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Character Driven Game Design

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174<br />

<strong>Character</strong>-<strong>Driven</strong> <strong>Game</strong> <strong>Design</strong><br />

After these steps are completed, a very basic structure of the gameplay<br />

and character design exists. To continue making the design more<br />

detailed, iterating can be started by beginning to add more detail to<br />

characters taking into account the additional information about what is<br />

required to make them socially believable. The added characterization<br />

can provide additional or refined goals for the player which in turn requires<br />

addition thought about how the actions of PCs and NPCs trigger<br />

other actions. Iterating in this fashion can continued until the wanted<br />

level of detail and complexity is achieved. New iteration can also take<br />

input from play testing with various types of play testers (c.f., Rouse<br />

[34] and Schuessler and Jackson [35]).<br />

Case: Lies and Seductions<br />

3 The game Lies<br />

and Seductions<br />

is designed and<br />

developed Petri<br />

Lankoski, Tommi<br />

Horttana, Niklas<br />

Gustafsson, Kimmo<br />

Karvinen, Reetakaisa<br />

Neittaanmäki,<br />

Linda Kronman,<br />

Anne Parkkali,<br />

Raisa Omaheimo,<br />

Mike Pohjola, and<br />

Jari Suominen.<br />

Lies and Seductions 3 is a game designed using the methodology presented<br />

in this paper, and it used to illustrate the method. The game is<br />

inspired by a classical story Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons)<br />

by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (first published in 1782). The designer<br />

took the main characters and their relations as a starting point. In the<br />

story Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont make a wager on<br />

if de Valmont can seduce beautiful and chaste Madame de Tourvel. In<br />

the following first the character and conflict design is described followed<br />

by how the gameplay design choices were influenced by these.<br />

<strong>Character</strong> and Conflict <strong>Design</strong><br />

<strong>Character</strong> and conflict design of the game went through many iterations,<br />

which we are not discussing in detail—only important choices<br />

are depicted. <strong>Design</strong>ed team chose to inverse the roles in the conflict.<br />

The player character is Abby (counterpart is de Valmont) who makes a<br />

wager with her friend Becca (counterpart is Marquise de Merteuil) to<br />

seduce Chris (counterpart is Madame de Tourvel) the lead of a Christian<br />

rock back, publicly promised to stay virgin until marriage. Abby,<br />

Becca, and Chris and are on holyday cruise. Chris is traveling with<br />

Emma and Ed, the bass guitarist in Chris’s band.<br />

Emma and Ed were introduced as the designers wanted to complicate<br />

the conflict, and make it possible to give players more choices. Seducing<br />

Chris should be impossible without some help from his fiends,<br />

but getting Ed or Emma to help should not be straightforward either.<br />

<strong>Design</strong>ers wanted to make Abby blackmail Ed or Emma. To help forming<br />

positive allegiance with Abby, Lord James was added to design. His<br />

main role is to lower moral standards of the game world.<br />

The next step was to deepen the characters based on Egri’s dimensions<br />

to fill these functions (Egri’s dimensions were used in the design<br />

even before the following description, for the sake of simplicity this is<br />

not presented). For Emma and Ed, the designers needed sociological<br />

and psychological traits enabling blackmailing. They both like Chris

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