshit thread?
Kerfuffle looks fun.

["Do games need stories?"]

"Do games need stories?"

I think that really depends on what the intention of the game is. If you want a game to just engage you for a time and be done with it, like Tetris, puzzle games, etc, it might actually be quite odd to have a story get in the way of something that is meant to be a purely intuitive experience. But, If you want to actually say something with your game, to really make it memorable and stand out, then I would have to say it absolutely needs a story. You can't connect to blocks and jewels, race cars, and generally things that happen 'just because'. It's not to say those games aren't fun and aren't capable of making your heart race, but they lack a very important element that turns something that feels generic into something unique.

To touch on a related subject though, I think there is a lot of implied storytelling in many games most people wouldn't think much of. For example you could look at Mario as a simple platformer where you stomp on baddies until you get to the boss and save the princess, but if you take a look at even Mario 3, you could tell the story of a character who went through deserts, oceans, and over the clouds battling pirates on airships, undead walking skeletons in castles, and the meanest turtle of all time to save the girl he loves, often aided by his little sidekick Toad. There's a lot of implied story there even if it doesn't feel like it. You flesh it out even more and you get Super Mario RPG with all its humour and drama, and you actually see these characters grow.

Maybe one day you want the one, one day you want the other, but for me nothing can make as much an impact as a really well told story that draws you into its world. That's what I'd like to get out of games.  :-)

[@LeonDaydreamer]

Hi everyone! My name is Leonid Pilchin (@LeonDaydreamer). I am an artist and animator by trade. I love classic style adventure games like Monkey Island and Broken Sword, and always dreamed of helping create some myself. I have some great ideas for stories I've never been able to realize, but now I really want to make my best effort to bringing some of them to life!

I'm currently working on a game called Back To Reality.

Sometimes I make things like this...

[@LeonDaydreamer]

Hi everyone! Brand new to this forum.

My name is Leonid Pilchin (@LeonDaydreamer), I am an artist and adventure game enthusiast. I've been working on a text-driven adventure game (with lots of artwork) called Back To Reality that I'm super excited about and I thought I'd share some of the art as I'm putting it together. Hope you like it!  :-)

Ally is an art student and sometimes waitress. She accidentally stirs some trouble in the first chapter.




Don Juan is an eccentric psychic. Call 206-1DON-JUAN for appointments.