[Baby Bonnie Hood]

I recently read a thread about backer characters in Kickstarter games, and some of it discussed a certain person who's gotten his original character in a few games now. However, it doesn't stop there; this person apparently has also gotten art commissions of his character, and even got a theme song composed for him. All that, despite the fact that he himself has never drawn any art of his own character; in fact, the only thing he's made himself for his character is a rather long backstory. But all art of the character so far was by other people.

To be honest, I envy him. He's still managed to share his original work despite having limited ability to express it by himself. Me? I made a character, wrote a story for her, made a not-really-much-of-a-game out of said story, and gotten nothing but my own satsfaction out of it. Sure, I've managed to express myself and tell a story that I've really wanted to tell; but I fear it's doomed to obscurity and mediocrity. Doesn't help that I currently still have no capability to expand on that story and character even though I really want to right now.

I think that's about it. Thanks for listening to my rather frustrated rant. Now let's return to our regularly scheduled inactivity...

[Exophase]

That's kind of a neat story. I never really thought of someone using multiple crowd funded projects as a vehicle for their own character. But at the same time, you have to ask yourself, would you be happy with this? Because if so I'm sure you can still try doing the exact same thing, if you have the money anyway. I don't think the spots are going to become super competitive now, even if this exposure probably will inspire some others.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Seems it would likely be inefficient to do things this way, if OC art is the goal. That said, getting your character placed into the game has different value and can't really be done outside this approach.

Plenty of people on Deviantart et al. will draw for you if you pay them. They even often have detailed price sheets etc. up because this is a fairly common thing, especially in communities where everyone has Original Characters but only some people have the ability to skilfully draw them.

I'm still toying with the idea of getting art for a game that way..
Inspiration generally doesn't come to me in the form of characters. Often I think of a plot, or even just a setting and some events, and then design characters to fulfill roles.

[CJA]

I can definitely empathize with Bonnie, that does sound frustrating and I hope it helped to get it off your chest.

(The rest of this post is: me muttering to myself about characters despite my extremely myopic experience with works of fiction of all kinds, please disregard all content)

The only real practice I've had with making characters that are worth mention is D&D. DMing is an awesome way to make things up, mostly by throwing things at the wall and seeing if they stick. You sort of have this mechanical framework to work in, and it lets you close the gaps that it leaves you by writing very small pieces of story and characters. And if the characters don't stick, they become forgotten, or human shiel- *ahem* "followers" for your players.

Where to go from here? Throw some more things at your character. Adventures, stories. Moral dilemmas are an amazing way to develop a character's, well, character. Have some bit characters interact with your VIP OC. And have them change. I think that my heart melts whenever I see a character really go through something and really change--good or bad. It just adds this dimension to them that immerses me and makes me think that there's really a heart in there. For example, as stupid a show as The Office is, you see a lot of 1D running-gag cutouts turn into multifaceted characters with complicated thoughts, feelings and relationships, and that's one of the reasons I stuck with it for a while. I really want to talk about characters and how they're represented temporally and the Ship of Theseus, but I have Windows Server 2012 lab worksheets to do.

Side note: I might be acting like it's easy to develop a character because I saw _{(I'm not even going to say what TV show it is. It doesn't deserve one more Google or Wiki lookup)} for the first time last night which has the flattest, worst, and most exploitative characters that I've ever seen in a work of fiction. It's like they deliberately timed this dumb show to be co-morbid with the debate going on about vocal fry in female voices, and the show mirrors the stupidity of that debate. There, I got off a rant of my own as well. That felt good.

[KKairos]

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For example, as stupid a show as The Office is, you see a lot of 1D running-gag cutouts turn into multifaceted characters with complicated thoughts, feelings and relationships, and that's one of the reasons I stuck with it for a while.

That's actually part of the brilliance of The Office, in my opinion. Angela sticks out as an example of a character who sort of develops into the judgmental religious type, but even half a season into that has a striking level of emotional depth.

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vocal fry in female voices

I have no idea what this means.

Re: The actual point of this thread, I can understand the frustration. I can't say I've had a lot of luck with original characters. My best games tend to be games with "shell" characters--the most developed was Fair Lady Warning, and frankly, I didn't make a super-awesome game for her. Maybe if any of the RPG-type things had ever gotten off the ground it would've been different, but maybe not. But I guess I don't care as much about making a game with great characterization because the games I make tend to be more about "the ride" or even the philosophical happenings that come about in the story. I'd love to do something slightly deeper in characterization, or even the philosophical happenings (like with Project Sleep, The Black Glove and Other Tales, or even MathRL 2) but I usually get lost in my own pretense and neglect to actually make the game.