Character Design

CHARACTER DESIGN

For each game the characters are one major factor that must be given a lot of attention. People tend to put themselves into the characters shoes making them more attached to the game. So as we are about to create a game we need to think carefully about our characters development. Character design mostly consists from 2 major things. The appearance and the personality of the character. Appearance is what makes you like what you see, and personality is what determines how the player will see the character and how much he/she 'll come to taking a liking on the character or not. So I 'll be talking about these things , and how I think we should implement them in our game.

Let's start from the character's appearance . First thing that comes to a human's eyes after seeing a certain figure is the silhouette. The uniquely identified silhouette , is what determines how easily can the games character's can be recognized with just a glance or not. So firstly what we have to aim, is a simple graphic shape , with an instantly recognizable silhouette. The next thing , that makes a character recognizable is the face. So we should also implement distinguishable features, that will carve the character's face into the players mind, like a big mustache, extreme hair or whatever, but this is a technique that should be carefully implemented since it can backfire. The reason is that although the face is really important through its distinguishable characteristics, is also what delivers emotions through facial expressions. The main feature of the face that delivers emotions more clearly are the eyes. So , if you overdo some characteristics , it will draw the player's attention from the eyes thus making it difficult to pass on emotions. In example a really big nose will result to that, or even if you overdo it with the eyes to make the character cuter by making them much bigger than you should, will result into detracting emotion and lose out of their cuteness, which was your main goal. Now as for the general design, the design should be as clean as possible , with more graceful lines, with a clean read on the eyes than a complex design. What I mean is, even though it might seem cooler for your character to have a lot of gear and stuff, actually , that will result in taking several seconds for a player to understand and distinguish each part on the character , thus making it more tiring. So we should keep the character's design and lines as clean and distinguishable as possible.

Now, as for the character's personality, firstly we have to decide the main features. Is he/she gonna be young/old, happy/ sully , confident / timid. Well in our case its obvious that the first choices of the previous is more suitable, but there are many more personality characteristics that we should decide on. Also the way that we should deliver these characteristics is by setting up situations which they will allow the character to prove these things , and deliver them to the player. Setting up situations can create particular emotions for the player towards the character. Also the environment is quite important for that , since we need to transport the player into an emotionally imaginary environment through images, sounds and music, to enroll with the game and create a certain bond towards the character. Also the subject and the goal of the main hero , is crucial to the players emotions as well, as it what defines the game , and gives the game a reasoning.

My opinion about the design of our character is that although our game will be a 2D design and will be using sprites, delivering emotions by facial expressions is not possible. So the character emotion's cannot be delivered throughout the game ,so we will implement intro video's and etc and setting up situations as mentioned above , which will be helpful towards that goal. Also we have to have in mind that we want to have 2 characters a boy and a girl, so we should be aware of that the situations should satisfy both genres. Now about the design , in a girls perspective it should be cuter , as for the boys it should be more hero-like in my opinion. Girls like princess-like characters that are beautiful, desirable and gentle hearted, unlike boys who like the hero to be strong, cool and confident. Also girls prefer light colours as pink, purple and etc, as for boys prefer intense colours as red,blue etc. So having these things in mind and implementing them as we should, I am pretty positive that the result will be quite satisfying to us as well as the kids that will be playing this game.