Skip to main content

On Sale: GamesAssetsToolsTabletopComics
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines

i havent published anything but this is helping me think about what i'm trying to say/not say when making someones appearance. although i don't plan or writing anything heavily involving irl cultural stuff so i kinda just choose things like skin tone arbitrarily. how do you decide on stuff like that when making your games?

(4 edits) (+1)

It's hard for me to figure out how to answer this admittedly. IRL culture is in every work and genre. It's just a lot of it is Western culture or medieval fantasy culture which is usually viewed as inherently white. I am attracted to Western settings so I put more effort into trying to make it clear white isn't the default in my worlds. I mention this but I also try to avoid a lot of ambiguous browness (though it is inevitable and sometimes i enjoy ambiguity. Sera from Meat Girl has a canon ethnicity in my mind lol, but I think it's kinda fun for people to draw her however).

To do this, I try write and design people with their relationships with their cultures and the cultures around them in mind even if I don't fully explore every aspect of it. It doesn't have to be IRL culture, but parallels to IRL culture tend to be in most work... A lot of my characters are also based on my friends from childhood and people I know now so I  like to bother my friends and as I learn more about them, I end up learning about their culture usually inevitably which ends up being incorporated into my writing and designs (usually I end up bugging them too ahah).

One thing to keep in mind is not including IRL cultural aspects can block out the existence of certain people. IE, there are people who only wear cultural clothing, Indian women who always wear bindis, etc. It's something I try to keep in mind designing too which is why Aiyana wears more traditional clothing in small subsections of the What Is It Like to Taste. It's something she used to do even if she doesn't anymore and it goes hand in hand with other things said in story despite not directly bringing up her culture by mouth so it's easy to miss (which is fine for me since I don't need every writing/design decision to be picked up on  by every single reader)