2D Character creation in Unity

The main sources of inspiration should correlate with the setting: you can, of course, look for ideas for a game about the Second World War in Star Wars, but it is better to turn to Saving Private Ryan and Brest Fortress. Sometimes there is a division even within the same theme: if you want to make a game about modern warfare, it is better to focus on "Apocalypse Now" and "Generation of Assassins".

Monitor the quality of sources and filter ideas - there are too many eclectic games in the world, the creators of which have no taste. It's not just about the 2D effects Unity game engine.

And please, write very short, functional descriptions of the game backing - it is better to finish small parts of it as needed, than to spend resources on lengthy descriptions of the thousand-year history of the world, which no one will read anyway.

When the base of references is ready, you can select suitable types for heroes from it. Sometimes it is not at all shameful to take someone else's character and rethink him creatively - after all, we all steal from the ancient Greeks.

This is where the character profile comes in.

Character profile

A simple two-page document that contains everything you and anyone on the project needs to know about the hero. In the previous article, I talked about the development of personas to work with the target audience - in fact, you need to create exactly the same “persona”, but already as the hero of the game.

Try to add to the profile only those facts that will help reveal the personality of the character and determine how he speaks, which means he thinks and acts. Based on the profile, you will build your story.

To make it easier for you, I will share a few profiles that we created for Plarium games.

Here is my favorite - bard Ragnar the Crafty, a smart fellow and a rare dolt, advisor (and sometimes a forced deputy) to the pompous king Björn.

As you may have noticed, the main driver of character and story development - living speech - came into play. Let's talk about her.

Live speech

We got to the most important thing: as they say, the characters think and act. Further there will be several fairly well-known techniques for writing dialogues with examples from the games I worked on.

This point is closely related to the previous one: the better you know the conversational genre, the more tools, techniques and tricks you can use to enrich the speech of the characters.

It is from these chips that a convincing character is created - and it is they who, as a result, determine the development of a particular situation in the plot.

This is the gallant General Lapidus from "Rules of War", one of our first characters.

Use the speech of the characters to reveal their motives, character and past. A few phrases spoken by the hero can do more than a couple of pages of text. It's especially cool not to make characters strictly good or bad, smart or stupid. The recent series Young Pope can be seen as the gold standard for creating controversial characters.

Here are some examples of how to reveal character through speech.

The mad trickster god Lovar from "Wars of Thrones" helps the player find the assassins of the Seven Kings to stop the civil war.