Talking Level Design with Samuel Dassler

I happened to bump into Samuel Dassler on Imgur, where he posted this thread about his time at DigiPen. He imparted a few tidbits of wisdom in the post, and I thought he'd be an interesting person to talk to.  He recently worked on a game called Mekazoo, which you can find on Steam, Xbox Live, and Playstation Network.

Character Development and writing: A Conversation with Ashton Raze

Ashton Raze

Not too long ago, I talked with Ashton Raze about character design, writing, applications in Game Development, and other highly unrelated topics. She was willing to answer some questions I had for her, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to her.  It's amazing what random conversations on Twitter can turn into! Our conversation started on Twitter before moving to a more formal interview.  Those 140 character limits tend to really cramp what one can say.  Our initial conversation was how easy it is to add a token character to the plot for little reason than to check off a box on the diversity checklist.  I got to thinking about solutions to this problem when I started talking to Raze.

Admittedly, I had a bit of an agenda to push when I first reached out to Raze.  I set out to rant about game characters and how developers don't spend enough time fleshing the character beyond a few simple traits/tropes. While talking with Raze, the conversation quickly changed and went an entirely different direction.  The conversation changed to writing and character development, and as such, I've had to rethink how I would write this article.