Hello, I'm in the process of designing a game and as such I have come across a forked road in my designing. At first I was planning on having 3 main characters, but have had the thought of adding one more character, but I'm unsure as to if this will ruin the story by adding more POV's to the plot line. I was going to use this to even out the sexes with 2 boys, 2 girls (at the moment I only have 1 girl). This was to enable more relationships with the characters but maybe I'm adding too much drama to the game. Thoughts please? -James-

It really depends on the scope of your project. I assume this is going to be a story driven game? I would say try it out with four characters, and if it gets to be too much, take the fourth out. Don't make the story with three, then add the fourth afterwords, because then she'd just be a minor character.

On a side note: a story with four characters is definitely doable. Everyone likes variety!

Nothing wrong with drama in a game. In fact, good drama can help draw players closer to the characters.

The big question you need to ask yourself is if the fourth character will help your story or not. If the answer is no, don't do it just to be even. That's never a good enough reason.

Remember, your game is an expression of a message or story you want to tell. Don't water it down by trying to please all groups (which you can't do). Even if you add a second female character just to even out the sexes, you will have the same issues when it comes to race.

You could go down the path forever trying to please everyone and never get there.

For example, let's take your game one step further and you decide that having four white characters isn't right. So, you make two of them black. But what about asian and hispanic (and don't forget the native americans!). You can't win.

Just write your game the way you want to write it. It's your story and we want to experience it the way it was meant to be told.

John

I agree with borngamer. Don't turn it into Captain Planet where you need to have at least one of each race and gender in the story in order to please everyone. That's been done to death and it's blatantly obvious to everyone.

I'd probably stick with the 3 characters. You seem to have a grasp on those characters and are just wanting to add the 4th as balance. Keeping with two guys and one girl means you can have a love triangle or something too. =)

Having two of each doesn't mean it will balance well either. It just means you're going to have to include 4 people in a plot instead of 3. My mentioning of a love triangle doesn't work well when you have an extra girl sitting on the sidelines. The more characters you add, the more story you have to write and the more complicated things get.

It also opens the doors to not focusing on characters enough and you eventually have underdeveloped characters that could have been left out all together.

Persona 3 for the PS2 is a really good example of how do do characters correctly in my opinion.

The main character is silent, but you are often given chances to reply to other characters. The choices aren't always "positive, negative, random", either. Sometimes it isn't even clear what response you will get. My favorite example of this is when you are on a date an the girl asks "Would you rather have a boy or a girl?" The response choices are "A boy, A girl, and I don't care.". There is a different response for each choice, but NONE are wrong.

The other characters in P3 fall into 3 catagories, characters that are involved in the story, characters that have social links, and generic characters.

For the characters inolved in the story, you slowly learn about them over the course of the game. You are often given chances to talk to them, which increases your knowledge about the character, but most of them are optional. Most character development happens with him in the story.

Social Links in P3 are a interesting gameplay mechanic. You power up your characters abilities by making friends at school. For these specific characters, you can choose to delve more into their story by choosing to hang out with them after school, which triggers cutscenes that delve into the story, and give you conversation options that let you get closer to that character.

There are serveral unnamed characters that exist, but they just say different things throughout the course of the game, and aren't fleshed out. The one I can remember the most is a girl who stalks the guy she likes. Throughout the she will talk to you about liking the guy, and you can find him and he tells you he knows about the girl. Throughout the course of the game you can find them around school and talk to them and eventually they are together :P

/rant P3 is too good.

I'm still undecided on the addition of another character. I may try the idea of writing out both stories, one with 3, one with 4, and see what I come up with. I may come to a point in one where I can't go any further or when it starts to get too complicated or the like.

The other option I had thought of that would make it easier to add the second girl, would be to make her a good character, but later on in the game she decides that evil is the better way, and eventually you have to fight her. Not sure if this would make her a major character, or just a slightly bigger role than minor...

Depending on the type of game, I would advise not forcing the story of each character into the players face.

You could provide some mechanism so that players learn more about characters they are interested in, etc.

Another main factor is game mechanics.

In my project, there is a need for people in groups of five, for nearly everything. Thus, when casting the characters, I went with a core group of ten, divided into two groups of five. These numbers are pretty solid, because of how they fit the game's mechanics; no shoehorning is required. In addition to this, the total number of ten fits the plot and setting to such an extent, that I would use that number anyways.

Which means that the question, is how the number of characters effects the game mechanics.

Well in the one I am designing, there is a group of 3, but that doesn't mean there can't be a fourth member, maybe to add some extra help, but I don't know...just ideas

So a fourth character would simply be a mindless chunk of flotsam, thrown in to adjust difficulty? The danger that you may run into, is that tacking on additional people will end up bloating things, and lower diversity. Unless you have an extremely strong point of leverage within your plot, that fourth character might just end up damaging what you have created so far.