Character Creation Just Gets Weird Sometimes

One of the things I like most about NORA is that it's a very character-driven game. So much of it revolves around the relationships you create with a small group of men and women, and a lot of what may make or break immersion for the player is how well we portray those characters.

Now, this is kind of my jam. I love creating characters and developing their quirks and backstories. You know those 50-question character development sheets you can find in like, every class that has ever looked at creative writing sideways? I do that kind of stuff for fun. I came into development after most of the cast had been concepted, so most of my job so far has been fleshing out those concepts into more realized people. It's not exactly building somebody from the ground up, but, well, I can deal.

One of the tricks to creating a character that feels realistic is giving them a little piece of something very human. A quirk. A certain way of looking at the world. A nervous gesture. A song they can't stop humming under their breath. And you can pull these out of the ether all you want, but the best ones come from observation. It's kind of the trick to "write what you know." You have to go out and learn things, see things, meet things, in order to write them with any modicum of understanding.

To that end, well, I've used a lot of myself in the cast of NORA.

This one is the kind of introvert that likes recharging around a small group of people. That one constantly checks and re-checks that others are following their line of thought. This guy likes to make up narratives in their spare time. That girl communicates in metaphors to the point of obfuscation.

And it doesn't end with me. He has a small dash of my brother. She has a touch of my cousin's accent. He has the same laugh as my uncle-in-law. She has the stubborn streak of an old friend from college.

None of these are defining traits. No one person has become an insert of any real person I know. They're individual characters, wholly themselves while still managing to exist as an amalgamation of several people I know and several people the other developers know. It's some kind of freakish alchemy, I'll tell you that much.

But that's not really the weirdest part.

See, this is a psychological thriller science fiction game.

Which means that I am putting parts of myself and of my friends and relatives into an incredibly volatile situation.

Sometimes I realize that this person I am carefully crafting could potentially wrench the heart right out of somebody's chest and stomp on it. Metaphorically, I mean. Or physically, come to think of it. Maybe they could eat it in front of them. Maybe they'll just up and unpeel into a gruesome flesh-monster like that scary dog in John Carpenter's The Thing. At this point I wouldn't put it completely out of the realm of possibility.

That line of thinking, well... it makes me stare at the wall. For a while.

I should probably warn my brother that somebody who might behave vaguely similar is a potential flesh-peeling dog monster.

But, then again, he probably knew when he was getting into when his sister became a writer.

By Annie Craton
Design Lead for NORA