The Protagonist

The Idea

I had a bigger scope in mind for IEI, originally. My idea was to provide players with a range of archetypes to play as, each with a different starting point, traits and experience. The last plan I had incorporated these:

The Stud – Handsome, popular and athletic. Player who has no problems attracting women.

The Student – Serious co-ed, convinced to take the internship as way to get a break from her studies.

The Average Joe – Middle of the road guy with nothing in particular going for or against him.

The Genius – Featuring a very different game start, the Genius is recruited specifically for his mental abilities.

The Loser – Ugly, not particularly intelligent and with terrible luck. Up until now, nothing has gone his way.

The Reality

To get things moving as quickly as possible, without completely overwhelming myself, I figured it would be best if I started off simply and just picked one of the archetypes, and worried about integrating the others later. The Average Joe seemed like the natural choice.

In the process of writing an designing everything, I realized just how complex (and completely insane) my original idea was. I’ve since given up on the idea on including the other archetypes in order to be able to focus more of my time on what I consider to be the more interesting content. This means that I’ve unfortunately restricted the type of character that the user can play.

As a bit of a concession, I took some of the ideas that I played with for the Loser’s game start and came up with the idea of a few optional traits that the player can use to customize their character a little bit.

As much as I would like to make a game that would allow the player to have full control over who their character is, I think it would make the scope larger than something I’m comfortable working with. As it stands, I’ve made efforts to make sure that the protagonist doesn’t actually speak (though I can’t help but write in some internal monologue), but, in order to keep things simple and be able to write things in such a way that the protagonist is involved with the story, he will always start as an average/below average, heterosexual college student.

Point of View

I’m hoping to make things as immersive for the player as I can. It’s part of the reason I chose to write the story in 2nd person (which is taking me some time to get used to). Since I’m using 3D models for the characters, I was also toying with the idea of keeping everything in first person perspective. (i.e., You would only see the main character’s face in mirror; they could see their body by looking down, etc.) Limitations with the camera in the studio make this a bit too difficult to accomplish, aside from a few images here and there. From my experiments, I think a mix will be more visually interesting anyway.