If you’re a gaming geek, Mario is one such character you should be certainly familiar with. Character designing forms a crucial part of any game and is often overlooked even by the most experienced game designers. The role of a character designer or artist entails creating the entire concept of creating a character, its style, visual appearance, personality and many more throughout the entire game. If a character in a game does not evolve over the course of the entire game, it might not be termed as a good character. For example, if a character in the game starts from an initial status and at the end of the game still remains at the same state of personality, the game character does not do a good job. The primary goal of creating a game character for a video game is to ensure that the players can interact with the character at an intricate level through the way it talks, acts or sounds.

A game can be thought of as a carefully crafted optimization problem that a game’s character is trying to solve. There is a goal or an objective the character is seeking to optimize subject to various constraints or obstacles. This underlying mathematical formulation of the character’s journey is the entire process of the game. It is important for any game character designer to have a deep understanding of how the character fits into the game story and therefore it is essential to hire a best character art designer in case you are looking for bringing the character of your dreams to reality. At Juego Studios, the team of game developers and designers have a strong flair and diverse exposure to creating various real life characters who the audience can connect with at an intimate level.

Imagine a game without the primary character in it. Sounds weird, right? A character is not merely a visual object. It is a central object to any game as a character not only connects the players with the entire story of the game, but also addicts the player through an enjoyable gaming experience.

The key step in character designing for a video game starts with defining what the character should be like and how would be its personality. The below list of steps are essential while designing a character.

1. Character Location

This is often a first step while designing a character. The dressing style, height, voice and appearance of a character needs to be aligned with a specific part of the world. First deciding on where the character should be from is therefore an essential step in defining these attributes.

2. Character Details

The baseline stats of the character needs to be decided once the location is fixed. The hair color, color of the eye, height, age, weight are some of the demographic attributes to finalize.

3. Character’s Redeeming Traits

The most important attribute of a character is planning on it’s redeeming feature. This is a characteristic of the video game character by which the audience would know and be able to connect with. Characters can often be seen as kind, passionate, calm or vengeful, atrocious. The redeeming nature helps players to connect with the game’s character in a more measurable way.

4. Character’s Limitations

It makes a game often enjoyable when a character has certain flaws or limitations such as for example, the character is weak with respect to some aspect such as overcoming certain obstacles because of its height. Such flaws in a character engage the audience of the game in a way such that they expect with higher number of trials, the character would eventually overcome the obstacles.

5. Source of Character’s Motivation

A character’s motivation plays an important role in the entire game design. Whether the character is on a venture to cover the world or he is discovering the path after being lost in a jungle, the key objective of the character plays a very important role in defining the whole purpose of the game.

6. Backstory

A carefully crafted backstory can take your game a long way. Be it the character’s actions, strategies, ability to adapt to a certain environment and motivation – all of these are interconnected in such a way that it generates a great setting. This is a challenging task for any character desgning artist and therefore an adequate amount of research, planning and iteration needs to go on at the backend of the entire process.

7. Embedding Life to a Character

The character created by a game designer should look like a physical character and therefore it is important to have a deep understanding of the human anatomy, the poses. Application of subtle touches is an intricate skill that makes the character you design sit perfectly on the ideal features you would try to make. For example, if your character in the video game is a middle aged man from the US, there should be a certain color of his hair, a certain type of dress and shoes he would be better suited with. In the course of the game, when the character interacts with other elements it should be in sync with his character and appearance. It might be misfit for a character of a certain age group to listen to a specific song type or engage in a particular type of food habit.

Conclusion

A game character is central to the success of a game and is a core parameter in determining the liking and popularity of a game. A lot of emphasis generally goes into the audio-visual effects and color and background imagery of the game most often which leads to a strong aesthetic sense. While this is perfect for ensuring the success of a game, a character’s design helps provide the entire narrative of the game and ties the story with the audience in an engaging manner. If you are a business or an individual planning to hire the best character designer for developing your game narrative, Juego Studios is a one stop solution for such needs. The wide skillsets of the artists and designers with a deep blend of industry experience working on real life projects using the latest state of the art technologies would make your dreams of creating a game character a reality.