3DFILMMAKER

Ego Central to Machinima Filmmaker Ken Thain

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Character Development Techniques in Games

With machinima riding the line of game development and filmmaking, I found the following article interesting.
As games continue to mature and become more sophisticated, the expectations for production values become higher. These production values include graphics, music, and story. Story is the result of character development: what happens to the characters as events transpire around them.

Character development in and of itself isn't going to make your gameplay any better, but it will create a more satisfying experience because you're furnishing a more well-developed context, a more immersive world for the player to explore.

(further on..) So these well-developed characters will engage the audience and immerse the player in a well-developed fantasy world. I'm not just talking about heroic fantasy, either. These techniques are applicable to a wide variety of games. In all cases, we are creating a fantasy world that the player can discover and explore. That illusion can be shattered by uninspired writing and character development.
I think this is important because machinima gets pulled into the 'game' frame of mind by the audience/viewer. Other than a few key machinima films, you can clearly see the gaming roots in machinima, and therefore, are more easily taken out of the story. Finding and expressing your depth of story, environment and character emotion/conflict keeps the viewer on track with your vision, and gives you far more mileage and forgiveness on working within the limitations of your resources or game engine.

Gamasutra

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