Appealing characters are the core of a great story, but how do you create appeal and communicate that to an entire game development team? At my studio, Well Told Entertainment, we have developed a process of developing, defining and communicating exactly who a character is so that they come across clearly to the player. I decided to share our process with you all, incase there are some creatives and developers out there who could use a little guidance on character guides.

WHO AM I?

Hey there! My name is Jennifer Re, and I’m the Animation Director and a Co-Founder of Well Told Entertainment. I’ve always loved animation as it gives an opportunity to introverts (like me) to act and tell stories through characters. It also lets me be an observer of everything around me, making me a forever student of life. If you’ve somehow stumbled upon this blog, then you must be interested in animation too. Today I’m going into what I think is the most important stage of the animation process, developing a guide for a character.

WHY ARE GUIDES IMPORTANT?

There are five main reasons why I make Character Guides:

• It acts as a blueprint for everything that goes into a performance.
• Animation is acting, and planning is like a rehearsal. By rehearsing you are able to get into the role of a character, leading to more thoughtful performance choices.
• It helps make animations across a project consistent. Animators tend to have different acting/animating styles. So by having a solid reference for the team to follow, the animations will feel more cohesive.
• It’s a great way to explore a character and set them up for successful narrative/design alignment. You’ll want to make sure they fit into the rest of the game art style and successfully represent their written personalities.
• If you care about your character, others will too.

WHAT INFLUENCED THIS PROCESS?

• A few years ago I stumbled upon a copy of ‘The Art Of Hercules’ by Stephen Rebello and Jane Healey. As I was flipping through the pages I came upon Sue Nichol’s style guides:

• Next are old 2D character model and expression sheets. These are not only helpful because artists write numerous tips in the margins, but they also act as great references on how to make appealing poses/expressions. Here are some of my favorites from the ‘Iron Giant’ that explore appealing hand posing:

WHAT TOOLS DO I USE?

• Anything with information — The ultimate way to build an animation character guide is to research, RESEARCH, RESEARCH. Google things, check out the art book section in your library, watch some films with similar themes to the game you are making, etc.
• PureRef — This is a free software that allows you to collect and organize images. It’s like a cork board, but for your computer. You can also make notes, drop links, and easily send files to co-workers to add/edit.

WHAT IS THE ACTUAL PROCESS?

The process has evolved a lot over the course of the games we’ve made and varies from character to character, but here is the breakdown of one the first character guides I made. (I’ll start by describing each section’s intention, and follow it with a small sample from the character guide.) This was for our main man BECKETT, from the game, ‘Next Stop Nowhere’:

STEP 1: SYNC WITH COLLABORATORS

1. Talk to the narrative, design and art departments to find out the game’s narrative theme, design limitations and art style. This will ensure that animators are thinking about the character’s personality, how they should move and how the animation style fits into the gameplay:

Narrative Theme: ‘Personal’ and ‘Road Trip’

Platform & Camera View: Mobile w/ Isometric Views

—’Personal’ infers that characters should have a wide set of emotive reacts.

— ‘Road Trip’ infers a wild ride, so golden poses should be lively and dynamic.

—Animations should be kept simple/readable due to the mobile platform and Isometric views.

Key Art Example:

— Fun, bright and graphic style reiterates what the narrative themes are telling us. Simplicity/readability and that it’s going to be a wild ride.

2. Next, grab a high level blurb of the character’s description along with three adjectives describing their personality. This will help align the writing with animated performances.

High level blurb from writers: ‘Beckett is a friendly, awkward, curious, tech-savvy teddy bear of a dude whose greatest weakness is a deep, echoing pit of guilt. When the opportunity to finally explore the galaxy (and attempt to escape that guilt) appears? Oh, he’s in.’

Three Adjectives (along with some of my personal notes):

1. Gentle Giant — Large in stature, but friendly and has delicate gestures.

2. Awkward — Reserved postures/posing. A little bit closed off, but in a sheepish way. When he gets really excited about stuff, that’s when his energy leaks out and his body language opens up.

3. Weighted Guilt — Deep sadness looming in the back of his head. Shoulders should be tilted down normally, arms hanging to show the weight he feels.

3. Grab as many kinds of character concepts as you can from the art team along with pose and expression sheets for reference. This will serve as a foundation for animation testing.

