hello you''re making a game right. and u have this really good story, and you have picked out a really evil sounding name for ur baddie. now what are u going to do to make your baddie "BAD"?? you could make him/her be a baby killer......but that has too many morals attached to it. you cant put that in a game!!! are u nuts ?? kill babaies?? yeah of course the user will then want to do anything s/he can to get that B%!&H. but ur game will probably never be release because of censorship issues. so then you think to urself, how can i make users really hate my bad guy. I want the user to to WANT to kick ass. i want the user to be so discusted, and have so much hatred to this bad guy, that even if the rest of the game is crap s/he''ll still play it just to kill this ass!!!. then you (being the genius that u think u are) put an obstacle in the game that makes it impossible to kill this guy. like he dissapears!! now the usetr has soooo much pent up anger. . . AND U JUST TOOK AWAY HIS AREA OF REALEASE. so now he goeas and beats the crap out of his little brother so how bad do u think the bad guy should be? how bad is too bad??
Al "For us it''s a natural disaster....For him/she it''s a damn memory leak..." [Triple Buffer]|[SCRIPTaGAME]|[My Old Site]

There''s no such thing as too bad. What there is however - and we see this a lot in modern movies/TV - is "too flat." The best bad guys are the ones with complex, intriguing personalities, with their own weaknesses and vices and virtues. Sometimes you really hate the guy, but sometimes you just want to root for him.

Just "bad" is applique, and the first thing you''re taught in drama class is how boring applique is (and your teacher mught use Keanu Reeves as an example - repeatedly). Your character needs to be bad for a reason, needs to have a motivation, and needs to always act in accordance with that.

In Mulan (yes, I know, strange example) the bad guy, his henchmen and his army come across two Imperial scouts. He tells them to go tell the emperor that he''s coming, letting them both live. Then he has an idea and turns to his archer. (Text paraphrased):
How many messengers does it take to announce my advance? ...Only one.

The action isn''t shown. Nothing more than his evil grin and the archer stretching his bow, but you know what happens. Now that''s bad!

Ooo I don''t know. This one is pretty tough. Have you seen Seven? I would say emulate that dude cause I can''t think of much worse than that. I like the idea, but I''m also not sure I want to play a game where I actually have EMOTIONS towards the people I''m killing....

Somewhat of a moral dillema you''ve brought up. How bad is too bad. Hmm, very good question

Make him as bad as you can imagine, push the envelope, get your game banned in 25 states, at least it will have media attention

When I saw Oluseyi''s post I was thinking Seven too.That is by far the best development of a villian I have seen in a movie(it didn''t hurt that Kevin Spacey is a great actor).

Seven is an excellent example. The bad guy has motivation - an insane obsession with "punishing" people for the "seven deadly sins" - and is sufficiently flawed and complex. He then turns the scenario inside out by making himself the seventh sinner and the protagonist (Pitt) the judge. Brilliant. Bad!

ok so thats a bad guy in movies, and while we''re on the topic i always thought that the baddy from swordfish (john travolta) made a "good" bad guy. u didnt like what he was doing, BUT on some insane level there was some kind of truth to why he was doing what he was doing.

but how bout games. what about the badguys in games. i think creating a bad guy for a game is much more harder. because u have the added element of user interaction. and you have to have the user interact with your bad guy to get rid of him....it dosnt happen how you want it to happen like in the movies. in games u have to find a way to make the user make it happen.

ok so what if ur bad guy has done so much bad. but then "turns"...s/he starts showing emotion, his decision starts getting affected by the "good side". now u think th euser would appreciate somethin glike that. maybe the user still wants to kill him. but now since in ur design u''ve made him good. u make him unkillable.




Al
"For us it''s a natural disaster....For him/she it''s a damn memory leak..."
[Triple Buffer]|[SCRIPTaGAME]|[My Old Site]

It really depends on how much interaction vs story you''re going for as well. The more story your going for, the more you can dramatize it. But I think it would be more interesting if you get to interact with the main bad guy several times BEFORE the end of the game. Sure if you kill him, no more game right? What if the game isn''t quite scripted, so you might meet up witht he bad guy early on and see something hes doing, know hes the bad guy, and just shoot him then. Now he''s dead. But because you didn''t have any evidence to convict him (assuming you play the cop) you go to jail for it. SO you gotta wait it out and get evidence to prove the guy is pure evil. You gotta outsmart him. But you don''t know WHAT he''s going to do next, cause its not totally scripted.

Whatever the game is, you have to take care to make him believable. He can''t just be another supervillain trying to take over the world. He has to have motivation of some sort, and he has to have some depth or you won''t be able to get many people to feel anything about him.

If anyone has seen the anime "Now and then, Here and Now", the bad guy in that is quite interesting. He''s a bit mad, and he''s OBSESSIVELY in love with the "good" girl, he also has quite a superiority complex, but the way he acts is so entertaining to watch. The destruction his game causes to people''s lives is truly evil however.

And for the record, I can''t watch another Kevin spacey movie after seeing that without getting nightmares

Antagonism.

While its quite important to carefully construct an antagonist figure through history and events, its more important that the antagonist is tailored for the protagonist on the personal level. If you watch the movie "Enemy At The Gates," Jude Law and Ed Harris, while never meeting face to face, complement and antagonize each other. In the grand scope of the historical fight going on, these characters both became irrelevant, however the story followed their little sniper''s duel. Theres also the Seven example. Its one thing to be a truely fucked up badguy, but a direct antagonist sometimes works better.

-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.

this reminds me of ''unbreakable''

make the bad guy someone who you trust and confide in,
who helps you out when you need it. then you find out they''ve
done something horrible and evil.. what do you do?


-eldee
;another space monkey;
[ Forced Evolution Studios ]

I always though dr soran the ''baddie'' in star trek :generations was good. He was obsessed with living forever, was generally a reasonable guy, but had been driven to think that we would all die anyway so it didnt matter how. Thus he was going to kill millions as a by product of getting himself to the nexus. He wasnt a classic villain, just a guy whose morals had been twisted by a unique look on life. the deaths of people had just become irrelevant to him
And he was played by malcom mcdowell

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