VA-11 Hall-A has presented us with many (And I mean it, MANY) challenges. In a way it’s been like those Trainings From Hell you see in anime. Where the main character faces unorthodox means of getting better while faced with a pressing deadline.

Among the many challenges we’ve faced, one of them has been the character creation. Up until now we only used really minimalist casts (The project we were working on before we shifted to VA-11 Hall-A had 6 characters at most), but VA-11 Hall-A required a bigger headcount. The main problem was making every character (Characters that the player had to sit through, no less) as unique or memorable as possible instead of just throwing them out there.

Luckily, we managed to find a sweet spot in our character creation skills that will help us in the future too. What follows is an effort on summarizing the main points in the process of creating and/or including a new character in the roster.

1- Try to pitch your character to someone.

Picture yourself trying to talk to a loli, only that this loli just so happens to be a very important producer. You found her in an elevator and now you’ve got a chance to try and convince her about that one character you’ve been trying to create for a long time. Her attention, however, will only last as long as the ride in the elevator lasts. What will you do?

Our first step when creating a character was coming up with a really simple way to describe it, and if it didn’t sell the character with just that or didn’t sound nice enough, we retooled it until it did. With the prototype our three character ideas could be summed up as “Sex-working lolibot”, “Kind-hearted mercenary” and “Christmas Cake Hacker” and for the Prologue it was “Stern-looking anti-enhancements veterinarian”, “Robotic office fuckboy” and “Racist Corgis”.

This not only allowed us to make sure every character we threw in would be different from the ones that came before (Avoiding characters from feeling same-y), it also gave us a base to work with.

2- Polish it.

Alright, you convinced the loli to produce your character. Now you need your character to do everything it can to stay in the people’s minds. You might have convinced the loli to produce your “Blonde girl with a big red ribbon that happens to be quite cheerful” and it might be good for your own game/story, but there’s a lot of those out there.

Polishing your character is actually quite easy. With your pitchfork in hand think about what you like about that kind of character and what you want to avoid.

For example, when coming up with Dorothy we wanted to keep the things that usually make the loli type of character appealing. Namely being cheerful, sincere and talkative. At the same time we wanted to avoid making her look like a bitter sex worker, while also avoiding making her look or act too vulgar in any way (Mostly making her comments come out more like jest rather than an invitation), all of this in an effort of trying to create a sex worker that doesn’t come off as an effort on being edgy.

Just this will help you get a colorful cast where you can avoid characters from feeling too same-y between them while also making them stand out (Even if a bit) in the player’s mind. But when the characters are a focus point, when they’re not just some passerby but rather a full-fledged character important in their own way, you need to go a bit beyond just this. This isn’t just about the loli producer anymore, this is PERSONAL.

3- Give depth to your character.

“Character depth” is one of those things that sound too pretentious to be good, but it’s not. While we usually associate “Deep” with stuff like “Pretentious” or “Artsy”; “Deep character” just means a character whose personality goes on beyond what you see at first. Some go about it the “easy way”, just making a character that’s blatantly one thing and then reveals another side (The tough guy that ends up being sensitive for example), but even this can come out as shallow.

We’ve got our “Character pitch” already, so now you just need to ask yourself some questions: What made your character like that? What kind of past does it have that has forged it to become like that? What does it like? What does it hate? To make a character human you only need to keep in mind that the character existed long before entering into the plot, that it doesn’t exist just to move the cogs of that specific story, that its past isn’t limited to that one pivotal event that keeps coming up. Your character might have family, a job, hobbies, silly fears, a minor health condition that isn’t deadly. That slight change in mindset can do a world of difference.

Of course, you don’t NEED to show or explain everything you’ve thought about, and most of the time the depth of a character has to be proportional to the amount of screen time. But believe it or not, all of this shows up one way or the other when writing. Speaking of which…

4- Let your character “Sink in”

Writing can be like acting at times. You need to get into the character’s mind, you need to be both parts of a conversation, keep in mind two different individuals in the same exchange.

You’ve got your polished character by this point, now you need to let it sink within yourself. Get to know your character, start treating it like how you’d treat an acquaintance or someone like that. If this was a date you already know the basics and have seen what your character likes and doesn’t, now you just need to know the small nuances.

Why is this important? Because it’s the final part of creating a character. At this point you’ll start nailing all the small stuff: Vocabulary size, how foul-mouthed your character is, choices of words, how it’d react to the most common kinds of interactions.

Here’s a good exercise: Just picture how would things go with your character in the following situations: Being with family, being with friends, at work, at a restaurant and shopping stuff. Try to think about those like you’re remembering something they did rather than just making it up.

When you start treating your characters like human beings, it starts to show up in the way they develop. Case in point: Kunihiko Yasui, Iori Yagami’s voice actor once commented that the King Of Fighters staff treated their characters as if they were people, making ever-so-slight changes on them to reflect every single development they went through. 

We make a big deal out of “Creating human characters” but when you get down to it, it’s silly. They say it’s easier to write what you know and unless you’re some biker mouse from mars I can’t see why “Human” would be an alien concept.

I guess in the end it’s the same as when you learn to draw. You just need to put in the canvas what you really see instead of what they’ve trained you to see.