Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Chapter 5. Character Development

Using well-defined characters in games has been with us since the earliest days of computer gaming and is becoming increasingly sophisticated as time goes on. The days of anonymous blobs of pixels, such as the gunfighters in the early arcade game Gunfight (shown in Figure 5.1), are far behind us. Originally, it was fairly difficult to get any real characterization into a monochrome 32-pixel-high figure, but with the increasing capabilities of game hardware, the question of characterization becomes increasingly important. Note that text games had no such problem with characterization (but the graphical aspects were not at all important); the main practical limits that affected this particular genre were the skills ...