Project "Nonfi Nis" - Week 4

Last time I laid down the basic concept for a small video game that will let me practice for my big vision. I decided that I will be telling the story of two enemy families meeting after a devastating war in my Kaleidoscope world.

If you want to know more about that particular war, you can read about it on WorldAnvil: The Final War

And if you are curious about the species of the characters I'm about to create, I recommend this article: Rul

Defining the Fundamental Traits

For these characters, I have to start with pretty much a blank slate. Since I don't want their story to interfere with that of my existing characters, I have little to anchor them to.

So what do I have as a starting point? Let's see:

• I have a basic idea for the two rival superpowers from which they come - key differences in core values, appearance and naming schemes.
• I need one family on either side, which includes at least two different generations and probably siblings on some level.
• I will be relying on the "Big Five" personality model with which I'm familiar thanks to my research career.
  

Randomized Character Generation

When you need inspiration on the spot, randomness is a great tool. I've seen this in tricks such as splattering ink across the empty paper and looking for promising shapes, or the numerous random prompt generators you can find all over the web.  Besides, this fits perfectly with my world - the Kaleidoscope is, in fact, named after the toy that generates beautiful shapes from randomly scattered fragments.

I like the random number generator at www.random.org because it allows me to quickly adjust the range that I need. The first thing I decide this way is the faction to which the protagonist family would belong - the Rilanga Union. (Note to self: Flesh out the WorldAnvil articles about both factions.)

Next up is the name of the family. Both the Rilanga and the Ran-E-Zu use family names that consist of one syllable, usually without any special meaning. This means I can completely randomize the letters, as long as I had a vowel and a consonant. Three random numbers later - order, vowel and consonant - I have the name "Op". Sounds kinda weird, to be honest, but then again, it is an alien culture. I can't find a waterproof reason for why they should not be called that, so the name stays.

Alright, on to the individual characters. For each of them, I need a sex, a name, an age and the five personality traits. I start with the sex of the character, since it will determine what consonants I can use in the name. For both the parent and child generations, I also let the randomizer decide how many siblings there are. The same goes for the marital status of the children and the father's sister.

Tweaking Names and Personalities

With the given names, randomization alone is not enough. While it gives me a first idea for the sounds that will be involved, I also want to arrange them in a pleasing way. Furthermore, I check my conlang dictionary so see whether these syllables carry any unfortunate meanings. Said dictionary can be found here: Rile

Regarding the personalities, I apply some common sense to make sure the spouses appear compatible. Do they have something in common? Do they compensate for eachother's less desirable traits? I also keep an eye on the overall distribution of personality configurations. I want the family members to be reasonably different so that their opinions will clash during the story and require the player to deal with that. In particular, I will need variety in the "Openness" trait because that one will greatly impact how they approach the enemy family. So I re-generate some values and adjust some others by hand.

Giving them a Face

Now it's time to learn what they look like, so that I can start seeing them as actual people.

While working on the characters for my regular storyline, I have already set up my Rul 3D model with the Unity Multipurpose Avatar system. I have also written a small script a while back that lets me "breed" children from two parent configurations, by blending the appearance parameters using random weights. (If anyone is interested in that script, let me know and I might write a blog post about it.)

To give the father and aunt the necessary family resemblance, I start by manually creating two parents with Rilanga features. This means warm reddish colorations, a crest that is angled downwards and a nose that is flush with the skull. Besides saving the parameters for their adolescent appearance (which I'll need for the secondary feather colors), I also configure the aged versions so that I can create portraits for their WorldAnvil articles.

Here's what they look like.

I now generate Ninu and his sister Refa, by running my script until I get a result that I like and adjusting their parameters here and there. Then I manually configure spouses for them, and let the script produce Etru and Urem. Kohip is created by hand again.

Looking at the family, I start to realize that a cast of parents, children and grandparents would make more sense than including the aunt and uncle. No problem! I just go back to the previous step and create names and raw personalities like for the rest of the family. And while I'm at it, why not create a kid for Refa and Beran? This one won't even need a defined personality because he'll never show up in the game. But a face will be useful, so that his grandparents can look at photographs when they worry about the rest of the family that is not in the shelter with them...

Do you see what is happening? I've stumbled over the first bit of what is going on in the family's minds! Now I've got a tangible reason why they will be anxious to establish communications with the outside world, besides the generic "they don't know what is happening".

So this is where I'm currently at.

Wrapping up

I've now got the bare minimum of who these characters are going to be - faces, names and how they are related to each other. I know on which of them I will focus and who will be part of the backstory. And I have the raw personality traits on a coarse scale from 1 to 5.

The next step will be to translate these numbers into actual characterizations. But for this I'll need to dive deeper into what the OCEAN traits mean, what facets of personality they cover and what that implies for the social dynamics. So I'll take a break here and make that a blog post of its own - maybe next week or the week after that.

What do you think of the progress so far? Is there any aspect about which you would like to know more?