Our Story and Character Conception

After our initial idea got scrapped and we decided to go with out new Victorian zombie game, a new story had to be made from scratch, so I wrote up the skeleton of a story that we could roughly work from.(Right click and open the picture in a new tab ti see better).

Although this rough story wasn't particularly detailed, it did give us something to work from and a pool of characters that could be easily created as family members, staff and residents of the city. From this we managed to create eight characters.

We liked the idea of a family surviving the apocalypse and so made five members of the group family members and we jotted down some quick ideas about who they would be and what their defining features would be. We also wanted a couple of staff members in the group too to create a class division which could make for some interesting story telling.

Being a group of three, naming these characters was a bit of a problem. Any suggested names quickly got shot down by one of us and we were having trouble agreeing. To counter this i researched the top 500 girl's names of the 1890's. From this we could pick out those we liked and we were more likely to agree on a couple of names.

This worked well and we started agreeing on names which sped the design process up as we could actually start designing the characters. Below is my process of giving the characters a biography along with any ideas we thought would be good for that character.

Having the characters names somehow helped us to get a better feel for them. Virginia became an American, born in Virginia who was being brought to England by Charlie to meet his family, Odette became a spoiled brat and Grace became a modest and well mannered maid. This helped me to create more detailed but still fairly rough biographies for all the characters (pictured below) which in turn allowed me to create fully detailed versions which will accompany the characters in later posts.

I finally revisited the story a while later and typed it up neatly. It is now much more detailed and portrays why the zombie apocalypse happens and what the Davenports do to survive.