Character design, or The Origin of 'Rattlesnake' Jake Dawson

Think about your favorite adventure games. Gabriel Knight. Monkey Island. Broken Sword. Grim Fandango. The Longest Journey. The stories are very different, but they each have one thing in common: great characters. Whether the goal is to make your way through the Land of the Dead or solve the mystery of the Templars, the reason you care about your quest at all is because you like the characters in the game.

Sure, graphics contribute to the atmosphere. The story is crucial, too, and puzzles are important if for no other reason than that bad puzzles can ruin an otherwise perfectly good game. But there's nothing—NOTHING—more critical than good characters. And when it comes to characters, none are more important than the main character, who becomes the player's eyes, ears, and personality in the game world.

Developing an authentic and engaging hero can be a daunting task. And trust me, I speak from experience.

Building character

Enter 'Rattlesnake' Jake Dawson, the hero of my upcoming adventure game, Rise of the Hidden Sun. Jake sprang from my imagination as a distant, Wild West relative of Indiana Jones, with maybe a touch of Guybrush Threepwood on the side of the family that no one wants to talk about.

In my mind, the main character has to accomplish at least two things in the game. The first is to become a part of the game world, which involves giving him or her a quest that makes sense within the world you're creating. The second, and perhaps more important role, is to become an alter ego that the player wants to identify with.

I may be nothing like Guybrush in real life (in fact, I hope I'm not), but I liked becoming him in Monkey Island. The Monkey Island series developed this by making Guybrush into a sympathetic character with personality, wit, sarcasm, and ineptitude that became downright charming. And for this, we loved him.

Not every hero needs to have this same balance. The hero can be perfectly capable, or brave, or intelligent. April Ryan of The Longest Journey is all of these things, and we like her, too. The important thing is that the character has a personality that matches the game world you, as a developer, are trying to create.

In the case of Jake Dawson, I started with a storyline and a setting, and played around with a lot of different types of characters that might work. Would Jake be an inept hero like Roger Wilco? Would he be just an ordinary guy like George Stobbart from Broken Sword? Would he be a career adventurer like Indiana Jones?

As the story took shape in my mind, it began to make sense that Jake should be someone who would doggedly pursue his quest, and the next question I had to ask was, "What is his motive?" Does he want to find this lost treasure out of greed? Financial desperation? Because he likes a challenge? Because the fate of the world hangs in the balance? Because he wants to win the heart of a pretty lady? Because he has nothing better to do?

Any one of these motives is a starting point, and each leads to a different kind of character. They're also not mutually exclusive. Maybe he's just desperate enough to go on a treasure hunt, but over the course of the story he also learns that there's more at stake than just a pile of gold. Do his motives change as the story progresses? In what ways does he grow and evolve as a character?

Anatomy of a hero

After I got a good sense of who Jake is and what makes him tick, my next challenge was a visual one. What does this character look like? It's one thing to tell people he's a down-on-his-luck cowboy. It's quite another to show it. The design for the character needs to match the concept behind him.

I wrote a timeline of Jake's life. I figured out how he got to where he is when the game starts. I decided that by the start of the first episode, he's been beaten down a little by the world. He's not going to be wearing new clothes. His shirt is probably a little dirty, and almost certainly wrinkled and well worn. He's sort of morally ambivalent, so he wouldn't be wearing a white hat. He's also likely to have a five o' clock shadow and probably be a month or two behind getting his hair cut. These are the kind of details that are important to transfer to the look of the character.

Talk is cheap... or is it?

Adventure games are different than almost every other gaming genre because they typically involve copious amounts of dialogue. You can look at or interact with just about everything you see on the screen. That means that the hero of the game will probably comment on the things you see and do, which gives developers a chance to define characters by their words and actions in a way that isn't available in most other types of games. If you do it correctly, it can solidify the bond between the player and the character.

It's important to make sure that the character's dialogue matches his personality. As a developer, my first charge is to know my character. How would he react if a homicidal mime suddenly jumped out from behind a bush? Would be scared? Amused? Skeptical? Indifferent? Whatever the answer, my next charge is to write a response to the event that reflects his internal reaction to it, and remains consistent with the characteristics I've already established in other scenes.

In Rise of the Hidden Sun, for example, Jake encounters an old prospector who recognizes him as the 'Rattlesnake' Jake Dawson of a popular cowboy song. How Jake responds to this will reveal a lot about the character. Is he flattered? Shy? Annoyed? And, depending on the tone I'm trying to set in the game, is his response funny? Let's take a look at how I handled it, and see what it reveals about Jake. (Note that fellow writer Phillip Dyte, who frequents the AGS boards, also contributed to this dialogue.)



So what does this conversation reveal about Jake? For one thing, it shows that he's not exactly thrilled about the fact that there's a ballad written in his honor. (Which opens up another question—why isn't he thrilled about it?) It also shows that he's not someone to simply "take it" when someone annoys him. He's morally ambiguous enough that he'll pull a gun on an unarmed man, though here it's used as much for comic effect as for defining the character. And the whole exchange is also, I hope, somewhat amusing.

Conclusion

There's no one way to build a character. My methods may be entirely different than yours. In fact, I often think there HAS to be an easier way to do it. But the key is to find something that works for you, and not be afraid to ask others to critique your work. If your character is supposed to be cynical but sympathetic, let someone read what you're writing and tell you if you're succeeding. You might learn that the character is coming across as too cynical, and is hard to like because of it. Or, hopefully, you'll be encouraged by the feedback and find that you've hit exactly the right notes to achieve your desired effect.

That's all for this month. Next time, I'll talk about building the user interface that lets players interact with the game world.