GDC Radio: Tim Schafer on Memorable Character Design

This week's GDC Radio podcast lecture, taken from our extensive archive of audio recordings from Game Developers Conferences past, is a lecture by Double Fine founder Tim Schafer (Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle) speaking at GDC 2004 on developing memorable characters, as described in the following official description: To create a truly immersive game experience with a compelling fantasy world, you have to populate that world with real characters. Not just characters that behave realistically on the screen, but characters that ARE real to you, the game’s creator. The more you know your own characters, the more real they will become, and the more they will help draw the player into your game’s imaginary word. It’s not enough for your characters to have distinctive speech patterns and tics. They need actual histories, motives, dreams, and secrets. Then they will have real depth with which pull the player in, and your fantasy world will be come a real place that the player loves to visit, and can't wait to get back to when they leave. This session explores techniques to get to know your own characters, and help bring them to life. Examples are drawn from Tim’s past games (Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango) as well as his current project, the upcoming XBOX game Psychonauts. You can now read more information on the podcast and click through to download this week's installment (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites). You can subscribe to GDCRadio.net podcasts using iTunes and searching the directory for GDC Radio or by clicking this link. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.