Speaking at a recent seminar at the SEA Summit in Singapore, Yoko Taro – the Director of NieR and its sequel NieR: Automata – was asked about his process when it comes to creating games and more specifically, the characters within them. In typical Taro fashion, he did not disappoint in his answers.
According to Taro (via 4Gamer’s report of the event), he has a 7-Step process when it comes to creating characters in games: Budget, Length of Time, Marketplace, Balance, Fans, Game Content, and Drama. According to Taro, they all work in a special order, and the reasoning for all them are fairly sound.
For a brief snippet on some of the stages, check out below, and head over to Siliconera for the full talk:
The first thing that Yoko Taro thinks about when creating a character for a game is “budget” and the second part is “length of time” that he has to put into it. He explained that most issues can be solved if you already know those two parts.
His next step is knowing the “marketplace” to get an idea what is in demand right now. Is it a battle action game, or maybe an RPG?
The following step is the “balance” that he has to think about for things such as the number of characters, gender ratio, and so on. In terms of budget, Yoko Taro says that 100 characters would be a little difficult, so somewhere between 3 to 5 is better.
NieR: Automata is available now.
[Source: Siliconera]
