Monday 5 January 2009

Characters (I'm gonna start giving these blogs heading since I'm not sure whether they re in order or not)

Characters in games i think are equally as important and the story, for example, i personally don't think that some of the tomb raider games have very good or memorable story lines ( except legend which i gave my sister for Christmas, that story was easy to follow and because the game play was interesting i kind of enjoyed it). However because everyone remembers the character of Lara croft, the way she looks and the way she talks and acts the games are memorable.


Natalie and me were talking the other day about stories and characters in games and we agreed that after a while the grand theft auto games just got boring, if all your doing is running around pointlessly shooting people. After a while you will eventually stray onto the missions, and the storyline (which admittedly isn't very good)


This extract from http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000720/gard_01.htm explains how the development of characters has evolved with the development of graphics, game play etc:


"As games evolve into an increasingly complex and sophisticated medium, game characters are also experiencing a considerable metamorphosis. Just a few years ago, a game character had to be simple enough so that it could be represented clearly under very severe artistic limitations. Essentially, game characters were just icons, amorphous blobs, or tiny men rendered from a handful of pixels. But steady technological progress has slowly opened up possibilities for more believable and realistic characters. The question now is, how does a game developer leverage all of these additional technical resources to create more compelling characters? "


I agree with this in some ways as over time more advances cut scenes with better graphics have made it possible for a character to be shown off better and for its personality and actions to be made more defined. When characters like Lara croft are compared with characters from the Mega drive the difference is enormous. like the extract above said, earlier games were basically just moving pixels around a screen avoiding and attacking different things but now u actually care about what happens to the character., and i think that that is where the success or downfall of a character is, whether the player feels anything for the character, if the character isn't like able the user wont care whether they live or die.


oh and while I'm here I'm going to try to put a picture in:


haha i win!!
this is my favourite bit of work Ive done so far.
Part painting part photoshop :)

No comments: