How To Give A Rock A Personality

This is a post duplicated from the Digitanks website.

The problem with digital tanks is that they don’t have faces.

Tanks aren’t like cars. Cars have faces.

carface

Tanks though? Tanks have about as much personality as a rock. I’d really like my tanks to have some character in them. Some life. I’d really like them not to be just polygons on a screen. I don’t want players to think of them as just tanks, but as “my cute little tankey buddy friends.” But, talking tanks is just crossing the line. Really, would you accept a talking tank? It works for cars, but it doesn’t work for killing machines. It doesn’t have to, though, because some of the most loved characters are ones that never talk. In fact, a common anecdote among writers is the “less is more” mantra, and no talking at all can often have a greater effect on the reader than volumes of dialogue. The difference between a box and an Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube isn’t how much it talks, but the amount of personalization that the player projects onto the object. Valve didn’t even set out to give the player an inanimate lovable friend that would stand the test of time and win all of the “best incinerated sidekick” contests, but they succeeded so well with instilling personality into an otherwise lifeless object that here I am still talking about it, and the damn thing never spoke a word.

A long time ago I played a little indie game created for one of the LD48 competitions called “Commies.”

Commies

One of my favorite web comics is Girl Genius. It’s a long story about a girl who discovers she’s really a mechanical genius and can build amazing steampunk mechs in her sleep, which makes her a marked woman and she gets all caught up in blah blah blah, anyway, it’s a good story.

worldsbestboss

It’s a problem, though. If a tank could speak in pictures, what would a tank say? A tank could be happy that you gave it a command to attack, but what would that be a picture of? A cannon firing? If a tank missed, what picture would be sufficient for displaying its disappointment? If a tank got damaged how would it picture its pain? I couldn’t imagine anything that would be satisfactory for me.

Of course, the solution is usually simpler than you imagine it to be. I was talking on IRC with a friend of mine, who commented that I was using a lot of smileys. I was feeling pretty silly at the time, and I had given her one too many smileys for her liking. They can come across as childish if they’re overused. I justified it to her saying, “They’re a pretty easy way to communicate an emotion nonverbally.” That’s when it hit me.

tankhappy

It makes perfect sense that digital tanks would use text smileys to communicate. It all fits with the digital theme. The problem is integrating the smileys into their digital environment without them appearing out of place. My first try was with the cartoon-style word balloon that you saw in the post where I announced the demo download, but that didn’t really work at all. The classic speech bubble style looked too out of place in the digital environment, so this gray gradient (or shall I say, GRAYdient? lawl) approach is an incremental improvement on that. I’m also experimenting problems with people who think it says, “D” instead of being a smiley, and I’m still considering how to approach that problem. I’m still experimenting with timing, with different smileys, and with the presentation of it, because I think that one of my biggest challenges will be presenting the smileys in a way that players accept it and use it as a channel for bonding with the tanks.

In all honesty, I’m the Doctor Frankenstein who instilled these tanks with their fabricated emotions, and even myself I’m starting to imbue them with actual emotions. Seeing a tank >.< (wince) when it gets hit almost makes me feel sorry for it. I resent my little tank buddies for zzz (snoozing) when I take too long to give it an action. I even share in the tank’s <3 (love) as he happily goes about executing the commands I issue. If it works for me then it has a good chance of working for others too. In time I hope to develop this concept so that the Digitanks become a beloved digital character to supplement their destructive prowess. The next time I get around to uploading another video, I’ll be sure to include the smileys so you guys can tell me what you think.