WHAT AGE RANGE ARE THE CHARACTERS IN YOUR GAMES?

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LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=Gretgor
Well, the main character of my current project is twelve, and I never stopped to think about it up to this point, but she only interacts with adults throughout the entire game. Is this creepy?
No, that's just a character forced to exist in a world that they're not ready for. That's a solid premise for an adventure story.

Now, it might be creepy if your main character is 35 and he only interacts with middle schoolers throughout the entire game. Unless it's a game about being a teacher or parent. But like, imagine a version of Metal Gear Solid where every single character is 10-12 years old except for Solid Snake. Otacon and Ocelot are both fifth graders. Vamp and Raiden and the Colonel are fourth graders. All the nameless enemy soldiers are preteens too. The End is an eighth grader, and if you wait long enough, he graduates to high school and you win the fight against him. Even Big Boss is a 12 year old version of Solid Snake, making the whole cloning timeline thing even more impossibly convoluted. But Snake is still in his thirties and just goes through the game acting like all of this is normal.
author=LockeZ
author=Gretgor
Well, the main character of my current project is twelve, and I never stopped to think about it up to this point, but she only interacts with adults throughout the entire game. Is this creepy?
No, that's just a character forced to exist in a world that they're not ready for. That's a solid premise for an adventure story.

Now, it might be creepy if your main character is 35 and he only interacts with middle schoolers throughout the entire game. Unless it's a game about being a teacher or parent. But like, imagine a version of Metal Gear Solid where every single character is 10-12 years old except for Solid Snake. Otacon and Ocelot are both fifth graders. Vamp and Raiden and the Colonel are fourth graders. All the nameless enemy soldiers are preteens too. The End is an eighth grader, and if you wait long enough, he graduates to high school and you win the fight against him. Even Big Boss is a 12 year old version of Solid Snake, making the whole cloning timeline thing even more impossibly convoluted. But Snake is still in his thirties and just goes through the game acting like all of this is normal.


So, an anime, then.

As for my projects, it's pretty wide but I don't generally include child characters.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Shit. I was trying to describe the most absurd possible example of a setting and cast that I could come up with, but I accidentally perfectly described the plot of Kantai Collection
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
It'd be pretty funny if you had an adult protag and literally everyone else was young children and the adult is just like "Why is this happening I don't understand"
Holy shit! Wow what are the chances. I was just going to make a topic very similar to this. I think I still will just because it is sort of asking a more specific question so yeah...we're gonna have two v. similar topics for a while.

Traditionally, my games have generally been a bit more grounded in reality, so I've had characters that were well past the age of majority, and old enough to be in their respective professions, but not old enough to be nearing retirement, so generally 25-50 years old. Since I first started doing this I have rejected the JRPG convention of teenage heroes.

I've departed radically from this recently with Road To Paradise: The Dragon and (obviously) When You Were Young. In RtP: The Dragon the protagonists are a seven year old dragon (says he's nineteen), a 191 year old Chronomancer who looks like he's in his 30s, an eighteen year old princess/knight, and a 919 year old Dark Acolyte of the Ruby Goddess who looks about 19, so that's a hell of a range. In (the first half of) When You Were Young, Ralph is 12, Ulrika is 13, Elmer is 15, and Caroline is thousands of years old in reality but physically 14. (When the first half got streamed someone mentioned being squicked by the implication of Caroline and Elmer making out, but it's important to understand that physically, she's a 14 year old girl, so she has the sex drive of a 14 year old girl, it's not like a calculated maneuver on the part of a millennia old biddy to trick a young boy into kissing her (although she's done MUCH worse), she doesn't really have control of her 14 year old body or her 14 year old feelings, even if she retains her 2,000 (or whatever) year old mind. It's one of the reasons she's so pissed about being trapped in the body she's in.)

From a writing perspective, characters (such as vampires) that have lived many human lifetimes are definitely the hardest to write, because they have a perspective on life that is almost unimaginable, at least if you approach the matter seriously. (I didn't approach writing Caroline particularly seriously.) Solitayre and Liberty have discussed this topic in much more depth and insight earlier in the thread!

@Darken: read your post, got excited about your description of what I assumed was your game (Lost Odyssey), was about to ask where I could GET your game Lost Odyssey, and then finally remembered that no, Lost Odyssey was actually a commercial jRPG I played a good third of about 10 years ago lol. (FWIW I thought the way that LO dealt with Kaim's immortality and history was...less than good.)
The characters in my games have tended to have ages that tend to match my own age when I started them.
Mimi So&so (yes, that is her actual last name) was somewhere around 13-15ish back in Mimi's Mountain. I wasn't exactly that skilled in writing back when I was moving from middle school to high school so I never really factored in how messed up she should have been from her backstory where she had went on a precious adventure when she was just a child to rescue her father and kill Antwan the evillian and then during the game story proper had to deal with her best friend being kidnapped, as well as Antwan's ghost still lurking for revenge. That is, until I wrote a reinterpretation of her story in Creeptacular Shack, which is a modern horror au which takes place presumably on earth instead of Thirdinaltup. In that one, she's 16 years old and constantly wracked with guilt and anxiety.

In Jello and the Valley of Duh, Jello Purin is 16 and lives by herself due to Plot Reasons which were written more as an afterthought of thinking "wait, where are her parents, she's still a teenager!". Kirby is stated to be 200 something years old, having spent most of it eating and sleeping, and emotionally about 13 years old, as opposed to how babylike he was depicted in the anime. Raiblu is roughly 17 or something, and had to grow up fast due to hardships in his past, hence why he's fully evolved and barely knows any high level moves.

