Character Design

The following is a character "designed" while play-testing a storytelling dice game in GDD101. The storyline tends to get ridiculous, but I think this type of role-playing exercise has the potential to develop interesting characters that aren't as absurd as this one.

Character Design – The Mummy Lord

Positive Traits – This mummy can only communicate telepathically, but understands the thoughts of camels, ostriches, English-speaking humans, and other undead. Since becoming a mummy, he gained control of an Egyptian pyramid and its resident mummy horde. He knows the location of a spacecraft hidden deep within the pyramid, left behind by the extra-terrestrials who built the structure.

Negative Traits – The Mummy Lord is very bitter, spiteful, petty, and vindictive. He despises ostriches after one almost killed him inside the pyramid, and seeks revenge against that ostrich. Before he was a mummy, this man was a blind, deaf mute wandering the desert, and his mummification hasn’t restored his sight or hearing. He can now make unpleasant hissing and grunting sounds, but is still incapable of speech.

Visual Characteristics – The mummy lords has had little time to decay, and is very bulky for a mummy. His bandages lack the dull, yellow color of older mummies. His left arm is missing several chunks from a run in with a camel before his mummification.

Back-Story – While trapped within a pyramid in the Egyptian desert, the blind, deaf mute was almost killed when an ostrich nearly caused part of the pyramid to cave in. In his attempt to kill the ostrich, he allowed the pyramid’s undead horde to mummify him and came to rule over the pyramid.

*For this week, I did options 1 and 2.

Mood Board

Metroid Prime

Pitch Doc

Difficulty Curves

The two Portal games illustrate the idea of a difficulty curve beautifully. The game revolves around a series of tests that the player's character must pass. While the purpose of the testing is never made clear in the game, from a design standpoint they're clearly intended to teach the player to use "portals" to solve increasingly complex puzzles. The puzzles begin as very simple tasks, introducing the player to cubes that can be carried, buttons that can be held down by the player's weight or a cube placed on top of it, and the portal. As the game progresses, the player is given control of one, and later on both portals. The player is introduced to new elements, such as a deadly ball of energy that must be guided into a switch to progress through the test, walls on which no portals can be placed, and deadly robots. Every new obstacle is introduced slowly, so that the player is able to understand how to overcome that obstacle. In later levels, the same obstacle is used in new ways, sometimes combined with other obstacles, to produce a more difficult challenge. Every level builds on the previous level, teaching the player a new skill and then forcing them to apply it to a novel situation.

For an excellent example of Portal's learning curve, the 7-minute video below shows a walk-through of the level where hostile robots are first introduced to the player. As the level progresses, the robots are placed in move difficult positions, forcing the player to come up more more creative strategies to get past them.

RPS Logo First Draft

Game Examples

Realistic Graphics: Crysis
Crysis is a first-person shooter that, when it was first released, had some of the most incredible graphics I had ever seen. It still looks great today, along with its successors. 


Abstract Graphics: Dwarf Fortress
Dwarf Fortress's graphics are about as abstract and unrealistic as possible: everything in the game is represented by ascii characters.


2D Game: Spelunky
Spelunky is a 2D platformer that mimics the style of older games. It has very low-resolution sprites, and no 3D aspects to it.


3D Game: Minecraft
Minecraft is a fairly simple game with an environment composed primarily of large cubes. It uses very low-resolution textures to give an old, retro look to its graphics.


1st Person: Halo 
Halo is a well-known first person shooter.


Real-World to Game-World: Reversi
An old board game that has been re-created many times for computers, phones, etc.


Compelling Storyline: Assassin's Creed
The Assassin's Creed series has a well-developed plot that spans many centuries and centers around a conflict between the Templars and Assassins.