Character customization.
This is one of the biggest draws for me about a game
Give me an avatar and then give me the power to really make him my own.
Or better yet, give me a blank slate and set me free!
Lots of games offer customization, more so now than they used to, and I hope its something that continues to grow. But that customization usually stops at the face, about 5 or 6 generic hair styles, and a handful of clothing sets from the early the 90's when we were just coming off the silliness of the 80's.
But beyond visual appearance...
Is their anything we can do to add more “character” to our character?
Even if you have a game with a really nice and robust set of customization options, and you can make your character look like just about anybody you want...
Is their anything else that we can do to really make our characters Characters?
Well for starters, How about animation?
Animation is what pretty much gives any good looking character model life. Its visual in a different way than your standard customization options are, and its the one thing that will really make you believe a character is who he say he is.
The way a character moves speaks volumes about emotions, his state of mind, his/her personalty in general. But in games that offer visual customization and no animation options you're custom character is restricted to behaving in a way that might not be right for him.
Maybe its the way he walks, or the way holds a gun. Maybe its even in the way your character just stands? Whatever it is, something isn't quite right.
Whats happening is that instead of the animation giving your character life. Its instead giving you an obvious imitation of life, and without the ability to adjust the animation, you have no way of correcting it.
Ever see a friend mocking another friend? Part of the reason its so funny, is because its so wrong.
Its so “out of character” for the friend doing the mocking.
If you're interested in looking...
There is an NPC in Assassins Creed that looks pretty silly. His hands are out to his sides and he looks like he's constantly trying to keep his balance, or maybe like he's dropped a load in his pants and he's trying to walk without people noticing.
When I saw this I thought to myself... “that's the stupidest walk cycle ever.”
and then as I started to walk away from the scene I noticed I was walking that way.
The NPC has Altair's Walk cycle, but because he is not Altair...it just looks very strange.
With a few key animation focuses we can avoid issues like that happening to our custom characters.
(Saints Row 2 is a game that proves it)
First... animations specific to core gameplay we have to concede. If we start messing with those, theirs a good chance that the game will fall apart altogether. Unless the developers deem the animation safe to have alternatives for, we'll have to let them be.
But there are 2 major common animations we can target...
Idle animation.
Even when your character is just standing around doing nothing, there is a big opportunity here. Posture tells us a lot about a character. If he stands stall, slouches, or if he's hunched over.
These are the things that give us clues about the characters demeanor.
Walk/run cycle.
Is this character skipping gingerly, walking with purpose, just striding along?
This gives us the same clues that that posture does, but may be more important because its a deliberate motion on the characters part..
Theses are decisions developers make when they are developing game characters.
When developers offer the player a variety of character customization choices to decide how the character looks, they should make sure to also allow him to make the decision about about how the character moves. Without it, you're given the ability to create a visually stunning cast member for the game, and at the same time prohibited from giving that character any kind of substance, or worse, the wrong kind of substance.
4 comments:
Depends on the type of game, no ?
I'm all for customisation in some games but it can be more of a hinderance.
Like ff10, one of the things that bugged me, was the fact in all the voice acting (voice acting was generally terrible but that's another story) they never called the main character by name, cause you could change it, drove me nuts.
Also, people will often make the stupidest looking character possible, cause it's midly funny.
like in Eq1 they bought out the ability to dye your armour. I ruined the ability to tell what armour someone was wearing which you could have done before just by looking and dickheads where running around in hot Pink and eye melting yellow.
If devs offer it. they should be allowed to look as stupid as they wish, and through animation act just as stupid.
with the voice acting it would be pretty neat if you could string together some pronunciation sounds that make up your name.
(I think that was Yahtzee's idea)
Hell on the audio and data management though.
But the day a game refers to my character by name "Assholio" will be a great day for the industry.
Haha, Mik, Marna doesn't want to believe that about FFX because she never noticed it before. It's bugging her now. XD I haven't really played it so I didn't know either.
Even though it's probably not the genre you had in mind, in Guitar Hero: Metallica, the character is very customisable, right down to some of the animations.
Yeah, that'd be a good example of what I was talking about, like in Guitar Hero, it doesn't hurt to have character customisation cause it's just a bit of fluff, it's not really important to core gameplay.
Like fighting games as well you can pick and chose your moves, and it's not bad there either. Even though I think learning how to move your character and destroy your opponent with the tools you have is part of the fun of those games, it doesn't matter about the storyline cause that is about as good a dish water is for drinking, usually.
Like in MMO's there is a good chance in that someone will look like your fucking clone. You spend (if your like me) an hour or two fucking with the 22 or so variations you have until you pick the same damn character look as last time and 3 minutes later have covered it all up with Armour, so can't see it.
At the end of the day it's a gimmick rather than a core part of the game imo.
Oh and I'm right about the FFX thing, trust me :P
Post a Comment