Week 3 - Character archetypes and backstory

Today our lecture was on character archetypes and the back story for the character backgrounds and level design. Much thought had already went into the types of character we were going to have in our game and a general idea of their background had started to formulate in our heads.

With our game concept, we have a relatively unique ability to have such diverse character backgrounds due to the nature of the game, meaning a fair bit of research is needed by us as a group to gather information on the timelines the key characters are set in.

When the game is played as single player, the character played will adopt the 'Hero' archetype - by that I mean that the story centralizes around that character, normally a resolver of conflict which the story is based on, and will often change and adapt to keep the players interest high.

We also discussed what goes into a game setting - what sets the scene when the player takes the helm of our character and starts to play, it could be the little things such as the small attention to details, buildings, scenery - music and sound can also play a part in this as well - a up beat song in a particular area may for instance, give off the impression that the area is a thriving town where there are lots of people interacting with one another, laughing, joking, etc, where a tune with more dramatic sounding tones may give the impression that there is impending doom around the corner for the player exploring a certain area and players may feel slightly on edge - as though something is about to jump out at them at any given moment.

With this lecture in mind, we set about delving deeper into our four main characters back story to give a bit of substance to the players, something that would make the player think 'this is why I picked this character' or 'this is why this particular event has happened in the story'.

Once we discussed this we assigned a couple of tasks to each other to work on for next week. I am expanding on the scientist characters background, and also the level design of his particular 'future world'. I have a few ideas banding about but it's something I will work more on during the week and drill down to a solid back story that doesn't sound too far fetched - but interesting enough to make players want to choose him. I have a mental image of his version of the world too in my head so will try and draw up some rough concept art to accompany it. This will be a decent enough challenge for me and I should have this done for next week so that we can draw our information together and start to press on.

Tom is working on the witch and her back story and level design and Bryan has taken on the templar and mercenary characters to develop further. As we discuss the game further and further, the sheer scope of the challenge just seems to open up at an exponential rate and it's something myself and the group are starting to feel pretty excited about. The potential for more is so big. I'll add some concept art as soon as it's ready.

Stay tuned...