What does it take to design an interesting, compelling character? Explore the challenge at this year’s Game Developers Conference, where you’ll have a chance to get tips from the creators of Moss — and its cute mouse protagonist.
In a very special Design track talk on “How Quill Defined Polyarc’s VR Character Design Process” Polyarc’s own Brendan Walker will dig into the nuts and bolts of crafting believable and engaging VR characters and environments in your game.
See, when Polyarc set out to make its first VR game they built their world from diorama-sized puzzles you interacted with in 3rd person while respecting real world scale. This naturally lead to the creation of a mouse as a main character that the player would use to traverse the puzzles.
According to Walker, Playarc hoped to make that moues protagonist (Quill!) appealing to the player, but did not expect the amount of emotional attachment players expressed during playtesting. This led Polyarc to double down on player interactions within as many places as they could while building out their puzzles.
Thus, this talk will outline all the things they learned along the way in creating compelling 3rd person character interactions in VR as well as the autonomous things your player’s character can do to make them more believable.
And of course, we have plenty more GDC 2018 announcements to make in the coming months. For more information about GDC 2018 visit the show’s official website, and subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas