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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/40101
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Suppose you are part of a development team working on a fighting game, and you're given the role of creating about 30 or 40 unique characters from many different backgrounds from the ground up. It's more story heavy than most fighting games, and it takes place over a large universe spanning many planets, so most characters end up being largely disconnected from most of the other cast.

Being a fighting game, the characters follow some archetypes established from many fighting games, such as:

- quick characters who relentlessly rush down their opponents. They are often very light on defense (leading to glass canons sometimes), but they make up for it with their speed and their small size.
- characters who work best with their projectiles or other long range attacks. They shine by keeping their opponents out of their faces as much as possible or keeping them at a distance that's advantageous to them but disadvantageous to their enemies.
- grappler / heavy-weight characters who excel in close combat. They can take and dish out lots of damage, but they are often slow and easy to hit because of their size.

_You also have healers, but it's specific to this fighting game as it features large teams with concurrently fighting characters._

Aside from these archetypes, you're _almost_ completely free to create the characters however you want with whatever backstory and arc you want, as long as they fit the game play of course. For example, sometimes you're given the task of creating a character who needs to have something specific, like a ball and chain user for example, but you can decide everything else for the character yourself.

Regardless whether this game and its story would be feasible to make or not (that's not the point of this question), how would you create all these characters if you're given a specific number of characters you need to make with certain requirements/restraints for some or all of them, like the example above?

The way I'm currently doing it is by having one "main" story and character that drives everyone else's stories to some extent. I have one to four characters per planet and they are just there at the moment, as "character slots" so to speak. Later, when I get ideas for characters, I try to incorporate them into the character slots I created, keeping in mind the requirements or restraints the dev team puts on that character. Once I have a full set of characters, I try to make them work together, so I can tell a cohesive story with all of them.

_Side note: I'm more of a discovery writer, hence the approach I take._

Original score: 17