Character Design and Development

First I'd like to start out by saying that the context for development is as a creator, not from the context of story-writing or the audience.  That being said, I'll jump in

Maybe it's a passion of mine, maybe it's just something I love; either way, character creation is my jelly.  I believe I discovered it most through role-playing games, some of the first ones I got into being Icewind Dale and its expansion and sequel.  Though even in these games the character's personalities and histories weren't really all that existent, except for through dialogue and how you perceived them to be.  Even this early on I began to imagine my characters in some grander fiction beyond the game.  That's not to say I wrote or even dreamt(gonna do it anyways spell-check) up stories for these characters, just that somehow, they had some place in the grand canon of my imagination.

Probably after sophomore year or so I began to get into TableTop, primarily AD&D 3rd Edition, and subsequently v3.5.  Creating characters for these games forced me to realize them on my own, and really design what I thought of the character to be.  It often starts with the simplest of backstories, and as you experience the world through the character, you start making these connections about how they might feel.  Bringing it back to topic, this is when I feel I did the most growth in my love of character creation.  As I played more I also began to take on the role of DM or GM, guiding the game, story, and characters through the session.

Here is where that love I developed was able to really take off, because I had all of this creative need in creating campaigns.  Looking back, it was a ShadowRun campaign I designed that made me really think about game design.  I created a rich environment and cast for the players to interact with and structured the play.  Now, I was getting somewhere(and fortunately for you that's a segue to the home stretch).

After falling out of TableTop play for a while, I decided to get back into it, found some players, and began creating a system for a zombie apocalypse system.  It was a short-lived campaign, but it was fun.   A few months later I had another opportunity to GM, so I transposed my d10 Zombie Apocalypse core system to a sci-fi setting.  Thus d10: Visceroth Cluster was born, and four years later I'm still working on it.  In those years, the characters I laid out, some as early as the very beginning, have only become more cemented as characters in my mind, earning their own place in my Imagination Canon.

Do you have your own little worlds and characters in your imagination? ... do- do you have an imagination?...