Short Character Biography Research
One of the pre-production tasks I am required to carry out this project are my contributions to the GDD of my groups game. As the writer, there are five different pages while I will be writing the content for, and one of these pages is the 'characters' page.
For this page, I will be required to write a brief character biography for each of the characters that will appear in the game/my story.
However, upon starting my biographies I wasn't quite sure how to write/what to include in a short version of a biography (well, not that I really know how to effectively write a normal biography).
Because of this, I decided that It could be a good idea to look for a game that makes use of shorter character descriptions/biographies.
Around the time of this, a friend of mine introduced me to a mobile gacha game called 'Dragalia Lost' (Cygames, 2018), which I soon found out had exactly what I was looking for.
While playing the game, I realised that in-between levels the loading screen showed a range of things from tips about the game, from fighting tips to character/party formation tips, to short character biographies.
These biographies shown are rather short, with most of the making use of around three short lines of text. But while being so short, they still manage to give a pretty good general outline of the character, and because of this, I decided to screenshot some the character that appear on the loading screen to use as my research.
Some of the screenshots I took are shown below:
Screenshots of some of the loading screens from the mobile game 'Dragalia Lost' (Cygames, 2018)
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After looking at these short bios, I have been able to find some reoccurring elements that are apparent in all of the short character biographies.
One element that's included is the location of the character within the world of the game/story.
For example, the first line of the biography for the character 'Leif' states that he's "The captain of the Alberian Royal Knights" (Cygames, 2018), which tells us that his character has importance in that area of the world, being the Alberian Kingdom, and pretty much suggests that this character is from that specific area.
However, there are other characters who have this element in their short biographies, but with the biographies not stating an exact named location.
An example of this being the short biography for the character 'Luca', whose first line states "A sylvan youth from a village in the forest".
This suggests that his race live away from the major kingdoms in villages within forests, but does not, however, give the village a name or location (although during the game we get an idea of the location of the village in the world when playing through the story).
Another element that is used in these short biographies are the key traits of the characters (well, these biographies include one of their main traits). Examples of this from the characters above are as follows.
Cleo: "A child of the woods who's skilled in the healing arts."
Leif: "His loyalty and love for country serve as an ideal model for all who aspire to be a knight"
Luca: "Though likable, his love of mischief often lands him in trouble - much to his sister's dismay."
Harle: "His bold smile and bombastic manner are unusual for one in his position, but he is also a cunning strategist."
All of the lines above describe a certain feature about their respective characters. The first mentions how the character is 'skilled' which implies her healing capabilities are better than most others.
The second mentions of the characters 'loyalty' to his country.
The third stating two traits, being 'likable' and 'mischievous'.
Then finally, the last states about the characters 'bombastic' manner.
Evaluation of this section of research
After carrying out some research into short character biographies, I now have somewhat of an idea of what to try include in my own short character biographies, such as their key features and maybe even where they're from in the game/story world (although currently the islands/villages aren't named so they're being referred to by the order they appear in-game).
The next step of this research is to look into full character biographies, as this will be useful for me during the production phase of the project when I will be required to write the full biographies/stories of my different characters.