Seth is a bit of a special case, considering he was first written as 13 when he first appeared in SBARGv2 and then was aged up in real-time due to being a character in an ongoing chat based rp. At the time of Sethstuck's development, he was almost 18, give or take any time shenanigans that would have made him older or younger than a simple calculation from "birth date" would add up to. All other characters in the underworld part of the game are younger dead versions of Seth, locked at their various states of (im)maturity for eternity, youngest version being 13 years old due to being hit by a meteor without the knowledge needed to avoid it.
Being written exactly two years after Sethstuck, Just in Time features Seth at almost 20, and shows hints of him being just a little more mature, especially concerning the knowledge of how easy he and his new battle partner could die despite his godtier status (it's ambiguous whether or not Justin had ascended to godtier but it's assumed that he never reached that point in his session), but still capable of making the same sorts of rash mistakes he would have before. I have no idea how young Justin is supposed to be, but I'd guess probably a bit younger than Seth due to his sheer lack of experience with his time powers.

As for Coda from A Snowball's Chance, she's a rough self insert so she's firmly 25, but tends to be a bit immature and unseasoned to the outside world due to her conditions and circumstances. Her hiking group is roughly within the same range, with Vern being 26 and Topaz being 24ish. They all have day-jobs that they're taking a break from for the week (cook at a diner, stage actor, bodyguard). Frie however is a complete mystery, as she is an outcast from society and is also a type of dragon person. Considering my gamedev partner wrote her as her own rough self insert, I'd say Frie could be somewhere around 17 or so.

So far, Coda is the oldest main character I've ever seriously written for. I'd definitely have to chalk it up to not knowing how to write adults and sorta feeling like I don't know much about adulthood in general. Similar age/a couple years younger is definitely easier to write for and relate to personally.
I have almost never written a character near my own age except by complete accident. When I was younger I wrote older, now that I'm older I write younger. The only exception is when I go back to characters I created when I was younger that are now, coincidentally, my age. (Unsurprisingly, I can write them better than when I was a young'un. Don't know how much of that is relating to 30 somethings and how much of it is just being better at writing now than I was then.)

Right now I'm writing a couple of 200 year old characters and it's quite the challenge, but a fun challenge.
25-55ish. I feel that way, the style of dialogue I write comes off the most natural, coming out of the mouths of adults. Never really liked the idea of a teenage protagonist for my personal projects, lol.
In 99% of all cases it's between 18 and my own age (at time of development).

Exceptions: Robots (usually age 0-1) and non-human races (any number from 0 to 399)

And one of my game designs involves an old man you have to visit who temporarily joins the party, but I never disclosed his age.
author=Solitayre
Young adulthood (17-24ish) tends to be a dynamic time in peoples' lives where they're figuring out who they are, forging important relationships, falling in love, and heading out on their own for maybe the first time, but haven't made lifelong commitments to anything yet and have freedom to move around and try new things. It makes sense from a 'Hero's journey' perspective for a protagonist and their coterie to be around that age.

Being in my thirties myself now I understand that only young adults really have the latitude and the endurance to head off on world-spanning adventures presented in RPG or adventure games.

For more drama-focused pieces, characters of any age can work.


Dangit Eeyore, you stole the words from my mouth. XD

I don't have any set age range in my work, it basically depends on the piece. I often don't even consider a definite age, just something general like "Young adult, full adult, older adult" etc.

I guess the most general age grouping in my works are people in their mid 20's. Old enough to be experienced, strong and intelligent, but young enough to still be fit and ready to take risks.

Like, in Illusions of Loyalty (being focused on a group of soldiers on a highly risky mission), they're basically in their late 20's to mid 30's...

Mayhem Maiden has people mostly in their early to mid 20s, considering most of the maidens are still working though some issues defining themselves.

And every other game I've completed I basically didn't put much thought into it.

Heresies of Discord has both heroines in their mid-to-late 20s, I guess? (I REALLY didn't consider their age when making it)

And The End....I really didn't even bother thinking up an age range, for reasons that kinda make sense by the end of it. And since Cursed Crown is a minimalist retro themed game, it hardly seemed important either.
MinST
This is a strategy game where there is no real characters, only medieval fighting units of undefined age most likely from 15 to 40 years old.

Wizard apprentice Lya
Lya: 18 years old
She just entered university and will go on an adventure from there. I now realize she perfectly matches Solitayre's observation about "heading out on their own for the first time".

Red balloon of happiness
Jim: 7 years old
He is a bit more complicated because he is a supporting character to give context to the player.
Spoiler:
What really matters is that the player is old enough to have a 7 years old son.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
Early 20s to mid 30s in the big project. Cat and Dragon float somewhere in the early to mid 20s range while Corf* and Pirate are distinctly 32 and 35 respectively. I'm surprised I never nailed down a solid age for the first two, but I'm sure Dragon is at least a year older than Cat.

* There needed to be about 20 years to account for his struggles, grooming and atrocities, and when he left home, he was in the early throes of teenagerdom. Also that I've grown fond of Hammerfall's "The Unforgiving Blade", which I found after developing most of his story.
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pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32367
The above post is reported for spam and likely a bot.
If you google "tellfunnyjokes.com" something about the results seem odd. They are rarely that uniform haha
If that bot is named funnyjokes then boy there had better be some funnyjokes in the pipeline
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
That joke wasn't funny at all! I want my money back!
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