• By Eliza Gauger
    Jul 28, 2006 6:20 PM 1,991
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    #gta

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    Tim Schafer Shows Us How to Do That

    Tim Schafer seems smart. Like, really smart. I am extremely impressed with the very simple, very true little bombs he drops over and over in this recorded lecture from GDC 2004.

    Yeah, it's long. But for anyone interested in creating any sort of fictional experience, be it games, movies, books or Crecente/Bashcraft slashfic (we call it Bashfic), this will be a valuable hour and five minutes for you.

    A very few of the many points Schafer makes about creating good characters:

    • Characters should be wish fulfillment. This doesn't mean they can't be goofy, or nerdy, or losers. There are lots of ways to make characters that are fun to play. Guybrush might not be a badass, but he always has a comeback.
    • Create supporting NPCs as you would the ideal road trip buddies. Making them annoying, offputting, needlessly stupid or generally hateful and then sticking the player with them through the whole game is just sadistic.
    • Write the PC as you would a character in a movie, a character that a good actor would jump at playing.

    More after the jumpasaur.

    • Backstory. Making up pasts for every single one of your characters, big ones or not, makes it insanely easy to imbue them with neat little traits by pulling from the past you've created.
    • Steal stuff, but steal it right. Steal stuff from life, especially. From your own life, from your friends', from crazy things hobos tell you on the street. And steal stuff from other fiction, but don't steal the surface junk. Steal what makes good things good. So if you're stealing from GTA, stealing the hookers and mobsters and violence is missing the point. Steal the fun, the open-ended gameplay, the facetious attitudes.

    I'm taking better notes on this speech than I ever did on anything in the history of my school career, so I'll stop. Just give it a listen; even if you aren't a creator this will give you a whole new way to look at and appreciate games. Eliza Gauger

    Listen to the lecture here, and subscribe to the Gamasutra podcast [Gamasutra]


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