Features

Game Design: Secrets of the Sages
Creating Characters, Storyboarding, and Design Documents

Jason Rubin, Naughty Dog

As a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc., Naughty Dog has won worldwide acclaim for its Crash Bandicoot games (1996 to 1999). Jason Rubin, co-founder and lead designer, is hard at work on Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, a 3D platformer for the Playstation 2.

	It's not always easy whipping up a hit character—Naughty Dog's Jason Rubin admits that Jak and Daxter took about four months to flesh out, which is twice as long as it took to get Crash Bandicoot right.

Is there a formula for creating a successful game character?

Ah, the impossible question to answer. Certainly, there are many things that contribute. Good design, which means making sure that the right people are involved, and the right opinions are sought. Good integration, which involves making sure that the character fits the game, and the game is worth playing. Good marketing, to make sure that the character is positioned correctly, and the public wants to know more about it. And good follow-through, including derivative products like toys and shirts to reinforce the connection, as well as properly timed sequels, and continued placement of the character in the public eye. Certainly, no successful character that I can think of has failed in any of these categories. The best, like Pokémon and Mario, have not only done well in each, but have always excelled.

So, how important is a cute/cool character in a video game today, such as Crash Bandicoot or Jak & Daxter?

The farther into the broader marketplace gaming goes, the more important "characters" become. That might mean a lead character, or a license like Tony Hawk, or the official NBA teams and logos. The reason that video games are interesting to more people today than they were in the '80s is that people who couldn't identify with a Pong paddle or Pac-Man are interested in playing Lara Croft. As the gap between reality or fantasy and the visuals in games narrows, more people are drawn to the medium. And as story and plot become more involving in games, even the non-competitive have a reason to play. A look across recent bestsellers yields (besides the venerable I) a list of games that focus on characters broadly defined, and the trend should continue.

Without a doubt, many readers of this chapter would be interested in how Rubin and company came up with the Crash Bandicoot character. He answers with the following anecdote:

Crash was designed by multiple Naughty Dogs and two Hollywood cartoon designers named Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson. We did dozens of paper sketches, and then we bred them together, picking the best features from each, and adding new mutations along the way. After dozens of generations, we had a 2D Crash. Then we modeled him in a 3D package, and further refined his attributes to work with the added dimension. Finally, we put him on the PlayStation, and refined him yet again to make sure that features stood out, and that he worked at the resolution and with the number of polygons that we were using. The whole process took about four months.

Speaking of Crash, if Rubin had to summarize it into a paragraph, what would he say is the key to Crash's success? He ponders the question, then answers:

Crash Bandicoot, the character, appeals to the broadest variety of people: young and old, male and female, Japanese, North American, or European. Most first-time Crash purchasers, regardless of nationality, are buying from advertising, promotional material, or the box cover. If the character fails, then the game fails. Crash excelled in this department thanks to both a good original design and Sony Computer Entertainment's amazing worldwide marketing campaign.

With this in mind, was Jak & Daxter any easier, more difficult, or about the same?

Jak and Daxter's design process was similar to Crash's but it took twice as long. We asked more opinions and had more experience as a group. We also designed Jak and Daxter in conjunction with our producers and marketing teams from Sony America, Sony Europe, and Sony Japan. We set out from the beginning to make a character that appealed to the whole world. Crash was designed in a less global manner, and I think that only luck and a great marketing effort by Sony facilitated his international appeal. Overall, I'm more excited about Jak and Daxter than I was with Crash. I love the way they look, and I think that they have more possibilities for growth as characters.

Want to catch Rubin's advice on game design? Fling yourself back to Chapter 2.

Toby Gard, Confounding Factor

You may not be too familiar with this designer's name, but chances are you're aware of his most beloved creation—Lara Croft. Toby Gard left Core Design as lead graphic artist and game designer on the revolutionary title Tomb Raider, to launch his own development studio alongside fellow Core Design lead programmer Paul Douglas. Their first game, Galleon, is an epic action/adventure scheduled for a 2001 release.

In a minute, we'll get into creating successful characters. (And Tomb Raider's Lara Croft is as successful as it gets—complete with her own live action movie starring Angelina Jolie!) First, a few words from Gard on general game design.

Your objectives should be contingent upon your resources. If you're forced into using a type of technology, such as a certain engine, or are limited in any other way by your platform or programming, then you have to come at your design from that direction first. For instance, at its most severe, if you're making a Game Boy game, then you already know you're limited to it being 2D and having pretty serious speed and memory restrictions. No Quake 12 for you.

