ciscoda

These are the 12 principles to create believable characters. Wendelin Reich, founder and CEO of VIRTUAL BEINGS, has spent more than a decade studying how to make digital characters feel alive and found out that to make a character feel alive it need to be: 👀 Observable: Behavior must be something the player can perceive. Internal states such as a racing heart only become behavior when they produce something observable, such as nervous tapping or knocking over a glass. 🔄 Continuous: Characters are always behaving, even when they appear to be doing nothing. Sitting, sleeping, or standing still are still ongoing behavior rather than an absence of behavior. 🤝 Interactive: Behavior always happens in relation to the character's environment and other agents. A believable character needs to respond and adapt to what is happening around it rather than simply playing predefined animations. 🧱 Constrained: Behavior is shaped by the physical and contextual constraints of the world, including the environment, objects, physics, sound, and the character's own body. The character needs to adapt its behavior to these constraints. 🧩 Sequenced: Behavior consists of sequences that can be reused and adapted. Real humans rely on learned patterns of movement but adjust them to the specific situation rather than generating every movement from scratch. ⚡ Interruptible: Behavior can change unexpectedly. Characters can change their minds, react to new events, or abandon an action while still maintaining a continuous flow of behavior. 🎭 Patterned variation: The same behavior should never look exactly identical every time. Natural behavior contains variation, but that variation follows underlying patterns rather than being completely random. 🪜 Hierarchical: Complex behavior is composed of layers of coordinated actions. For example, a handshake involves the torso positioning the arms, the arms controlling the hands, and the head and eyes coordinating with the other person. 🔀 Parallel: Characters perform multiple behaviors simultaneously. Someone can walk, smoke, look around, and react to another person at the same time. These behaviors may involve different or overlapping parts of the body. 🧠 Cognitively caused: Behavior has an underlying mental cause. What a character does should communicate intentions, emotions, decisions, or other internal states rather than being movement without meaning. 👁️ Monitored: Characters continuously interpret what is happening and use that information to influence their behavior. Their actions are connected to their perception of the situation rather than operating independently of it. 💬 Readable: Other characters, and especially the player, automatically interpret behavior and infer its meaning. A gesture can communicate intention, failure, embarrassment, or emotion even when these states are never explicitly stated. Check out the full interview with additional links and resources here: youtu.be/Oy47sSNXeYk