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 Post subject: How many characters
PostPosted: Fri May 04, 2012 3:37 pm 
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Joined: Mon Mar 26, 2012 6:51 pm
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Just asking but how many characters in a game would you consider to fit these profiles of how hard a game is to make:

Easy
Medium
Hard

Like would medium be 4-6 or even less to you?

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 Post subject: Re: How many characters
PostPosted: Fri May 04, 2012 4:07 pm 
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IMO, 10+ would fall under the hard difficulty, while 3-4 is easy and 5-9 would be medium. But truthfully I think the real difficulty of working on a game comes from the amount of content you want and what you want to do with your story, especially if you're a one man team doing all the work. This is the main reason why I sort of stopped working on RPGs and moved on to visual novels, since VNs don't require as much work as an RPG does.

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 Post subject: Re: How many characters
PostPosted: Fri May 04, 2012 6:20 pm 
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The difficulty is more reliant on how much you want to develop each character and the story itself. Having 50 characters would be insanely hard if you were to want to develop all of them significantly, but if you didn't really do that, it could even be considered easy. Having a story with just one character could be incredibly difficult. In the end, characters are just one factor. You have to consider the subject, the length, the complexity of the story itself, and many, many, other factors. Depending on your own skills and abilities, certain stories will be harder to do than others. I would have trouble writing sci-fi, for instance, but it could be easy for others.

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 Post subject: Re: How many characters
PostPosted: Fri May 04, 2012 9:09 pm 
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Joined: Wed Sep 29, 2004 1:38 pm
Posts: 1494
The more that a character has a *significant* role, the more time you will need to dedicate. If the person shows up in one scene and does not say or do much, then you do not need to spend much time or effort developing the character. If the person has a role in the story, but can not be described as a main character, then prepare to spend a modest amount of time.

If you focus more on plot or gameplay than characters, then you will probably need to balance your time use and efforts.

It's up to you to determine the scope of your game. Do you want to create a simple story that has only a few characters? Do you want to create an epic or a complex game? Something in between?


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 Post subject: Re: How many characters
PostPosted: Sat May 05, 2012 2:35 am 
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1-2 is beginner modo.
3 is the standard.
5-6 is not generally recommended for a beginner's game. Naturally, that's the one I'm going for.
Once you exceed 5-6 you might want to examine why exactly you want that many character paths.

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 Post subject: Re: How many characters
PostPosted: Sat May 05, 2012 2:59 am 
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Omnificent wrote:
Once you exceed 5-6 you might want to examine why exactly you want that many character paths.
I have 7 because I'm a deranged masochist. Yeah, you want to make sure that everything you're writing is necessary. The answer to "how many?" is often "as many as you need to tell the story," and something high generally isn't "as many as you need to tell the story."

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My new policy: All my games will have a redhead. Period.

Not really checking the forums any more due to time constraints, so if you want to contact me, PM. I'll get a notification and log in. :mrgreen:
Also, I've been hit and run posting, which means I don't see many replies. If you want to respond to something I've said, also feel free to PM me.


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