In developing character classes for Blackstar, we decided to handle them in an iconic fashion. To the design team, this means conceptualizing the entire class as an individual, a single character that embodies the core philosophy, attitude, and visual design of the class. This way, the class comes to life in ways that a generic approach cannot. Our initial development effort is spent creating a compelling and interesting representative of that class, a compelling personality, rather than just a simple role.

Meet omicron-Walker

This methodology feeds the rest of the process in a number of significant ways:

• The art team creates a more striking visual concept for an individual than a generic class description evokes.
• Gameplay design reflects the idiosyncratic style of that particular character class.
• The character’s animation style emphasizes that unique personality far better than a generic class description.
• In some cases, publishing partners find it easier to grasp an iconic character than a generic class description.
• Promotion and advertising is made easier when these iconic characters are intrinsic to the game, rather than being added as an afterthought or later in development.

A common theme from all of this is that it serves to unify understanding of the character. At Spacetime, it is essential that we get the entire team onboard and familiar with all aspects the game we’re making, and the creation of iconic characters aids that immeasurably.

One example of this development is our iconic Operative character: omicron-Walker. This article will walk readers through the process of conceptualizing her and how the development process shaped her into an iconic role in the universe of Blackstar.

At the first pass level of development, we decided that to best represent our characters and races, we’d distribute genders and races equally across the classes. As it turned out for the Operative class, our iconic character was a female Mode.

Without revealing too much, here are some core elements of this class/race combo.

• Operatives: Operatives are highly-trained covert operations specialists. Trained to survive in a variety of harsh environmental conditions and gravities, the Operative is focused, agile, and extremely reliable. Because of their strong dedication, Operatives are often assigned to suicidal missions or missions with a very high possibility of failure. Their core gameplay styles are stealth, speed, and damage avoidance. The characteristic that Operatives embody above all others is “Spirit”.
• The Mode: Mode are a race of sentient robotic beings, the end result of highly sophisticate biomechanical design and guided evolution of artificial intelligence. Originally constructed to serve as companions and servants for Humankind, the Mode are recognized as sentient beings and are full citizens of the United Colonies. They appear mostly Human, though with some obvious telltale signs indicating their engineered nature. Mode have long evolved past “models” or series, and each one is distinct and original in appearance and development.

In the Blackstar setting Mode can undergo a great deal of body modification and customization, so a Mode Operative would be smaller than average – a smaller body mass directly translates into enhanced stealth capabilities and a smaller starfighter cockpit (meaning a smaller overall mass). So our Mode Operative is small of stature, like a jockey. This decreased physical mass aids her immeasurably in covert operations. She’s also got an incredibly strong and forceful personality, fearless and unwilling to accept anything less than the completion of her mission.

Mode have their own name traditions. Their “first name” prefix is often a Greek letter, equivalent to a loose family or cultural identification. Some (but not all) Mode assume Human names to reflect their heritage, sometimes choosing names from history, arts or literature, or even from influential people they admire. In this case, we have omicron-Walker. She identifies with other Mode using the omicron prefix, though they aren’t necessarily anything alike. As for the surname Walker: there are a number of famous people named Walker in history and in fiction. (As a writer and longtime comics fan, I enjoy that the name of our stealthy, ghost-like character name evokes another Walker: “Kit” Walker, also known as The Phantom.)

Exploring the Character
Once we’ve determined who we’re doing as a representative for a particular class/race combo, the next step in our process is to flesh the iconic character out using a variety of techniques. As with each of our iconic characters, omicron-Walker receives the following pages in our internal wiki:

• An Overview page covering her class description, aspirations, relationships to other characters, gameplay roles, gameplay styles, technology themes, and inspirational references from media.

• A Visual Design page giving technical considerations, mood and background, suggested aspects, with inspirational imagery. For omicron-Walker, the characters from pop fiction that evoke the core aspects of the Operative are as diverse as Jason Bourne (the Bourne film trilogy), Æon Flux, Snake Eyes (G.I. Joe), Major Motoko Kusanagi (The Ghost in the Shell), Trinity (the Matrix film trilogy), Leon (The Professional), Selene (Underworld), and Wai Lin (Tomorrow Never Dies).

• A Ship Visual Design page covering her starfighter, covering all of the same ground as above, treated identically as a character. Blackstar ships are highly evocative of their pilots, creating strong player identification between the player and ship avatar. Some of the suggested visual references included the SR-71 Blackbird, the (never-deployed) F-19 stealth fighter, the F-17 Nighthawk, the MiG-37 Ferret, and the B-2 bomber.

• Two short pieces of Visual Design Fiction—literally short stories. One about the character and the other about her ship, both depicted in action. These aren’t too long or involved, but give a dramatic hook and a simple gateway into the character.

• A Gear Progression that covers weapons, armor, and other wearable items, at three key level plateaus, showing the character’s distinct visual evolution as gameplay progresses. This describes each piece of gear in some detail as well as noting the technology that makes it possible. Operative armor is embedded with stealth technology and is plain white—a better canvas for its chameleonic properties to work. She uses paired pistols to inflict massive and immediate damage on a target, and to emphasize the need to go “gear light”, these weapons are gun-blades, projecting solid-phase holographic monoblades when omicron-Walker needs to go hand-to-hand with her opponent.

• A Starship Upgrade Progression that covers customization and the upgrade path from the ship’s initial appearance and functionality at various level plateaus. This follows the same process as the standard gear progression, described above.

Once complete, everything gets filtered through our concept team’s unique visual style to arrive at an iconic character with a look distinct to the universe of Blackstar.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Developer Blogs . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.