STEP 2: START SMALL ON YOUR SEARCH

The start of the research phase can feel overwhelming, so I like to start small. Start by building notes solely based on the info you got from Step 1. If your character is stylized in some way, this is the time to start finding reference to show how you’ll utilize those unique qualities in your animation.

Example 1: Beckett has angular, broad shoulders. We knew we could use his shoulders to show strong and clear emotes from far away. They’d also act as a great line of action.

Example 2: Beckett also has big hands. We wanted to make sure we kept the ‘gentle giant’ characteristic in mind, so we had to find some reference on hand posing that lend itself to more gentle mannerisms. Here’s some great reference we found on our search:

STEP 3: BRANCH OUT

Look for similar characters in film/tv or even within your own life, and search for fun quirks/timing in performances. This is how I categorize this section:

1. Live Action Reference:

The best way to study animation is to reference life. Finding live action characters who fit the personality or body type will help with timing of movements and posing. Find stills along with gifs.

One reference I chose was John Candy’s character from ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’.

Context: (who is the character) An eternally optimistic, outgoing, overly talkative, and clumsy shower curtain salesman. Really just wants friendship and looking for a home. Has a heartbreaking past. (Sounds a lot like our Beckett)

What to Look at: (why this character) Candy has a really appealing contrast of movements. When he is feeling awkward or unsure of himself, he has very reserved poses, and more micro movements. When he is feeling excited, his movements are more animated and lively as if they’ve been building up waiting to burst open.

2. Animated Character Reference:

When in doubt, check in with the greats. Use old model sheets to see what makes their poses appealing. Grab stills from films/tv and draw over with notes to point out to the animators what to pull from each reference that aligns with your characters.

One reference I chose was Ralph from ‘Wreck-It Ralph’:

Context: Ralph’s job is to play a bad guy, but that’s only in the game. He feels isolated because people think he doesn’t fit in, but he just wants to be accepted.

What to Look At: Good shoulder line and amazing hand poses for someone with big hands. The use of shoulder rotation in Ralph helps push feelings of innocence, sincerity, or lack of energy. Reference him for posing reference, not so much timing.

STEP 4: ANIMATION TESTING

Once you have a good handle on your character, animate some tests to see what works and what doesn’t stylistically. Drop them in game to see if they feel and look good. Here are some early Beckett tests:

Also test technical parts of rigs that might differ from ordinary controls. We had to make face cards for Beckett instead of building eyes into the geo (mostly for optimization purposes). Here’s a test we did to see if the shapes were readable and appealing:

CONCLUSION

Overall, there are a lot of ways to go about planning, and this is just one format. Be a dry sponge and soak up as much info as you can. After researching, you’ll know the best ways to categorize your reference and make the research work for you and your team. Even if you think there’s no time to actually develop the character, MAKE TIME. It makes animating a lot easier and you’ll save a lot more time that way. It’s the best way to flex animation creativity within the constraints given from other departments. And lastly, it will give you the chance to get to know your character. You want to invest a great deal in your character so you know how to get players to invest in them.

If you feel like you need help developing characters and other story-related aspects of your game, our studio Well Told can be a great resource to bring your characters, environments and storytelling to life.

Thanks so much for reading, and happy developing!

❤ Jen Re

How to Build a Character Guide was originally published in Well Told Entertainment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Howdy! My name is Jen Re, and I’m the Animation Director at Well Told Entertainment. Today I’ll be diving into the facial animation pipeline I put together for our latest game, The Foglands. Specifically, we’re going to focus on one of our main characters, Ursa, and how we crafted her emotive and reactive performance.

The main goals of determining the pipeline were:

• To reduce animation scope by using a mocap foundation. We had a tiny, but mighty, animation team of 4 (Jen Re, Aharonit Elior, Quoc Nguyen, and Ashley Chung) who created over 800 handmade character animations for the game’s cast. And the facial animation itself, about an additional 350 animations, were analyzed/retargeted/cleaned up by a team of 1 — moi!
• To find ways of having more creative control over the data generated performances so that they matched our stylized characters and animation. We strived to add that personal touch that comes from only an animator’s eye.

THE CAPTURE

Now, as I mentioned, Well Told is a tiny studio. We did not have the manpower to hand animate all the facial animation, nor did we have the funds for mocap stages or expensive equipment. Fortunately, Faceware had some more affordable headsets and software options.

