Characters! Characters! Characters!
Mar 01, 2015
As Ron and I work through the design and associated character story arcs, in addition to the five main playable characters, we've determined there are around fifty more characters that live within the confines of the Thimbleweed Park universe.
Each of these requires a written description (approximately a paragraph or more) of their function within the game, personality and some amount of backstory so we can determine how they might behave within the perspective of the story. What are their likes and dislikes? Where might they have gone to school. Did they go to school? Do they have siblings? What scares them? What makes them happy?
I also need to make sure they are visually unique, consistent and iconic enough that a player can easily recognize them as they become familiar with the cast of characters and their settings. What's someone's profession? How would they dress? How do they interact with the other characters?
All this drives the character's visual design, also in case of creating this style of character (at least for me) I like to arrange everything I've done side by side in a single photoshop file as I create them so I can constantly compare and reference what I've done so far as part of an ongoing iterative process.
I also tend to use iconic items and clothing to reinforce personality and function, these can be a concept from out of my head or referenced from online. I usually use google image search and it's interesting that an iconic representation of an item wether it's a bottle, a phone or a pistol has pretty much remained the same over the last 50 years and that most players can immediately recognize an item even when it's reduced to a small number of pixels (I think the media has done an amazing job of getting our brains to recognize iconic representations on a screen) .
Once a character's front facing pose has been drawn it's fairly straight forward to create the matching side and back views, followed by walk cycle and any special animations it requires.
There are still quite a few left to do and some of them won't make the final cut and we'll play with skin tones, races and sex. It's all about exploration.
- Gary
Do they own a café or something?
You two guys are going to make a cameo?
This looks awesome, btw. :D
It would be nice to see character cameos from Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken in the game, really.
I hope there will be a poster or at least a wallpaper with a collage of all the final characters at some point, no?
They don't belong in the game. It's just distraction....
They should work really hard!!! :o)
:)
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that.html
http://www.abandonsocios.org/wiki/images/d/df/Maniac_Mansion_-_Dave.png
this is off-topic, but I wouldn't know where to post else. This question bugs me for quite a while, so I hope you can enlighten me. Concerning the musical score of games: why is it that mostly all of the old adventure games had a theme song that had a memorable melody you could easily hum and remember? I am talking the Maniac Mansion, Zak Mckracken, Mokey Island tunes. Also I find the music from movies like India Jones, Star Wars, Ghostbusters etc. very catchy.
I was a little "disappointed", that Broken Age, although very atmospheric, didn't have a catchy tune. Also , I don't dare to say it, I would not be able to remember the Thimbleweed Park trailer tune. Hope I am not stepping on toes here. Is this something that is decided or "just happens".
Regards,
Pedram
I can't speak for Broken Age, but there is probably this desire to feel and sound more sophisticated in modern games, and that might drive people from simple, memorable melodies that sound like "video game music". Just a guess, but it's great feedback on our music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz_uLNdf2Fg
Basically he realized in the final stretches that he should make a tune and whipped up something quick. And that's, I think, is how most memorable tunes are born.
I propose a "lackmustest" for catchy tunes! Everything that translates easily to ASCII is proven to be catchy:
Indiana Jones: Daa Da Da Daaaaaaaaaaa, Daa Da Daaaaaaaaa
Imperial March: Dan Dan Dan Dandaran, Dandaran!
I immediateley thought of Gilbert & Winny! :-)
what program did you use to make the characters???
can i help you? yes? yes? for the love to videogames :D
His chatlines should consist of:
1.My brother, Jacob made a little jingle back home.
2.la, la la la la, la la la
3. it's so popular, people shout his name.
4.excuse me? sorry, that's my name too.
His chatlines should consist of:
1.I can't talk, i'm playing a game.
2.And the first rule is not to talk about it...
3.Care to join? i'll give you a 3 hour head start.
4.Some say it's the most dangerous of games.
1. My parents once asked, what do you want to be when you grow up?
2. TA-DA! People should not make career decisions at age 7.
3. I just read a book about a clown, Did not end well for him.
4. Despite the smile, I'm actually Red, White, and Blue... How patriotic.
The "Female Clown" should be called: Eva
1. This is a male-dominated field, I just trying to get my piece of the pie.
2. This makeup is like SPF 3000, SPF being: Single, Protection Factor.
3. Smart, Funny, and Good Looks. Can you guess what one i got?
4. Unlike some girls, I wear too much makeup and funny shoes on purpose.
The depressing looking main character looks too much like I do. How can you get escapism if you're staring at your real life carton-copy?
If I was the designer here, I'd test removing the "staring straight to the camera" (staring at the player) as default pose except for when the character was truly talking to the player (or group conv), perhaps when making a joke about previous game or stuff. (default to slightly angled pose, then turn to face the player to make observations)
I'd also look at more ways to draw the mouth if faced to "camera". I'm very much like these characters - grumpy stares all over. That's why I prefer Zak who if stupidly grinning all the time. However if this was my game I'd have the character default to neutral stare and if the players idles too long not doing anything, and tell some insult and then briefly grin to the camera or whatever with some blink in the eye etc, or do some funny "impatient animation" or other kind of visual jokes. If the player idles still after few jokes put on a permanent grin but briefly flip it to frown just for laughs.
