Character Development - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 143

bright and cheery; the red and blue of his uniform recall the American flag. Batman,
the Dark Knight of Gotham City—a much grittier, more run-down place than
Superman's Metropolis—dresses in more somber colors.
Sidekicks
Hero characters are sometimes accompanied by sidekicks. A tough hero may travel
with a cute sidekick (or vice versa) to provide some variety and comic relief. The
cheerful look of Miles “Tails” Prower, the two-tailed fox who accompanies Sonic
the Hedgehog, complements Sonic's expression of determination and mischief.
Sidekicks appear in many action games: Jak and Daxter , Ratchet & Clank , and so on.
Link from the Zelda series has had various sidekicks. Banjo and Kazooie were, in
Banjo-Kazooie , really only one avatar; they could only work together (Kazooie rode
around inside Banjo's backpack). Later in the series, they began to operate indepen-
dently some of the time.
Sidekicks offer several benefits. They allow you to give the player additional moves
and other actions that would not be believable in a single character; they extend
the emotional range of the game by showing the player a character with a different
personality from the hero; and they can give the player information she wouldn't
necessarily get any other way. Link's fairy in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time ,
for example, doesn't do very much, but she offers valuable advice at key points in
the game.
Additional Visual Design Resources
This is not a book about drawing or modeling, so it can't address the actual tech-
niques of creating character artwork. However, these crafts are an essential part of
the process of character design, especially if you prefer the art-driven approach. If
you would like to know more, consult Game Character Development with Maya , by
Antony Ward (Ward, 2004), and Digital Character Animation 3 , by George Maestri
(Maestri, 2006).
You don't have to purchase expensive soft ware to learn to draw and model charac-
ters. There are many free tools available. Among the best are GIMP, the GNU Image
Manipulation Program, for editing bitmap pictures; Inkscape, for editing vector
graphics (line drawings); and Blender, a 3D modeling tool that approaches the
quality of some packages costing thousands of dollars.
Character Depth
The visual appearance of a character makes the most immediate impact on the
player, and you can convey a lot of information about the character through his
appearance, but you can't convey everything. Nor does his appearance necessarily
determine what role he will play in a story, how he will behave in different