The aim was to only capture and utilize the lip sync and some minor brow data. Eyes and emotive brow posing would be implemented in a different way. Utilizing Faceware’s Indie Cam, we were able to capture facial performance while recording our VO for Ursa. And through a custom and very scrappy lighting setup, in a small meeting room of our office — the studio was able to secure some great capture.

ANALYZING AND RETARGETING THE CAPTURE

There were two pieces of software we relied on from Faceware to get our initial results — Analyzer and Retargeter.

Analyzer was where we brought in our capture. We essentially created a data set for Analyzer to learn the face of our actress, so that it could then use that data to analyze the rest of the footage. And Retargeter, a plugin for Autodesk’s Maya, was where we did the setup of our rigged character and created a pose library for Retargeter to pull from.

I utilized Faceware’s batch scripts for their Analyzer and Retargeter tools, this way I could do a lot of the work up front and let the scripts do the rest. I also spent a lot of time making a custom script that utilized tools from Animbot’s API, in order to batch edit curve values across all the animations while the data was being mapped onto Ursa.

For instance, if I wanted Ursa’s jaw to hinge a little to one side so she favors that side of her face, I could blanket add ‘x’ amount of rotational value to her jaw control in each Maya file. I could also use custom scripts to apply certain curve filters across each performance!

BLINKS

Blinks are one of the major components of facial performance that bring a character to life. What people don’t realize is that humans blink much more frequently than an animated character. Blinks are meant to be placed with intent, so I wanted to make sure I had some level of control over their frequency.

What we did was create a standard blink animation in Maya for the character, this way I could get the timing, squash/stretch in the lids and brows, and overall feel, just right. That blink was then dropped into a system created by our engineers that set the blinks to trigger every ‘x’ seconds. And if we hand placed a blink notify anywhere in one of her animations, the system would note a blink was placed, and reset its timer for the next one. This gave her a more naturalistic look!

EMOTE LAYERS

The last piece of the system was emotive layering. This is where the brows and lids come into play. What we did was create 7–8 different one frame facial poses that could be additively layered over any facial performance. If she had a line that was on the gloomier side, we’d add a notify to layer over her ‘sad pose’, where her brows and mouth corners would slightly droop. And if she was supposed to be upbeat, we’d add a ‘happy’ notify where her brows and mouth corners would peel up.

Here’s some examples of the same base performance I made during a very early test capture, with varying emotive poses layered on top:

This gave us a huge range of possibilities for the different line reads, and let us easily change her emote mid-line by using Unreal notifies. It also helped extend our body animation library whilst getting more control in stylizing her facial performance!

And with all those layers, we have our final facial performance! Here’s an example of one the conversations in the game:

Thank you so much for stopping by! We hope you enjoy our game and interacting with the characters we’ve loved creating! : )

Approachable Facial Performance for Character Driven Games was originally published in Well Told Entertainment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Or: Articy Draft 3 My Beloved

Roguelikes have been highly en-vogue in the 2020s: their procedurally-generated looping structure is a fantastic mechanism for storytelling, but can also pose a real challenge when it comes to designing and implementing a narrative. And when your team hasn’t made a roguelike before? It’s a real “build the plane as you’re flying it” kind of experience. Thankfully, our maiden voyage was a success, but like making any game — it required some real problem solving along the way. Here’s just a taste of what those challenges looked like, and the tools and strategies we used to get good.

There are a few traditional narrative MOs that video games tend to follow. You might be the most familiar with the “3 act” structure with its inciting incident, rising action, and falling action. But when the gameplay loop is, well, looping, it can make progression throughout an overarching story complex to design. Toss in a procedurally generated world where you still expect characters to turn up, and you can run into some real progression blockers. So like many roguelikes, we have a central “hub” space of The Lookout that the player can return to. This cozy spot is where they can edit their loadout, do some target practice, and speak with any recruited/befriended characters in a space where they can reliably turn up. This guarantees that the player can have conversations with NPCs which advance the story, rather than endlessly searching for them in a Run. Additionally, we have several in-Run rooms or locations that can pop up within designated biomes: such as a specific campsite or roaming market, so the player can always know where to find friendly (or not so friendly) faces in an ever-changing world.

