Writing exercise : Create new characters for a multiplayer shooter game.
Jake Dynamite
The special agent Jake “Dynamite” Jeffords is a talented engineer specializing in the art of demolition. His job is to blow things up, which he gladly gets done with the assurance of a professional and the laugh of a supervillain.
Back in his youth, Jake was a genius student in the civil engineering field, capable of running complex calculations and structure analysis faster than his peers. But despite his outstanding results, Jake’s stubborn and hot-headed personality made him difficult to work with.
His fate took an unexpected turn when his neighborhood got caught in the flames of war. Noticing a few civilians trapped inside an unstable building, Jake took upon himself to save them, using a bunch of explosive tools he made. With the right bombs at the right places, all the civilians got away safely, but one last explosion from an external missile got the building to collapse onto Jake, trapping him under the debris.
Jake was saved later by the Agency of Secret Killings (A.S.K.), which decided to get him back into shape and train him as a new agent. A.S.K. can now count on their tactical yet passionate bomb maker, now re-branded as “Jake Dynamite”, to work on massive scale killings and explosive traps.
Quotes :
| Character select | “Let’s blow off some steam !” |
| Victory | “HAHAHAHA ! Haaaa… That was refreshing !” |
| Death | “Blasting off again…” |
| Catchphrase | “When everything fails, just blow it all up !” |
| Fluff | “The “good” thing about explosives is that nobody gets upset if they don’t work… Except me.” |
A hero is born…?
The genre of Hero Shooter is one I did not play much when I tackled this exercise. I did play some Overwatch way back during its launch but then my PC was more used for work rather than games. Still, the idea of having fully-fledged characters with distinct abilities based on their lore, rather than customizable avatars, was an idea that got me interested.
To create this character, I figured it would be best to define his gameplay archetype first. I chose his weapon of choice, asked myself a lot of questions around the weapon and started from there.
“What kind of weirdo uses bombs ?” “What do they even do with them ?” “How well would they interact with their team ? Against their foes ?” And so on and so forth.
The lore of Jake Dynamite came out naturally as I pinned down his gameplay and personality beforehand. I assume in a real situation, the worldbuilding would have come before the characters ? It may be unconventionnal, but I’m fine with how it worked out.
Lastly, the quote section was an extra bonus I made the following day. It makes the character more real, in my opinion !