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Comp.Game Character Design

© Joe Jeskiewicz

If you are going to be doing a game that involves something more than a few variables, like I don't know, a Storyline, then you're going to need to develop the story. And I'm not putting down plot, or even round characters, but for that kind of help you might need to talk to a writer. I'm here however to say the Character design is important in another way, the way they look and behave on screen.

If you are designing a fighting game or a computer role playing game, characters are a big part of the game. To design these characters think about their intended role. It IS usually a good idea to have the story written to some extent before you write the game. Knowing the ultimate demise of a villain or the specific abilities of a monster are important to know when designing the computer aspects of it. Knowing abilities helps define many of the variables.

Knowing how a character looks before and after their fall or cartharsis or birthday party helps define the character in strict visual terms for the graphics designers (beaming broadly). The visual aspect of the characters is important unless you are working on a text adventure, then you can probably skip most of this.

Netcaster has no specific characters however, let's say that a player vs. player fighting style game were to be developed and to of the vast array of characters were a low level fire mage and a mid level earth warrior. For all characters I would make a checklist of possible differences and attribute those differences to visual flare. For instance, the category of fire, I might associate with the color Orange or Red. The category of Earth I would associate with the color of Brown.

So let's develop our two fighters and design the characters with numbers, abilities, and visually. If I'm working with a shoot off from NetCaster then the numbers are predetermined as the low range numbers and the mid range numbers. What I am then interested in are the abilities of the characters. The fire mage is a low level mage, which means he hasn't advanced to a middle stage just yet. He is still using low level effects. This limits his abilities to low level fire damage, low level fire blocking, and low level fire special. I want to low level fire special to be an evaporation/dry-spell technique. This makes it especially effective against Water Types and somewhat effective against Earth Types.

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