The big trick to organizing how looping stories progress lies in variables and their conditions. For this, our team relied on the combined powers of Unreal Engine 5 and Articy Draft 3. Unreal is our game engine of course, but Articy is our dialogue editor where we write and organize the various conversations. It also keeps track of the variables and conditions that tell Unreal what conversations are available to play or have already been heard. Articy’s ability to juggle multiple variable sets at once was invaluable to our implementation, and our engineers and tech designers built us a tool that parses all of these into Unreal. This is how we’re able to make sure that the player can progress through the story in the proper order of the beats, regardless of how their last Run went.

But outside of dialogue with characters, we also have variables that are “listening” to the world of the Foglands around them. These sorts of variables keep track of what might have killed the player on their last Run, who the player may recently have spoken to, or which collectible keys have been picked up. When these variables are “called” in Unreal, it may allow the Stranger to say something sassy about your last cause of death, or for Shandeen to tell an anecdote about a Runner of the past. We wanted the world to feel reactive in this way, and to give the idea that something is always watching.

However, one of the greater challenges when working with variables in a looping structure is pacing: that is, having various plot moments feel like they are occurring at the “right” time, and making sure there aren’t any prolonged periods where nothing (or too much) happens. We tried to map out pacing through a variety of techniques, using everything from spreadsheets to flowcharts, but ultimately good ol’ fashioned trial and error helped us create a progression that felt right… and it turns out the narrative of our game was longer than we expected!

There’s lots to dive into even with our small ensemble cast, and we can’t wait for you all to experience it. You can preorder The Foglands on the PlayStation Store,or on the platform of your choice!

Get Good: How to Write a Roguelike GameWithout Losing Your Mind was originally published in Well Told Entertainment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Foglands, the emerging “anti-Western”, and making new space in a familiar genre.

Mosey Into the Foglands

The Foglands by Well Told Entertainment comes to PS5, PSVR2, and Quest 2 later this year.

The Foglands is an upcoming atmospheric roguelike that puts you at the reins of a tall tale. In a mysterious world covered with thick Fog, humans have been driven into sparsely-populated strongholds to survive. Runners are the brave few who step outside the Hold to scavenge for materials and resources… that is, if they make it back. You play as Jim Womack, a fresh recruit for the Runners who makes a deal with a mysterious Stranger when a great and terrible creature awakens in the Fog.

But we at Well Told Entertainment also went on a journey while making this game: we set out to make a Western, but throughout our research and collaboration, we found The Foglands to be much more at home in the subgenre of the anti-Western. But don’t let the name fool you: the “anti-”doesn’t mean it’s the polar opposite — it’s still very much a Western! However, since the anti-Western is a response: let’s take a look at how the Western came to be… and all the baggage that comes with it.

A Genre is Born

How the history of the United States and the Western are intertwined, but not synonymous.

The Western might make you think of cowboys, gunslingers, outlaws, and shootouts. But what if it comes from somewhere else? (For example: the World Wars, or a shirtless, hunky Scotsman posing in front of a Highland backdrop?)

While stories have been set in the American Frontier since its colonization started, the Western as we know it today is mostly a product of 20th century “genre fiction”. That is: dime novels, pulp fiction, B-movies, and the like. Following the World Wars, women who joined the workplace to support the war effort were forced to give up their jobs for the returning soldiers. Increased automation at home and in the workforce meant people had more leisure time for activities like reading. (This is where the shirtless Scotsman comes in.) Enter: pop-fiction novels like romance, quenching the daydreams of now-unemployed American women one paperback at a time. The Western became a popular “masculine” version of pop-fiction, and gave traumatized veterans of the World Wars a uniquely American piece of media which affirmed their identity and values. This means there are clear-cut good guys, bad guys, and chivalrous, stoic protagonists. And having just survived the horrors of war like the world had never seen: it’s no surprise why this was so popular.

The Western is a genre about tension: between individuals and wider cultures, between the individual and the landscape, between the law-abiding and the outlaw. Its no-nonsense handling of themes like death, suffering, and existentialism were validating to post-War audiences. With the rise of radio dramas in the 20s, Hollywood in the 40s, and television in the 50s, the Western transitioned from “genre fiction” to mainstream success. When you think of Western titles, you’re likely thinking of things from this “Golden Age,” such as High Noon (1952), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), or The Lone Ranger (1949–1957).

But the Western as Hollywood knew it was a “period piece,” a version of the American West that never existed. This fictionalized version was popular with its primarily White, American audience, but it sometimes completely erased or offensively depicted entire populations and completely chose to ignore (or even glorify) some unfortunate historical elements. But this wouldn’t go unchallenged.

