The characters themselves aren t as important as giving the player the feeling of bringing the castle to life after placing a few buildings. So the primary goal is really to have enough characters walking around doing their tasks in great enough detail to make it feel like a functioning medieval castle. The most important goal is simply to make a fun game. The characters in Tropico were shaped by the whole team. The character s funny thoughts were mostly made up by Brent, the other programmer here.
Every game is approached a little differently due to a variety of factors.
Making games is constantly a learning process, and is, by nature, experimental, so we are constantly refining the process while also trying out new ideas, even in how we organize and approach a game design. Character creation is very important for a character-based game, but it shares equal importance with game play. There are two schools of though dictating concept stage right now whether to concentrate on story and character and then determine the game based around it, or to determine game play and then determine story and character around that. Both approaches have validity to them, but I find artists prefer the former approach, while programmers prefer the latter. On our current project, we are trying a balance of the two with mixed results.