Creating Characters
It is time to see how characters are created and managed in the game world. It is no coincidence that we discussed how to write characters and their stories first in Chapter 8, Designing Compelling Stories for Games. Writing a character is just the beginning, and it is a game designer’s responsibility to translate their essence into an entity that makes sense in the game world and its rules.
It is easy to think of a game character as the main character, the one the player controls. However, video games are mostly populated by characters that cannot be played – allies and enemies, in fact, are often the real stars and sometimes even more memorable than the protagonist.
This is nothing new; great supporting characters are distinctive of any good story! Traditionally, characters that remain stuck in our hearts do so for three main reasons – the way they are written, how they look, and (in the case of movies) the way actors perform them.
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