Twitter poll votes asked for ‘Creating the Characters’ first by a healthy margin! So let’s introduce that today :D !
Global Game Jam 2019 and Scope
Everything begins with the Global Game Jam 2019 that started off this project. We had to establish all the basics of the plot quickly, so we could focus our time on creation. Team Leader Heiden, who also has a lot of experience making VNs before, took the lead with setting the project’s scope as small as possible. For the characters, they requested we stick to three!
Sticking to Conventions, Playing to Strengths
We knew we wanted something set in space, and we decided to ‘stick traditional’ and try a simple otome-type structure with a female main character and two ‘suitor’ type characters. Our Head Artist Debbie had a lot of experience with drawing animals and fantastical creatures, so we decided having one of them be an alien would be interesting and cool. Our other artist, Mira (me!), mostly had experience with drawing people only, so I was assigned to drawing the other two. We assigned tasks and also decided story elements based on our own strengths, in this manner 😊 .
We decided quite early as well to make the aliens a non-binary species. Making the whole game cis-het-standard wooouldn’t have been my personal favorite plan, so I was really glad when our artist mentioned this idea just as I was thinking it. It was like she read my mind!
Confronting the Unknown
To be honest, since we all met for the first time at this jam and had no idea what to expect from each other, we were a little nervous about what kind of beliefs or backgrounds the others might have been coming from.
We live in an area that isn’t exactly the bible belt, but also not exactly a diversely liberal utopia either. It was one of the biggest reasons I was nervous about even going to the game jam, myself! So throwing out LGBT-friendly ideas was almost a kind of testing-the-waters to feel each other out too. Like, "Aaaaare these guys cool, ooorrr are they... iiiiiignoraaant...?"
Well, as we got to know each other more, we thankfully realized that we share quite a lot of values and interests! So no wonder we got along so quickly!
Working within Limitations to Form the MC's Focal Core
So, our brainstorming process happened both quickly and organically, as the four of us considered our scope limitations, setting, and the possible story that could work around ‘What does home mean to you?’
We decided the main character would be mixed heritage and torn between her two sides, so from that focal point we could decide that the alien ‘suitor’ represented one side and the ‘human suitor’ the other. Depending on choices made, the MC would end up deciding where she felt she belonged and whose ‘side’ she chose. With that core as our focal point, we built ideas around that.
Team Idea Melting Pot
Like throwing everything and the kitchen sink in, any idea that we came up with, we seemed to try to cram into the characters somehow. Heiden thought the alien should be a war prisoner, I wanted the captain to be the ‘fake-cheerful ace-pilot type’, Liam came up with the daily broadcasts as a recurring event, and Debbie jumped on the idea of a friendly robot companion and drew it out immediately. There was no real formal process, nor much deliberating.
The main character did change their occupation a few times. A soldier, an ambassador, a civilian, before we finally settled on a humanitarian doctor, thinking of ‘Doctors Without Borders’ as an inspiration.
When the characters' overall concepts and core personalities were decided, the artists were focused on drawing them (Debbie and I), while the two writers discussed the details of the story and started on the script together (Heiden and Liam)! This whole process took up, oh, the first 1-2 hours? :)
Q&A with Heiden
And now it is time for a 3-question Q&A with Team Leader/Writer Heiden! Heiden is the only one of us that has made a game before. Over half a dozen, even! One of her games is even up on Steam, free to play for anyone curious :) !
She was also our Lead Writer during the game jam itself, hammering out a whopping 12k words with her writing partner Liam, with plenty of time left over for her to do ALL the coding on top of that!
"Where did the inspiration for names come from?"
"In 2015, I and two others in a group had created a game called Helena's Flowers, which was a retelling of Homer's The Iliad with an all-female cast in space for Yurijam 2015. I had a lot of fun transposing those characters, and it was an idea I had wanted to return to in the future.
For GGJ 2019, once we decided our game was going to take place in space and was about the theme of "What does home mean to you?", it seemed like the natural time to return to those ideas . Although this game isn't a retelling of any Homer stories, I still drew on the same themes I had used for Helena, thus leading to us using Greek names for the characters and places in the story.
This did end up backfiring a bit when no one knew how to pronounce some of the words (Ogygia: Ogeeguh? Ogiahguh??? ), but at least that was where these names came from."
(Psst! You can PLAY Helena's Flowers HERE for free! ^_^ )
"How did the theme of the GGJ effect your ideas and conceptualizing of the characters?"
"Whenever I make multi-route VNs, I try to make the routes as different as possible, usually reflecting different perspectives on the same topic.
The theme of "What does Home mean to you?" led me to thinking about the different ideas surrounding the ideas of home. Was where you grew up your home? Was "your people" your home? Did the idea of where your home was change over time?
It was these ideas that led to the distinctly different characters of Odysseus—Aeaean captain who hails from the same planet that Athena grew up on—and Chiron—Ogygian war criminal with ties to Athena's heritage. One represents her connection to the physical place she grew up as a minority, while the other represents her connection to a land she herself has never truly seen as a native, but where her ancestors lived."
"How do you usually create characters for your past games, and in what ways was the process different or the same for you for this game jam working with a team?"
"In past games, I tried to create as many different personalities as possible, and then pit them against each other, hahaha. For this game I was a lot more hands off, since it was a group project, and I wanted to make sure that everyone had a say in how the characters would be developed.
There was also more pressure to make sure the game performed relatively well, since it was a group project, so I wanted to make sure that I wasn't taking the story/characters in directions that no one else would be interested in."
Thanks for sharing, Heiden, and that won't be the last Q&A from people in our team, nor the last we'll hear from Heiden either I'm sure! ^_^
Sorry for the lack of pictures of the actual character-art and design side yet! That will be for the rest of the 'Creating the Characters' mini-series :D . There will be a blog post covering step-by-step the creation of each character from thumbnails to final sprites and concept arts, so look forward to them!
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Thank you for reading! <3
Mira from The Far Rings Team