Designing a living cohesion guide for your cast of characters.

Intro

We all know how important an interesting and diverse cast of characters is to the media we enjoy.

Think of Pokémon for example, which built a multimedia empire out of their massive cast of creatures, or the Mario games, which with it's iconic colorful cast of characters has spawned multiple spinoffs that dont even include main man Mario!

The cast is usually the first thing I think about when I think of a piece of media I enjoy. For me the cast of Jet Set Radio is iconic. Their obvious 90's street style aesthetic makes them hard to misidentify, and always makes it clear that I'm looking at a group of teens who belong together, both in their theming, but also their attitude.

I have designed multiple casts of characters over the years, which is why I'm making this tutorial.

I made this cast on the left for my game concept Rhythm City Radio, a rhythm game with heavy inspirations from 80's and 90's subcultures. I designed different gangs that are all unique and different from each other, but I made sure to focus on diversity within the gangs themselves as well.

You can see more of the project here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qQdL6z

I designed this cast for my RPG OverNight, a short demo about a boy being whisked away to a fantasy land as he tries to find his place in the world.

I wrote lore and backstories for all the characters, which helped enormously with keeping them consistent. In the lore, every character associated with the kingsguard has a sublte floral theme going on in their uniform, I put my own spin on classic RPG classes, which are already a staple of consistency in cast design and I made sure to have a wide range of personalities, sexualities, body types and gender expressions in my cast.

You can play it here: https://hessel-bouma.itch.io/overnight

You can see more of the project here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oA5Jn4

Why this tutorial:

In this tutorial I will be teaching you a way to document rules and keep the characters in your cast consistent. I made this tutorial because I found it very difficult to find information on this topic, that's not buried within character design tutorials and videos.

Cohesion is one of the most important parts of designing a cast of characters, it's the thing that binds your characters together, but also gives you rules to work with and stick to, so you can keep the cohesion going if you add new characters to the cast.

I will talk about different methods to keep cohesion in your cast through research, themes, styles, patterns, shape language, colors etc. This will all culminate in a living document in Milanote you can use when designing your cast. This document should be useful to you, but also to potential teammates, so it should be in-depth and thorough.

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