On the creation of good characters for your story
A study about how to create good characters for your video game's story - Part 1 / 2: The general outlines
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For the few last months, I was in charge of animating the weekly open doors at my local PnP RPG club. This meant that I had to create, each week, a new scenario, interesting enough to hook any potential newcomer.
For those of you not familiar with PnP RPGs, the high level of interactivity of most games makes the creation of an actual, linear story near impossible, especially when you don't know your players and can hardly predict their reactions. Thus, creating a scenario mostly means creating a situation and the characters related to it. The quality of these characters is essential, as it is their reactions to the players' actions that will make the story go on.
So, I quickly had to find a way to make sure every character I created was good enough to keep my players entertained by the story.
Now, the first question to arise is: what is a good character? Personally, I found two answers: it's either a believable character or a strong character.
On the creation of a strong character
A strong character is usually a very simple character, with a pretty straightforward personnality. In the vast majority of the cases, these are the big bad guys: Ganondorf, Dark Samus, Lavos... They can also be recurring ennemies, such as Nemesis from RE 3, or the Tank from L4D.
These guys barely need any personnality (actually, they barely need to talk at all), they just need to be good at what they're meant to be. In the other medias, you have examples like Darth Vador (from Episode 4), the Daleks, the Joker. But they're not always the bad guys, they can sometimes be the good guys, like Gandalf or Yoda (from the original trilogy).
These characters are those who stay in our minds, the most iconic ones of any story. They usually don't do much, but have to be damn good at doing it.
For these characters to work, you must rely on seasonned tricks. Pick what this character will be (villain? mentor? helper?), and make every single element of this character and his environment work towards this: the looks, the context, the actions, the music. Music, especially, is very important, as it is what will remain in peoples' memory: just think about musics like the Imperial March or One Winged Angel, and you'll see. Or just think about that moment in Left 4 Dead when you hear the Witch crying, or the Tank's theme.
When it comes to video games, you must also use the gameplay itself to reflect this. If you want a bad guy to actually inspire fear, then make sure that the hardest boss fights are for when he's around. Want a mentor to be really helpful? Make sure that he is the one who gives the player his best bonus and pieces of equipment. Want an ally to appear really reliable? Make sure he appears when the player really needs it, and gives him some actual help.
This might seem pretty obvious, but not everybody remembers it. Have a look at this scene, from Resident Evil 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76JlQeLt0Ew
So, what this scene says is: you are alone and in trouble, but no worries, friends come and save your life yay! Except it all happens in a cutscene, and never has any real consequence on the gameplay (they send you on a mission on your own, without even giving you any weapons or help).