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By
Marc Saltzman
Gamasutra
[Author's
Bio]
March 15, 2002
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 Miyamoto,
Lanning, and Ishihara
Perry,
Broussard,
and Miller
Rubin,
Gard, and Naka
Suzuki,
Kojima, Ancel, Schaffer, and Newell
Garden,
Shelley, Steinmeyer, and Saunders
Tørnquist,
Gilbert, and Greenberg
Roper,
Householder, Taylor, Spector, and McGee
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This
feature is taken from chapter five of Marc Saltzman's Game Design:
Secrets of the Sages, Third Edition.
The
book is available inside Macmillan Software's Game
Programming Starter Kit 5.0.
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 Features
Game
Design: Secrets of the Sages
Creating Characters, Storyboarding, and Design Documents
Yu Suzuki, Sega
Also at Sega is the one and only Yu Suzuki, responsible for such fantastic
games such as the character-driven Shenmue, the Virtua Fighter
series, the Virtua Cop series, Hang On, Space Harrier, and
others.
While Chapter
2 houses Suzuki's answers on creating fun and challenging video games,
here we just asked him one question: How does he create such great characters
as Ryo in Shenmue? Suzuki says:
What's most important is originality. Also, by tightly creating
invisible parts like background stories or personalities of the characters,
later development opportunity will be broadened. And lastly, a note on
self-promotion: It's necessary to make an active effort to gain more recognition,
like exposure or advertisement to media such as magazines or home pages.
Hideo Kojima, Konami
The celebrated game designer responsible for the Metal Gear Solid
games was asked the discuss the importance of a lead character, such as
Solid Snake, and how to create a successful one.
This is a tough question. The lead character of a story is the
most important element. If you can't associate yourself with the lead
character of a movie or novel, you won't enjoy the storyline, no matter
how great the storyline is. This holds true for games. What's different
is that in games you control the main character. This is why it's necessary
to take into consideration the character's "compatibility" to
the viewpoints and psychology of all the people who would potentially
play the game. Maintaining this balance is very difficult. The basic character
description/setting, along with the character itself, is one thing. When
the player actually moves the character, the character becomes complete.
The player is the one who adds to the character what's missing.
Be sure
to turn back to Chapter 2 to read Kojima's advice on general video game
design.
Michel Ancel, Ubi
Soft Entertainment
As project director at Ubi Soft in Paris, France, Michel Ancel is the
designer who created the character Rayman, a huge international hit. He
stars in all the versions of the Rayman games (available on multiple
platforms) and for the past two years has been working on a top-secret
project to debut in 2002 or 2003.
Before we
dive into Rayman as a character, Ancel offers some game design tips. "Be
creative, be logical, and understand the player's point of view,"
he begins. Using Rayman as an example, Ancel continues:
The creativity aspect of Rayman comes from its graphic
style. We also tried to imagine some unique game sequences, like being
chased by a pirate spaceship or cooperating with a powerful but fearful
friend. The logic part is about the rules, the gameplay techniques that
you have to follow precisely, like the evolutions of Rayman, the level
of skills, the puzzles. And to understand the player's view, the game
must be playable for maybe millions of people. It means that we must consider
how people will react when playing. The typical questions are about the
controls, the story, the challenge, the rewards, etc. Are they good enough?
Easy to understand? etc. The questions that must be answered early in
the game's creation.
Is there
a special technique for creating world-renowned characters such as Rayman?
When I created Rayman, I didn't really analyze it. I just made
it like this because it was fun for me and my friends. I also wanted an
easy-to-animate character. Your character must not look like [other characters],
but at the same time he must appear familiar to people. That's a challenge
between originality and an easy-to-understand character.
Rayman is visually original, but in some aspects he's close
to what young people are wanting from a hero. The visual aspect is important
for the first impact. After this first feeling, the next one is about
animation. A lot of the personality is revealed by the animations—the
way your character move in common actions. The next and most important
step—especially for games—comes from his powers, his specific
actions. What can he do that will surprise the player? This is an important
question. The next and deepest aspect will come from his feelings, his
personality, the way he reacts in particular situations: danger, love,
surprises, victory, etc. You must consider all these steps of perceptions
and be sure that you're not completely copying another hero!
"Rayman
is 50 percent action and 50 percent humor. That's what most young people
care about," says Ancel.
Finally,
he discusses the issue of control (discussed in depth in Chapter 14).
Ancel agrees that one of the biggest challenges when making a game is
to make the control very intuitive and comfortable. The Rayman
series is a good example of it done right. Ancel explains why:
You must look at the player's reflexes. To avoid frustration,
you must think about what's natural for people. Test your new control
with your friends, wife, children—everyone who will give you feedback.
A single delay on the buttons, the acceleration curve of the camera—all
these parameters are important to tune if you want good control. You must
have more than 100 of these kinds of parameters in your game, and must
be able to change them easily depending on the player's feedback.
Tim Schafer, Double
Fine Productions
Some of the computer game industry's most beloved characters were created
by the affable Tim Schafer, who recently left an eight-year stint at Lucas
Arts to start Double Fine Productions. Schafer brought such memorable,
time-withstanding characters to life such as Manuel "Manny"
Calavera and Hector Lemans from Grim Fandango and Ben and Malcolm
Corley from Full Throttle.
According
to Schafer, wish fulfillment is the main secret to character (and game)
design. He explains:
Never forget that you're providing players with the chance to
do something they can't do in their daily lives. It should be something
that they really want to do, if just for a little while. With Full
Throttle, we were banking on the secret desire to be a biker: big,
tough, cool. Riding a huge hog around. Without a helmet. Ask yourself,
what's the wish fulfillment that I'm providing with my game? What secret
desire am I satisfying? This is more important in adventure games than
in a game like, say, Sonic the Hedgehog, because adventure games are always
about fantasy.
Schafer
comments on the importance of storyboarding and design documents for creating
adventure games:
We storyboarded every single shot that appears in Grim Fandango,
and it was invaluable. It helps the artists know what to build, what angles
it has to look good from. It tells the people who are placing the characters
in the scenes where everybody should be standing. People have been doing
it in movies for years, and games are just figuring it out now.
A design document is the game designer's bible for the development
of the game. It shouldn't just be a burst of ideas you scribble down in
the beginning of the process and then forget about as you enter the heat
of production. It should be a living document that you revise after every
brainstorming session to keep fresh and up to date. It's for the team
to reference when they (or you) forget what the plan was.
Take heed
to this veteran's advice: "If you don't have one, you'll drift off
target, I promise."
Read more
from Schafer on general game design tips and techniques (Chapter 3) and
how to create good puzzles in an adventure game (Chapter 8).
Gabe Newell, Valve
Software
In Chapter 2, Gabe Newell, founder and managing director of Kirkland,
Washington's Valve Software, talks about creating successful action games
such as Half-Life. He briefly comments here on creating lead characters
and writing design documents.
"Actually,
I'm not sure that a lead character is necessary, or even beneficial, in
first-person games," admits Newell. He continues:
We made Gordon [Freeman, the protagonist in Half-Life]
as transparent to the player as possible. The only time you ever hear
yourself is when you're breathing during the disaster sequence. We had
a bunch of third-person scenes, and we slowly realized that they were
hurting the experience, not helping.
However,
Newell does admit to using design documents:
We couldn't work without design documents. We have too many
people who need to think through all of the implications of the design
in all of the millions of details that go into a next-generation game.
Each hour spent on the design probably saves us 10 hours of implementation.
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