How to Design a Compelling Character for Your Text Adventure

Interactive fiction occupies an interesting place in the world of gaming. It isn’t quite a videogame—indeed, most interactive fiction is missing a key component, video—yet it is still classified as a game because of its interactive nature. Heck, ‘interactive’ is in the name! Due to this, text adventures, as they’re also called, receive mixed reviews from gamers all over the world. Why the muddled reception?

Personally, I believe most interactive fiction is done completely wrong. Traditional games—good traditional games—have compelling characters, interesting storylines, a developed world and lore, and player interaction within the world. Interactive fiction needs all of this, plusgood writing that can convey everything without losing the player’s interest. There are a few areas where most text adventures fall short, but today we’ll focus on characters, compelling ones, at that.

Characters are the lifeblood of video games. Think of any game, and then imagine it without the main character or your favorite side characters. Boring, right? Now imagine that same scenario, but only with a black screen and only a few lines of text to represent the world. Nearly unplayable.

Now, just because traditional video games have characters does not mean they’re good, and the same goes for text adventures, possibly even more so. How does one create a compelling character?

Crafting a character’s backstory is where many genres of entertainment often fall short. The backstory, even if it will not be shown or told directly to the audience, plays an incredibly important role in informing how a character acts, reacts, their motivations, their personality, and possibly even their appearance. In other words, it is extremely important.

That is not to say that every character in your text adventure needs a five-page biography. On the contrary, most backstories can be as short as a few sentences or cover a few paragraphs; anything more than that is unnecessary. The main idea is to figure out a character’s history and have it set in stone so it is an easy referral when crafting the other components of the character.

An easy guide to follow when crafting a backstory is:

• How did they grow up? What was their family like? What did they do in their spare time?

• How did their views of the world shape as they grew older? Did any experiences change them?

• Did they decide to leave their old life, or are they still in it? Are they happy?

Not all of these questions have to be answered. Some can be ignored altogether, and others can be added. But, if you’re stuck, this is a good starting point to get to know your character.

Motivation is what drives a character forward. It is what gets them up in the morning and influences everything from their pathing to their conversations. It is easy to pick up on characters that have no defined motivation—they feel hollow, hard to connect with, and are most of the time forgotten or abandoned by the player of your text adventure.

To craft a compelling motivation, draw from your character’s backstory. Were they born to rich parents who bought them everything but showed no love? Were they bored with their old life and left it all behind without saying goodbye? Have they lived a perfectly simple life all this time?

While not a comprehensive guide, a few questions you can ask are:

• What does the character want right now?
• Why are they here?
• What is the one thing they want in life, but just can’t seem to reach?

Personality, in essence, is a character’s outlook towards the world and how they react to the stimuli around them. While it is seemingly an easy task, crafting a character’s personality can be quite difficult. Most people run into the issue of either not fully understanding the character’s personality, or by not sticking to a certain one.

For example, imagine you’re talking to someone in a bar—let’s call him Steve. Steve has had one too many and he’s fuming mad, ready to beat up the next chump that comes too close. But then, from out of the blue, Plot Point Penelope approaches. Suddenly Steve is calm, as if he’s never been upset a day in his life, even though Penelope hasn’t spoken a word to him yet.

There’s nothing wrong with this, unless Steve is known to have a short temper and doesn’t calm down easily. Sudden shifts in personality are hallmarks of someone not fully understanding their character, or someone unable to stay to one personality.

Personality is admittedly a difficult, nuanced component to work with, and if not done correctly, can make your character strange and unrelatable to players. When in doubt, draw from real-world examples and model characters after the people you know.     

How much interaction can the player have with this character? While this is a bit easier to achieve in traditional video games, this is especially important in text adventures. Without characters to interact with, interactive fiction seems to fall apart, back to the realm of mediocrity.

With words being the main vehicle in interactive fiction, the easiest way to achieve interactivity with characters is to give many dialogue options. Give the player enough freedom to feel as if they’re having a direct conversation with the character, and make their dialogue have consequences regarding the player-character relationship.

Text adventures are tasked with a difficult objective: meet all the standards of traditional video games, while doing it all in a few lines of text and possibly some still images. And yet, while there are many bases to cover to ensure an interactive fiction game is compelling, the most important component is having compelling and interactive characters. Allow their backstories to inform their personalities and motivations, and give the player plenty of opportunities to interact with them.

At the end of the day, games are supposed to be fun. If a player has the chance to interact with an interesting character inside a well-written world, they’ll be playing for hours.