Assuming that you'll be making a game for the PC or one of the newer 3D consoles, however, as is more often the case these days, your restrictions are pretty loose. I prefer working from this direction, because you can take a pure idea and you know that in some form you'll be able to make it happen—however hard that route is. So then you need an idea, right? Well, I think we all have about a million of them each—it's whatever gets you excited, like wanting to be in Star Wars or showing people how much fun snowboarding is. Then all you need to do is go down to the pub and talk endlessly with your mates about what would be cool about it (or preferably with whoever you're going to make the game with).

During that time, you need to be constantly solving the "How the hell can we do that?" technical questions. Even if you're just saying stuff like, "Well, we need shadows. Quake does shadows, so how are they doing that, and can we use a similar technique?" During this period you should be thinking an awful lot about how your control system will work. I'm a believer in compressing your control system down to the minimum number of buttons to achieve your aims; that way you tend to get an elegant rather than a cumbersome control system. You're basically aiming to be in the position where you have such a clear idea of what the game will be like that you can actually play it in your head. When you can do that, if you're visualizing it hard enough, you'll be able to see and address loads of the flaws in the idea before you've implemented a damn thing!

Therefore, the three most important things for me are a) visualize the control system, including game mechanics; b) have technology ideas for how to implement all of the above; and c) write it all down!

	Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, Gard's claim to fame. Also, a shot from Gard's next project, an action/adventure epic for the PC and Xbox, dubbed Galleon.

When creating a lead character for a video game, Gard says to be sure you really like what you've designed; then other people have a good chance of liking it too. He expands on this notion:

If you aren't sure about your character, dump it. If you experiment all the time, drawing without any particular purpose, and explore avenues that look good in a fairly freeform sort of way, at some point you'll get something that you just instinctively know works. Then, you see, you'll start to love the character, and that will shine through in your work because the character starts to take on its own personality through your drawings. I think that's probably it—you need to design and redesign again and again, until you can't anymore. Then just draw that character about a hundred times (having fun with it), and you'll be there. Well, that's the method I use.

Can Gard offer are specific do's or don'ts for creating a hit character like Lara Croft?

• Make a character simple and clear; look at comics to see why. Your art should be an iconic piece of graphic art, as well as a nicely rendered piece of art. Example: gray, black, and yellow = Batman. Bold sections of color and a simple overall design. Whatever style you draw him in, Batman is always Batman because he's so iconic he's almost a logo in his own right.
  
  
• Do something radical. Almost everything can work equally well turned on its head. Most people are sick of seeing the same sorts of characters, so break the rules.
  
  
• If you want people to take to your character, then you should have respect for it. It should have admirable qualities; it should be something you kind of wouldn't mind spending a few hours stepping into the shoes of.

After all, that's the whole point, right?

Yuji Naka, Sega

As president of Sonic Team Corporation, Yuji Naka has worked on a number of beloved Sega games, including Nights, Samba de Amigo, Phantasy Star Online, Sonic Adventure, and others.

Through an interpreter, we chatted with Mr. Naka about game design and creating successful lead characters.

Asked to give some advice for those interested in making games for a living, Naka's answer was to try and create a game with its own unique identity (regardless of what others are doing) and to add as much feeling and character into the game as possible.

Speaking of characters, Sonic the Hedgehog is one of the world's most recognizable video game mascots. How can someone create the next Sonic?

Characters produced from the games are naturally born of the fun elements of the games. Because it's much different in that respect from animated cartoons and movies, think about the game itself and then create characters.

The game's movement and flow are the necessary reason why Sonic was born. There originally was Super Mario, and although much different from Nintendo's character, we designed—not as his rival—but as a game that we can be proud of on the same level...and Sonic was born.

On finding inspiration for games, Naka says he tries to direct his attention to various kinds of things in his everyday life—like everyday entertainment, for example.

What's the best advice Naka can give for creating massively-multiplayer console games such as Phantasy Star Online? "Carefully create the means of communication." That is, one of the most important points is the communication among the game players. So when you create a game such as Phantasy Star Online, you should think about what communication means to the gameplay.

Does Naka believe multiplayer games are the future for consoles? He responds, "I guess it is in a way, but I don't think it's the only way. I would say that 30 percent of players will become multiplayers and the rest won't."

Naka emphasizes that the user interface (see Chapter 14) is one of the most important considerations for the game designer: "Games that don't take the interface and controls into account have not been successful in the past—they're the most important points in the game itself."

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Suzuki, Kojima, Ancel, Schaffer, and Newell

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