COP2: Visual Response 2: Characters

After developing an idea for a narrative but getting stuck, i began developing the characters. From what i learnt from my reading, and from undertale, i knew i had to make a handful of characters with very strong personalities. I did this by first scribbling down some ideas for unique characters, and necessary characters for the narrative.

I wanted to keep the amount of characters small as to not overwhelm myself, and really focus on individual characters. After this i began scribbling down some ideas for characters. A lot of this stemmed from previous character designs and research, as i used a character i developed for COP1 and a character i developed for Character and Narrative earlier this year. Below are my initial sketches.

These were the final character designs I created. I made sure that they all looked distinctly different from each other as to not get them confused. I will then use the characters colour pallets to help determine what background colours to use for each of their areas.

After developing the main characters i had to develop their personalities. This was a lot more difficult that i first expected. Some characters were easy, particularly the character the player plays as, as a blank slate is the perfect main character to help the player imprint themselves onto it and help create immersion. Some were easy because i already had a character in mind, such as the little pill robot and the hippie gardener robot, who i knew exactly what roll they would play and their personalities to begin with. However I really struggled to come up with a personality for the bad guy or the CRT head guy. Perhaps because i had to develop so many characters at once.

The next characters i developed were the non essential background characters, which were made in the same way, first sketching out, then making proper character designs with colour on photoshop, then coming up with some character traits.

I based the designs on real world robots, with a little bit of my creative drive thrown in. I then also developed the enemies you would face in the game by adding some elements that could link back to the main antagonist.

When it came to deciding on personality traits, i simple wrote down small thoughts of quirks they could do. As they aren't main characters i didn't have to write in some kind of personality trait that was required in the story. I had the most fun designing and writing these characters.