When writing the concepts for two of my characters, I found myself struggling to come up with any sort of concept for the characters, and a reason for them being in the story, and joining the protagonist's crew.

After some more time of thinking if concepts and scrapping them, I thought a good way to come up with some concepts was to make the characters have a specific role in the protagonist's crew. But to do this I needed to first carry out some research into the different roles that pirates had within a crew.

One website I looked into (being The Way of the Pirates, 2019) states a number of different roles that were apparent on a pirate ship. The website lists the following roles:

Captain, First Mate, Quarter Master, Sailing Master, Gunner, Powder Monkey, Boatswain, Surgeons, and Cooks.

From looking at the list, I could already connect some roles with the characters I already had concepts for, such as the protagonist being the Captain, and the first crew member (who provides the boat) acting as sailing master. Because of my current characters fitting a role quite well, I thought it would be a good idea to continue this by making the other characters centered around a role (which could even relate to their story on their respective island). The main two roles that caught my eyes were Gunner and Surgeon.

I feel that the main reason the role of Gunner caught my eyes and somewhat clicked with me was since one of the mechanics in-between levels is for enemy pirate ships to attack the player's ship.  Although this would occur before the member joined the crew, but there could be a benefit for him joining (such as better cannon accuracy or faster reload speed only being obtained once the character joins the crew). However we’re only making two levels so this character won’t be in the section of the game that will be created, but it’s still interesting to concept what benefits they could provide.

The second role that caught my eye was the role of surgeon/doctor. The main reason for this is that there is combat in our game, meaning that it’s likely that the player would become injured. Some games that have a health mechanic use hearts or other items that when collided with restore a set amount of health to the player (Such as Super Mario Odyssey, 2017). However, some other games make use of an inventory system and allow players to obtain items that can be used for healing when needed (such as how food works in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, 2017). Since the plan is for our game to make use of some sort of inventory system, a surgeon who provides the player healing items/can be interacted with to heal the player could be a good concept.

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Evaluation of research

By carrying out this research task I was able to solve my problem of not having the final character concepts that I needed (that and not having character concepts that I was happy with). Although the character concepts I ended up with after this tasks are by no means perfect, I am still happy with them as they ended up making more sense and in my opinion, more effective, than all of my previous scrapped concepts.

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During this research task, I looked into the different roles that would be on a pirate ship, and so I feel as though I have been able to develop my understanding about pirates further, which will hopefully end up making the crew members (them all having a different role) make more sense.