Where do your characters come from?

[RATED-RKOFRANKLIN]

Where do your characters come from? Some professional video game developers based their characters off of friends and famous people. Most notablty in MegaMan X5 that the 8 Maverick bosses are named after the Gun N' Roses members. Are your characters based on people from your personal life? Are they named off someone famous!?

My characters are based off of myself and friends. I find this to be the easiest way to create characters. I do have some characters who are not based off of anyone.

 

[Link]

A base them off of my many personas and personalities >.>

 

[Indinera]

I often make easter eggs such as the GNR reference that you mentioned, but never for playable characters.

 

[The Infamous Bon Bon]

I usually base them off of people who inspire me, which is mostly friends and family, but sometimes its famous people like I plan on including a character based on Rachel Maddow.

 

[Lunarea]

My head.

In all seriousness... I don't intentionally (ie consciously) base them on anyone specific. As I'm working on the game concepts, they tend to sort of come alive and pretty much write themselves. I just start thinking about their motivations or basic personality traits and roll from there. Once more details about the game/story come together, the character will sometimes evolve too. I always have a very strong idea of who the character is and what they're like before jumping into making the game inside the editor.

 

[Espon]

While in the past I based them off friends, these days they're almost all of my own creation.

I don't fully flesh out the characters when creating them. Once I start working on the story I get a much better idea about how they act and what they do. Normally characters end up being far different than what I originally came up with, some just don't fit in very well and I end up radically changing them.

 

[Levi]

In my current project the many of the characters, places and items are named for Real and Fictional people.

 

[Genii Benedict]

I've named the recurring (hopefully! dun dun dunnn...) character in my present game after each of my Sons. I will also be sneaking in cultural references in all aspects of gameplay, as there is nothing I enjoy more than finding easter eggs in games and movies. Nothing too pressing - you shouldn't have to go searching for them...

 

[C Frost]

My head.

In all seriousness... I don't intentionally (ie consciously) base them on anyone specific. As I'm working on the game concepts, they tend to sort of come alive and pretty much write themselves. I just start thinking about their motivations or basic personality traits and roll from there. Once more details about the game/story come together, the character will sometimes evolve too. I always have a very strong idea of who the character is and what they're like before jumping into making the game inside the editor.

Pretty much this.

Actually... exactly this. Are you in my head? :wacko:

Ok, one difference: I will start work within the editor before I have a strong idea of what the main character(s) is(are) like, but that would mostly be world-building: mapping mainly, and some database stuff. I find that early on in the process, I do a lot of tinkering with the program- making maps, playing around with enemies and items, etc. Just making things, some of which may not even end up being used in the final game, but the tinkering itself helps me to come up with ideas to further develop the game and story. I think it's because I love world-building: it's one of my favorite aspects of story creation (whether for an RPG or for a novel).

When it comes to real people, including people I know (i.e. friends and family), having a character that reminds me of someone, or shares the same name with someone, can sometimes be sort of weird. Like, I'm writing about this person that almost could be my friend only not quite...I dunno, it's hard to explain, but it's something I actively try NOT to do. This applies to basing a character on myself, as well. I had a couple of stories back when I was MUCH younger where the main character was basically an avatar of me in the fantasy world, but over the years, my interest in that ebbed away, to the point where now the very idea is something I dislike.

 

[servantb7]

I'm sometimes inspired by good characters on tv or in books. I'm planning to have a couple of the characters in my current game roughly based on characters from Les Miserables.

 

[RavenTDA]

I agree with Lunarea on this. I don't really try to base the characters off of anyone. I too have a "get to know 'em" phase and they end up writing themselves, which is sometimes a hard point to get to but once there it's great. Sometimes their will be at least one aspect of my own personality I place into the character just so I myself can understand them better but then there is always at least one trait you probably share with a lot of people, including someone who isn't like you at all. For example there's a little something of myself in all 3 main characters in my game but each character is a complete contrast of the other.

Personally, basing characters off of real life or fictional characters isn't such a good idea. Real life people aren't like fictional because you're able to get to know them over a long period of time. In fiction you have to make the personality of the character “pop” so you are able to get to know them better. Basing characters off of fictional ones... well they'll only be a shadow of what you think that character is. I always think it's only the writer themselves that know the character the most and always know more about them than what they represent in the game/book/show/whatever. If you want to write about someone else's characters I always think fanfiction is fun.

Cameos for NPCs are a little different. Sometimes there's just so many NPCs it's hard to come up with stuff over and over again. It can be funny too to see something like that. But for the main characters, I'd really try to stray from this... unless of course your game is a fan game then of course the characters aren't yours. ^^

 

[Reynard Frost]

I base my characters off of roles. I take a core conflict idea and the cast stems from that. I look at a role that needs to be filled for a situation and then I develop the character to mesh well with that role. I ask myself tons of questions on what that character would do and go from there.

Lots of wandering in the brain space leads to the birth of interesting characters.

 

[Probotector 200X]

My characters tend to be mostly be "combinations" of traits and aspects of other characters, intentional or not. That's how I do things. Sometimes I see a character that I really like and want to make a character like them, but just in some ways, and I usually add enough other traits and such that they almost seem nothing like the character they are based on. I've even got ideas for characters when writing dialogue for fangames actually...While some of my characters come from who knows where...it's like, "Am I really that weird? lol"

Oh, and for the record, for Mega Man X5, the Guns 'n Roses names were kind of added almost on a whim in the translation. I heard one of the people on the localization team's husband was a huge fan of the Guns 'n Roses so she went with the idea of the Guns ' Roses names for the mavericks. The Japanese version still had the "something-animal" (but with some variance) naming scheme. As a matter of fact, the US instruction manual has semi translated names, like "Spiral Pegacion" for "The Skiver", so he's "Spiral Pegasus", but I think some of the Japanese maverick names were like that, Pegacion as opposed to Pegasus, and the translated versions started keeping that from X6 onwards...like Blizzard Wolfang, Flame Hyenard, Wild Jango, Tornado Tonion, etc.

 

[Chaneque]

Sometimes, I base them about my friends, myself and family. It's not very good to base a hero off of me, because I'm quite cowardly and unkind and horrible and nasty and people tend to hate me easily.

And on other occasions, I like to base them off people in my class or other classes that I know. Sometimes I like NPCs quoting things people I know have said.

Though I do prefer to make them up in my head, as it's easier to understand what they would do and what they would say rather than someone based off of a friend, because you don't always know how they would react. You can guess, but that's about it, really.

 

[Jeneeus Guruman]

My characters mostly came from out of nowhere!

What I mean is that I just get the characters from my random ideas and some came from the things I observed in my surroundings.

 

[The8th]

Most of my characters are based either on people from real life (i.e. friends, family, and love interests) or from aspects of my personality/life experiences.