creating believable characters

I wanted to create characters that were realistic, inspiring, and iconic in some way. Since I'm only a first time game developer, I'm going to set expectations really low on how well I can achieve this goal. But I'll try to do my best to root the characters based on some amalgamation of folks that I've trained with over the years. I've noticed that there's a few personality types that join aikido. We've got folks that have served in the military or police. There are a lot of students that are in some form of healthcare, whether it be doctors, nurses, chiropractors, physical therapists, massage therapists and the like. We've got all kinds of engineers and we've got artists.

Anyway, a lot of these positions are just career paths. I'm more interested in the reason why people choose to take these paths. The first two I mentioned before are folks who want to protect or to heal. So, I thought that was interesting that they choose aikido, a martial art that emphasizes keeping the attacker safe.

Another thing that was important to me was that the main characters be teenagers. The reason for that is because I want kids in middle to high school to identify in some way with the characters. I don't know if it's too much of a stretch to have a teenage police cadet and a teenage student volunteer at a hospital, but that's what I'm going with. The whole point of his post was to say, I've had the modeler I'm working with give the characters a new set of clothes. These clothes are based on the career path they're starting. I can imagine more themed costuming for the characters later to let players customize as they see fit. Here they are in t-pose in the bridge environment.