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Personality Once you have a good, strikingly designed character, the next step is to work on conveying its personality. Again, the extent to which you need to portray personality depends on whether the character is an Avatar or an Actor. I can't overstate the importance of body language when creating images of any character. Not only do people make dozens of snap assumptions based on a person's physical appearance and apparel, they also make strong judgements based on the way people carry themselves and their physical presence. Just the way people stand reveals enough information for others to read all sorts of traits about them. The trick is to be aware of this, know what messages you want to give, and provide those cues clearly (Figure 5).
Far too many characters are portrayed in static poses designed to look "hard." Unfortunately, the quintessential hard look is the emotionless, squinty-eyed, Charles Bronson-style stance. This does not allow people to "read" a character at all, but it works with Bronson and Clint Eastwood because that's the point of the "Man with No Name" tough guy -- he's supposed to be unreadable. So many characters imitate this look that they all fade into an obscure morass of similarity. Instead, create some attitude through poses that provide clues about the character's personality. Poses are especially important for the static artwork typically used on game boxes and by marketing people. Dynamic poses are far more interesting, striking, and memorable than static ones. If a character is meant to be an action character, then for goodness's sake show them in motion. Consider then taking the final step and exaggerating a character's pose to the point that it actually begins to signify the character. If you create a set of strong, distinctive poses for your character, people will recognize these poses even when seen in silhouette or from a great distance. Spiderman is an excellent example of a character that has a great array of extremely strong, immediately identifiable poses (Figure 6).
Motion, The Fourth Dimension Just as with visual design and poses, it's incredibly important to consider how a character moves, and design around that aspect. The most important step is making a character move in a convincing way. That means showing weight, balance, and inertia. Unless you pay particular attention to the solidness that a character demonstrates while interacting with its environment, people will never accept it as anything but a group of weightless polygons. Every time a foot slides or a character snaps between animations, the illusion of life is totally shattered. Since computer game characters constantly repeat their animations, it is worth the extra time to make movement animation as flawless as possible. Apply the concept of unique poses to the actual motion of a character. The way people walk suggests vast amounts of information about them, such as how they feel about themselves and their surroundings. If a character's movements are a consistent, exaggerated representation of their inner selves, you can build up its personality while it moves about its environment. (As a side note, there is a vast difference between realism and believability -- I feel you can always get a stronger, more universal emotional response from high-quality hand animation than you ever can from motion capture.) Awareness The key that Disney animators ultimately found to creating the illusion of life was showing their characters thinking. Making a character aware of its environment has an incredible impact on its believability. If your character examines its surroundings and the other characters in it, it automatically appears to be thinking about what it's looking at. Awareness doesn't just end with where a character looks, it extends to its reactions to its environment. A character can give emotional responses to what it sees, such as surprise, fear, happiness, and so on. One aspect of awareness that reinforces a character's believability is how aware other characters are of your main character. Besides just awareness of presence, emotional responses by NPCs toward the main character add immeasurably to its substance and believability. Note, however, that the player will be affected by how NPCs react to the main character. Unless you want to lower a player's opinion of the main character, NPCs should generally react positively towards it. What's Your Story? I like to work out some sort of background history for a character, even if it only helps to flesh things out in my own head. Don't go too far when creating the history, though - it's risky to give a main character loads of hidden motivations that might conflict with the player's, and the character could react in ways that make the player feel uncomfortable. At the end of the day, a game character shouldn't have anything more than superficial personality traits since, whatever the POV, the player needs to retain as much control as possible. A bit of background just helps solidify the character design process so that it can be consistent. If a character is going to speak, the benefits of having a decent voice artist are immeasurable. We glean a host of information from each other's voices that has nothing to do with the nature or content of the words spoken. We listen to the timbre, the accent, and the range of a voice to make basic assumptions. More importantly though, we listen to the rich subtle inflections that hint at whether a person is sarcastic, sincere, intelligent, or has a sense of humor. Only highly skilled actors can evoke all of this hidden information as they deliver their lines. If anything is lacking in the voice acting, then you can't inject personality into a character even if all its other design elements are spot-on. So much
about character design is subjective. I mean, what is attractive? On
that point alone you could argue for hours. But one very important thing
remains to be stated. Any of the points I've discussed can, and probably
should be turned on their heads if you want to create new and exciting
characters. Guidelines such as these are just guidelines: ingenuity,
humor, and originality require rules to be broken. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Northampton, Mass.: Kitchen Sink Press, 1994. References: Jones,
Hannson, and Phillips. "Physical Attractiveness and Judgments of
Psychotherapy." Journal of Social Psychology 105 (1978):
79-84.
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