Working on this sprite for our game my girlfriend looked over my shoulder and said: "Hey, is that the virus?!" I was perplexed because I hadn't made the connection at all. This microscopic fellow, called Jimmy Protozoon, has been in our story design for at least a year now. (He has an extremely ironic trait, contributed by creative Felix Goldberg – we'll keep it a secret for now. Some hints to it are already in Jimmy's appearance, but you'll have to wait and see.) Anyway, Jimmy's not a virus and has nothing to do with the current Corona-crisis, but it made me think about how we create and handle characters and characterisations in The Funny Boneyard.

At the beginning there's of course just a funny premise or dumb thought. "What if the evil landlord is actually a lonely and really lovable dude?" "What about Horse Bureau of Investigation?!" But other than having a cartoonish cast, that's acting and talking in a hyper-stylised way, we really try to give all of them at least some nuanced narrative depth, and an arc. Even the unicellular protozoon gets one. The goal is to let them go through changes, knowing where to start in their motivational and emotional journey, and where to go from there. An important tool for creating this structure, is the character sheet.

Lets take Greg for example, the annoying clerk at The Tech Shack (play the demo and meet him – but at your own risk). In his character sheet we defined his most striking traits, likes, dislikes and most importantly: A voice. It can be a known celebrity's way of speaking,a  podcaster's, YouTuber's or some other fictional entity with a distinct voice. It should "fit" the character and its traits. When we write dialogue for them, in our head there's a clear and mutual way of how they sound, what makes the process of writing them so much easier and more organic.

Another trick up our sleeves for constructing and defining characters like Jimmy, Amy, Greg or the wide array of upcoming zany NPCs, are their online profiles. Andi had the idea for those and now it became a major innovation and asset to  the game, pulling it  into modern age although looking like a 90's game. Yes, we built an entire in-game internet (more details on that in another dev log entry) and many in The Funny Boneyard have a profile page with a kind of mini-bio and small excerpt of their wall postings. That is an incredibly useful framing device to characterise our weird game inhabitants within the narrative. It creates insights into their superficial wants, needs, opinionated preferences – ergo: a great way for signposting puzzles!

The online profiles lift characters like Greg and the whole gang to another level, it makes them more-dimensional and even more profound. Real people, everyone of us, tend to describe themselves  online like they would like to be seen. So let's think about how that would look like in case of protozoa?! :) We can express, how a character would present itself on social media, also how well received, -liked they are and if they are commented on a lot. So much meta social-commentary  and winking at the audience becomes possible, WAAAH!! 

We are getting A LOT done for our adventure game these days, staying at home and with society and the planet kind of grinding to a halt at the moment. We are very lucky and thankful to have this fulfilling distraction. It's important to have that in these not only physically but psychologically straining times. I wish everyone out there: good health, patience and a similar positive occupation. Thanks to the people that keep the world running and let's try to help each other, if possible, maybe reflect on some important stuff. Who knows, you might go through a change – just like Jimmy. Until the next dev log, 

best
Josef