April 25, 2022
Character Concept Picker – Creating Literary and Video-Game Characters
From Narrative Nods to Word Journey, I’ve made a lot of programs that one way or another revolve around words, writing, and fictional worlds. Character Concept Picker is such an app. It’s open-source, free for all, and it can help you come up with ideas for building characters for your next novel or video game.
It all started when, browsing LinkedIn, I discovered an Excel table with some character traits and other characteristics, meant as a guide for creating characters. It was the work of Jacob Conner Harris, a narrative designer.
I messaged him and asked whether he’d be interested in teaming up and creating a little app using the data he’d come up with. He said yes, and Character Concept Picker is the result.
Character Concept Picker: the Basics
You might recognize the interface from StoryDice, but the core is much different. Indeed, Jacob provided almost all of the data, I only coded the app.
The program is very simple. You first select whether you’re interested in video game genres or literary genres, and then you select the genre itself. The choice has an effect on the kind of things you get, but it’s not fully implemented yet – this is something I’d like to work on some more in the future.
Or, if you’re a programmer and want to give it a go yourself, feel free! The code is accessible on GitHub.
Narrative Nods Integration
I recently made some changes to the program, one of which was the result of a friend’s idea. Remember Restitution, by Brandt Ryan? Brandt and I have collaborated on other things too, exchanged plenty of interesting ideas, and one of his suggestions was indeed this: Why not take results generated by Character Concept Picker and import them into Narrative Nods?
Well, why not indeed!
So, the “Save” button now exports two files: The first is an image file, as before, containing the results you see using the Character Concept Picker. The second is a separate text file which you can use to import the results as metadata in Narrative Nods!
Where to Find Character Concept Picker
Well, you can do it right here! There you go:
Click to run the program
The technically-savvy will realize the program is running in an iframe. It links to raw.githack. This means that, as a free service, 100% uptime cannot be guaranteed. If it seems unresponsive, please try later. Moreover, note that some browsers (often on mobile) disallow simultaneous saving. If you face problems exporting, use a different browser or a desktop/laptop device.
If you prefer a desktop app for your Windows, Mac, or Linux, you can get it from the GitHub release page.
Interested in learning how to introduce characters in your story? Take a look at my post explaining the dynamics involved.
4 Comments
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To add to your character design concept, I’d also recommend seeing the entire cast of characters for a novel/series (in my case, a trilogy plus related short stories) as a whole.
For anyone who is interested (and I don’t recommend it – the learning curve was steep and long), that is much easier to do if you use Dramatica, because you can create characters by also taking into account their role in the whole. Opposing/contrasting/cooperating characteristics to be included led me to many of my main and secondary characters – and gave me some interesting combinations to play with. Once created, some were eerily prescient. And eminently tweakable.
I used Dramatica many years ago, and at first I thought it was the best thing ever. I’ll be honest with you: I eventually came to the conclusion that, despite its intriguing premise and perhaps useful setup, it’s too purposefully vague to be worth it.
Indeed, sometimes it felt like a horoscope: I could find patterns and squeeze things into the meaning by supplying most of the details. Of course, the difference between horoscopes and Dramatica is that they claim to predict the future, whereas a narrative program tries to help you create it, in a way.
I’d say it can be useful to some authors, but it takes a lot of work for something that, ultimately, is there to simply inspire the author to figure it out in their own mind.
But to each their own!
I use it as prompts – and appreciate the compare/contrast nature of them.
Everything comes out of the writer’s head – but the comprehensive nature of the prompts has resulted in some significant insights into those relationships.
As I said, I don’t recommend it – it takes a long time to get to the easy-use stage. Among other things, I stuck with it because I know Armando Saldaña Mora, who wrote the Dramatica for Screenwriters version; I have offered to write the ‘for Novelists’ version – when I finish the trilogy. I don’t know if they’ll take me up on it, but otherwise I’ll produce a short ‘the UNauthorized’ version for anyone interested enough to examine the difference between a screenplay and a long novel.
It has been helpful for my fractal system of creating from individual beats to a trilogy with three main parts and an epilogue. I’ve added some of my own ways of using it – probably unorthodox – documented in places on my blog.
If it helps you plot or write, use it. If not, find whatever you need. It is… different.
I found those patterns useful because I poke at them until I find something that seems to make sense for what I’m trying to do. It’s interesting that you even know about it.
The addition of ‘gists’ – sub-meanings – allows the tinkering to get very suggestive to the writer. Whereas something like ‘Becoming’ is fairly obscure, once you read through the gists, you might end up at ‘changing into something terrifying’ if it suited your novel, and have one character who changes – and one who doesn’t.
And it does that for hundreds of character relationships.
I may be uniquely empowered because I need the granularity. It wasn’t happening at all without being broken up finely enough, and this was systematic.
Again, definitely not for everyone.
I especially like the way I figured out how to use it to get men and women to like the same story – a deliberate set of choices which has definitely had the desired effect, if you read the reviews, especially those from older men.
Not arguing – just saying I use it and it has worked for me.
Oh, absolutely. At the end of the day, if it works for the author, that’s all that matters.