Tuesday, February 28, 2012

The Vampire portrait project

I've been tardy again about posting. A lot going on in real life for me right now, so I can't dedicate a lot of time to the story right now.

However, I have been tooling around a bit in Sims 3. One of the nice things about games with character creation sets this broad is that it allows authors like me to create portraits and pictures of the characters in our heads.

Philly by Night 2012 is an interesting exercise in this, because nearly every character is either A) based on a real person or B) based on a World of Darkness game character.

Item A forces me to be somewhat creative, since this is a fictional account that uses characters that somewhat resemble the real life people upon which they are based. So, in my estimation, their appearances really shouldn't stray too much from reality.

Item B would seem to be easy to deal with, since these characters are completely fictional. However, in the absence of something blatant and obvious in the character's background, I tend to associate these characters and their appearances with the people who played them. This produces a problem when an Item B character was created by an Item A character.

For example, Mitch and Ernie are, in one sense, the same person. Not narratively obviously, but Mitch is based on the real person that I know and Ernie was that real person's character in my Vampire game. So I can't have them look completely alike, yet they're going to be similar because that's how they look in my head.

So far, I like what I'm coming up with. Now that you've heard me talk about this, you'll probably be able to spot which characters are based on the same people, but I'm hoping they look different enough that it won't be completely obvious to someone hasn't read what I just wrote.

I hope to be posting these in the next few days. I'll probably put up another chapter also since I'm presently about five or six chapters ahead of what I've posted so far.

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