When the character has last walked left, I'd use "idle pose" like the woman at the bottom with hand not-straight and face turned at slight angle. If there was multiple characters in group conversation, then that might call for the front facing pose. I'd probably only do this for the main characters as they're the ones player sees the most and you want the player to want to be that character. (yeah maybe there's a lot of people who want their own face in the game but I've never been such and it just pisses me off to see someone so similar there and none of the main characters look anything I'd like to play with - so that's largely why I'm not handing my money - same argument with the LSL1 kickstarter - the character just looked annoying and to top that off there was some sloppy animation and no one wanted LSL1 remade either - it barely got funded. If he'd made the missing LSL4 then I might've funded it despite some style issues. I told all this several times during the KS and then reviewers made same comments later. I'm half expecting Terrible Toybox to repeat same mistakes because stubborn & grumpy people like myself generally don't take any advice from similar people)
likable characters (from 1:1 scale character.png , just zooming it to 150% with bilinear fuzzy filtering caused some changes in what I felt from the characters)
row#, char# from Left or Right: (full size png)
100% zoom:
1,L1
1,L13
1,L15
1,L17
5,L2
5,R5 (IE zoom to 150% or 200% ruined this due to some sort of blurrying filter effect - Crazy that 200% zoom causes that!)
Most likable of course is Spock (even ignoring the glued-earlobe look)
I'd probably like to play with my idle look as 1,L15 or the plumber wing dude or Spock. Last resort would be 3,L1 nerdy look.
One of the characters looks way much like Mr. Game Developer and coincidentally myself. Grumpy middle age guy. I really don't like to have that in my game as it ruins the whole escapism deal but I guess you're going to force it? Well I'm not buying the game then. I usually play as some hot chick but none of these are to my taste.
150% zoom
1,L16 (it seems all characters with some stuff on their head are somehow more likable to me - grumpy faces neutralized by the silliness?)
1,R1-2 (borderline likable)
1,R3 looks like bit as if she just commanded you to do THIS instead of whatever you were doing but might also be neutral pose for some people
1,R6 disappointed or frustrated? not neutral that's for sure - the strong contrast above eyes has something to do with this + the small black area in the mouth
2,R8 potential for likable but this face is "hey I'm busy (work related) what do you want?" Could go for some sort of stereotype senior police office worker or academia high official.
4,L1 neutral but the head ornament and symbolism brings it up to "wassup dude?" level
4,L3 "hey lets get this deal done with (my lawyers made it sure I win here)"
4,L5 The purple colors almost
6,R7 One tooth old hag. I might want this on my team so she could then be voice acted my some old one tooth hag throwing around some wisdom and references to things so old no one knows what she's on to.
(IE11-downscaled res thumbnail size, likable looks)
1,L3
1,R2
1,R8
3,R2
3,R3
3,L2
4,R3
4,L3
4,L5
4,L1
... I didn't go every row here as I figured the emotions would differ depending on scaling.
Also, the graphical style of this type of game doesn't lend itself well to isometric or views where the character isn't mugging directly into the camera. Asking them to change that is somewhat akin to slapping their legacies in the face. Everyone has an opinion, and yours certainly isn't wrong, it just leans quite heavily against the well-established grain of this genre.
I have to apologize now, because I'm a fan of these games too, and I'd be annoyed if somebody told me my post wasn't valued. Of course, now I've misquoted myself, because the heart of my point is that you did a lot of work which probably didn't help anyone specifically.
1) I don't expect that and I stated that very early in the post
2) It was stated that I initially used other than 1:1 scale. I left the non 1:1 comments to illustrate how much difference few pixels make - I'm sure the artists found nothing new in my post beside the argument of the main character possibly shattering escapism/immersion for myself (perhaps escapism isn't the point of the game, I just don't know yet for sure) - I'm sure most of the "ideas" in the post were from past games the blog author was involved with and I just thought it would be fun if those features were present yet again
3) A misunderstanding I need to correct in your reply is what I said about the character facing the camera. To state what I said in other words: I know the characters are going to face the camera just like in say Maniac Mansion etc, however they can still be drawn at any angle out of 360 degrees. I think it would look better if they faced at 0 degree angle (straight looking into eyes of the player) only when making remarks or talking to the player. When idle, if they could be drawn at say -20 or +20 degrees or whatever.
1,L15 (the guy on the top of the blog header) - his feet are suggesting that he's not facing straight to the player but his face and eyes are.
So which is better idle look? This or the one where the face is also at an angle? Well maybe it depends on the character. But I just noticed I don't like if both the feet and eyes are suggesting straight "in your face staring". Some people take that as a challenge coming from strangers.
no update for eight days...
Are you guys broke already?
Just joking!
This must be the best devblog ever, so I'm really just looking forward to the next update!
Keep going!
Thanks
http://www.eevblog.com/2015/04/18/eevblab-9-meet-dave/#disqus_thread
47 speaking roles (https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/stateofthegame4),
Mare than 80 NPCs in the circus scene alone according to Big Red Button (https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/podcast65).
More than 26000 characters on this page.
Tonight, Nor Treblig. He has reached the "500,000 copies" goal, and he's going for the final goal: "1,000,000 copies".
There are no choices for the last question.
Here it is, Mr. Nor Treblig:
How many distinct users, based on the names appeared on the Blog, have written on the Development Blog of Thimbleweed Park, so far (Feb 27th, 2017) ?
https://gist.github.com/NorTreblig/507e3e8379d1678c44973e3e80dab2ba
Congratulations, you won!
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.
.
...I have written over 1300 comments?!? What a spammer I am!!! :-D
https://gist.github.com/NorTreblig/21c61be2729d0171e58618617ff9ff3c