coming up with characters

once chrome has all of the sprites done, i plan on publishing a post on lemmasoft and possibly finishing a proper website for aspen.

everyone's character cards will look something like this:

at least for the main characters. (shriek, prism, cyan, and... maybe jackie. i'm still contemplating whether or not i should include their portrait in the game.)

you'll notice that i include their good qualities and bad qualities. not that they are in direct correlation with one another, but hey. they're there.

what qualities come first: good or bad? bad. bad, bad, bad usually comes first. i like having bad or morally grey characters. prism is the exception since he's intended to be a good person. i feel like it's fine to have the amount of good traits outweigh the bad or vice versa, as long as the character still seems well-rounded at the very end.

in this sense, i feel like prism is lowkey a bit more complex than the other characters. he does have bad qualities, and they will be touched on in his character card. but they aren't as... crippling as they are for everyone else. probably because he's a robot, and made to focus on one specific thing.

is it bad to have one note characters? no. these one notes can end up becoming symphonies. prism was intended to be one note, but as i ended up writing as him and building the world he ended up being a lot more. i'm happy with him, and i feel like a lot of other people will be intrigued with him, too. i kinda wish i had more for cyan, but since his personality is so strong i feel like it's fine.

it's great to have characters that are deceptively one note. riley comes across to jackie as someone that's pretty superficial and only really cares about superheroes, but it doesn't take long for them to find out there's a lot to riley as a person.

how do you build your characters? is it around the world? the world and scenarios characters are in can greatly affect how they play out in my eyes, but not always. prism's complexities were built on/around the world he was made in, sure. however, cyan's complexities were made well before i had a good grasp on how the world of aspen is going to work.

riley's even more so. riley is interesting to me, because i didn't really acknowledge some of his flaws as actual flaws until i wrote him for a good long while. at least not as big flaws like they are now. in his original source material, he still loved superheroes and exploring ruins. but it's impressive to me how differently he acts in such a different situation. 

he still loves vivacious women, fucking a lot, and running around, but since he's bound to a hospital bed in that scenario he's much less accepting of... pretty much anything. riley is much more spiteful in his original source material, and that much more desperate to find a way out.

how do you design your characters? ideally, i like to reflect my characters' personalities or interests in their designs. cyan is a bright, bubbly, colorful character who takes a lot of pride in the band he's in. so i try to reflect that by giving him bright, white clothing that has subspectrum's signature colors on them. when i think of his band's genre, i typically think of glass animals so i took dave bayley's bomber jacket and slapped it on him too.

prism is fully focused on his function as a superhero. he takes a lot of pride in his colorful fighting style, so i gave him a colorful outfit! he likes colors! a lot! but his speech pattern along with the way he carries himself and his beliefs make him pretty... rigid. so i elected to make his design pretty fuckin geometric.

riley was honestly just a character i ended up with in a dress up game. i feel like it's a good start if you don't know where to go with appearances. it also helps if you don't really know what a character should act like by getting the design in first. since he ended up with red hair, i decided to make him pretty firey and bitter... honestly, riley is a bad example of character reflection in design so i'm not gonna talk about him a lot haha. all i really got to say for myself is that his interests take a lot from indiana jones so i wanted to give him a brown jacket like indiana jones.

why are you talking about this? i dunno, i'm really proud of my characters. i want to talk about them, but it's very important i don't spoil their backstory or anything. so if i talk about them just freely like this along with my philosophies for design it fulfills my needs without ruining anything. win-win.