Heartthrobs and Heartaches: GDC Summary
On March 18, Megan and Andrew spoke at the Game Narrative Summit at the Game Developer Conference, presenting a talk where they shared some insights on crafting memorable love interests for interactive romance games using examples of love interests they’ve written. In this blog post, we wanted to share a few of the talk’s highlights!
Know Your Audience
The first step to creating an irresistible love interest is to know your audience and what they’re looking for. Writers delight in subverting tropes, but players often just want the trope done very well, so a good place to start is with the most popular tropes in your category.
For The Nanny Affair in Choices: Stories You Play, we went with one of the most popular tropes in contemporary romance, the billionaire romance, and created Samuel/Samantha Dalton. Then we tried to find a number of angles to make this character uniquely compelling: emphasizing their heart of gold, framing the romance as a forbidden employer-employee dynamic, and developing the compelling complication of their new engagement as an obstacle to overcome.
Complicating the Character
Once you know what tropes you're working with, you’ll want to complicate the character with interesting flaws. Flaws are critical to making your player think of the character as real and develop a meaningful connection with them; after all, real humans are incredibly flawed. To determine the flaws, you’ll want to think about the character’s strengths and find attributes that complicate and accentuate them.
For Kamilah in Bloodbound, one flaw is her ice-cold ruthlessness, which accentuates her strength of her deeply passionate and protective personality. Once you’ve identified the flaws, you can showcase them using an approach we call "Show the Wound", where you structure the arc of the relationship like a mystery that answers the question, “Why are you the way you are?”
Complicating the Relationship
With an appealing complicated character, the final step is complicating the relationship. You can do this by finding the central conflict between the two of you.
In the case of Bardric Arkland in Project Spellstruck, you’re set up as enemies: your father was a dark arcane who led a bloody rebellion, and Bardric’s father was the noble general who executed him. As a result, you’re the only person who doesn’t treat Bardric as a golden boy, a dynamic that infuriates him even as it intrigues him. You also want to find your answer to the fundamental question of “why does this person like your character?”, and weave the development of that into the conflict.
Interested in seeing how the relationship between you and Bardric develops? Keep an eye out for more news about Project Spellstruck, coming later this year!