Putting It Together

In any character design effort, some technical considerations need to be taken into account. For example, the player's avatar needs to have the largest number of animations, and they must be the smoothest animations of all because this is the character being watched all the time.

The avatar's movements must be attractive, not clumsy, unless that's part of the avatar's character. The player should be able to see the avatar easily: The avatar should be a distinct color that stands out from the background (at least, in action games ) and should not be able to be mistaken for an enemy or a sidekick. When designing a group of human characters , consider useful ways of differentiating them: sex, hair color, general body shape, clothing, distinctive weapons or tools. You can also give them distinctive names and ethnicities, if appropriate. (The men of Sergeant Rock's Easy Company in the old DC Comics World War II series reflected the ethnic diversity of America, with names such as Dino Manelli, Izzy Cohen, and "Reb" Farmer ”not to mention our square-jawed American hero, Sgt. Frank Rock.)

Of course, there is a flipside to this as well. Naming your characters in such a fashion lends a "cartoon-like" style to it. This is fine for some purposes, but for others it is not necessarily such a good fit. It's just not realistic, and if realism is your aim, then it cheapens the final result. Notice that we, the authors of this book, are not called Ernest O'Scribe or Andrew Penn-Wielder.

Names do not have to spell out explicitly the name of the character. For example, the name of the hero in Anachronox , Sylvester Boots, says little or nothing about the character. However his nickname, Sly, is altogether more revealing . Another example is Lara Croft. Although this does not immediately seem to indicate anything about the character, it does (to English sensibilities, at least) imply a degree of upper-class Englishness.

In short, the importance of character design on your game really depends on the nature of the game itself. However, the success of character-based franchises such as Duke Nukem , Oddworld , and the Mario Brothers certainly indicates that you should consider effective character design as one of your top game-design priorities.