The Rise of the Anti-Western

The emergence of a sub-genre for a new age.

The anti-Western (which is sometimes ironically referred to as a “revisionist Western,” when the Western is in itself revisionist) is a subgenre about subversion and questioning the traditional Western. Whereas the Western praised “American values” like rugged individualism, freedom, and “righteous” violence, the anti-Western critiques capitalism, American exceptionalism, colonialism, and the very idea that there is such a thing as clear-cut “good vs. evil.”

The anti-Western tends to be more in touch with real American history, not shying away from things like colonization, greed, patriarchy, slavery, and genocide. It often does this by recentering stories of people from multiple backgrounds and genders, giving voices to those who have historically been excluded or depicted as stereotypes — but it’s a work in progress.

Between Indigenous people of many nations, White settlers from the eastern part of the country, Mexican ranchers, former slaves and members of the Black diaspora, and Chinese laborers: the West was much more diverse than it appeared on the silver screen. Women of all cultures, who are usually depicted as having domestic jobs, “soiled doves,” or as damsels in distress, also historically held similar roles in the community as men. Opening up the range of the cast allows for new voices and new stories to enter this American genre’s lexicon.

Anti-Western themes began to crop up in the genre in the 60s coinciding with the Vietnam War, but most see the subgenre as really hitting its stride with the release of Dances With Wolves in 1990. It continued to gain momentum throughout the 2000s and 2010s with movies like Django Unchained (2012) and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007). And just like in the “Golden Age of the Western,” they’re a box office hit. This fresh, new take on the genre shows that the Western truly a fixture of the American imagination and abroad. And truthfully, as a genre associated with tension: it only makes sense that the Western develops tension… with the Western.

Western and Anti-Western in The Foglands

On Well Told’s newest title

What can we say: video games, developers, and players all love Westerns! And some elements of the anti-Western are already present in some games of the genre, such as the Red Dead Redemption series and Fallout: New Vegas (2010). As games continue to evolve as an art form, it feels right that they intersect with the emerging anti-Western. Now, there is no such thing as a perfectly-written Western, or a Western that is perfectly “correct.”

This is not to say that we did it “right.” This is just how we did it.

The Foglands was originally a traditional Western: characterized by an individual honing their skills to exhibit dominance on the hostile, outside world. And sure, that’s a great setup for a lot of survival crafting games — but Well Told is a narrative-driven studio at heart, and that just didn’t have enough to say for us.

Two things really began to make themselves clear.

One: it’s about opposition to systems. Roguelikes, and games in general, are built on systems. They’re about patterns — they’re about “loops.” Much like in real life, the characters’ agency is defined by structures beyond their control. Structures that we — the developers — decide upon on Zoom calls and in Unreal blueprints. It became clear to us that just how the epitome of the Western is to clash with the Western… we had to make a Roguelike that would ultimately turn inward on itself. A roguelike that has tension with the roguelike.

Our character of The Stranger, initially dreamed up as a whimsical, cowboy-Merlin-like figure, was the one who created the systems under which the characters clash. If he held the keys to how the characters got locked into their situation… it meant he held the secret of getting them out, too. We ended up building an anti-Western because we as a team decided we were going to paradoxically challenge the very systems that games are built on… and into.

And two: we neither can, nor should, attempt to reexamine the Western without input from Indigenous contributors. In fact, we wish we had done this more and earlier! Sure, those of us who are non-Native can research, but research simply cannot compare to the knowledge and understanding that comes with lived experience. As we worked with Indigenous and Black members of our team to approach the above idea of opposing systems, it became so clear to us that our story would feature community-driven restorative justice. Just as the Land Back movement fights for restoring Indigenous sovereignty, the key to restoring harmony in the Foglands lies in Native stewardship. But there’s a lot of work to be done before any great monsters can properly be defeated…

What, you didn’t think I was going to give it all away, did you? You’ll just have to play to find out what happens! Like making any game, building The Foglands was a journey, and we’re really pleased with the result. We love the Western, but we wanted to tell a new story: a story that looks back at the past and tries to do better for the future.

Please check out The Foglands and wishlist it on PlayStation. We’re really excited about what we’ve been building and can’t wait for you to see.

This Ain’t Your Granddad’s Western was originally published in Well Told Entertainment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.