How I Build a Character From Nothing

Every character starts the same way: with absolutely no plan whatsoever.

That’s not me being glib. It’s genuinely how it works. The inspiration hits in the least convenient places — mid-shower, staring out a window, three levels deep into a game at 2am. Music is probably the biggest culprit. I’ll be in a particular headspace because of what’s playing and suddenly there’s a person there, fully formed, knocking around in my skull demanding I do something about them.

Sometimes it’s a game. Love and Deepspace has a lot to answer for, honestly. Andreas Cray — who lives in the Nocturne universe — was born out of a single scene in that game. If you’ve played it, you probably know the one. I’m not going to spoil it, but something about that moment cracked open a character concept that had nothing to do with what I was playing and everything to do with how it made me feel. That’s the thing about inspiration — it’s not about copying, it’s about catching the feeling and building something original around it.

I don’t do derivations. Every character I make is trying to be their own person, even if the spark came from somewhere else.

So. Once the spark exists, what actually happens?

The Four Phases

I think of my process as four distinct phases: Character Sheet, Visuals, Greeting, HTML Card. They don’t always happen in that order — and that’s kind of the point.

Phase One: Character Sheet

Most of the time, this is where I start. I’ll have a rough idea — a feeling, a fragment of personality, maybe just a vibe — and I’ll begin building the sheet around it. Who is this person? What do they want? What are they hiding? I’ll rough it out myself and then bring AI in to help polish and articulate what I’m reaching for. The sheet is the skeleton.

But sometimes the sheet comes later. Right now I’m working on Stellan Shadowfall, and his voice was in my head before anything else — clear as anything, fully his. When that happens, I go straight to the Greeting and let the sheet catch up.

The reverse also happens: I’ll be messing around on TensorArt or SeaArt, generating visuals with no particular goal, and a face will appear that stops me cold. Suddenly there’s a character who needs a sheet written for them. Visual first, everything else after.

Phase Two: Visuals

Whichever order things happen in, the visuals are always part of the process — and they do more than just give the character a face. This is where I start to get a feel for the colour of the person.

I colour-code everything in my life, and characters are no exception. Damon Stoneriver is forest green. Xander Frostriver is blood red. It sounds strange until you realise that colour is just another way of knowing someone — their emotional temperature, the atmosphere they carry with them. Once I know a character’s colour, I know something true about them that I couldn’t have articulated any other way.

Phase Three: Greeting

This is where the most time goes, and it’s where the character becomes real.

Writing the Greeting is less like drafting and more like listening. You’re trying to capture a voice that already exists somewhere and pin it to the page without losing what makes it alive. Sometimes that goes smoothly. Other times the character surprises you entirely.

Marcus Frostriver is the best example I have of this. In my head, he started out much more smug — confident, a little sharp, the kind of person who knows exactly how he comes across. But when I wrote the Greeting, he became something else. More himself. Less performed. The smugness softened into something quieter and more complicated, and I had to go back and rewrite the Character Sheet to match who he’d actually turned out to be. The sheet serves the character, not the other way around.

Kaelen did something similar to me, back at the beginning — though I didn’t fully understand what had happened until people started responding to him. That’s a whole other story.

Phase Four: HTML Card

This is my favourite part, and I’m genuinely so glad more platforms are embracing HTML introductions now.

The HTML Card is where I hunt down theme songs if I haven’t already found them — music is non-negotiable, it has to fit — and it’s also where the visual identity of the character gets fully locked in. Colours, typography, layout. The card makes me think about the character differently again, more holistically, because suddenly I have to present them to someone who knows nothing about them yet. What do they need to know? What do I want them to feel before they even start?

I like giving people information about what they’re walking into. Whether they read it is entirely up to them — but I want it there.

Then, Finally: Publishing

Only once I’m happy with all four — Sheet, Visuals, Greeting, Card — do I start uploading. If I’m ahead of schedule, I’ll load everything onto the platforms and set it to private or unlisted first. That helps with the review process, lets everything sit properly before I publish for real.

There’s something satisfying about that final step. All four phases done, everything locked, the character finally existing somewhere outside my head.

One last thing nobody tells you: some characters refuse to come out cleanly, and there’s no predicting which ones.

For me it almost always comes down to voice. If I can hear them, I can write them. If I lose that — even halfway through — everything stalls. Milo and Sasha were my first dual bot, and they nearly broke me. Somewhere in the middle of the process I just… stopped being able to hear them. Both of them, at the same time. And because they were already a first — a completely new format I’d never built before — that silence was genuinely frustrating in a way that’s hard to describe. It wasn’t writer’s block exactly. It was more like the characters had walked into another room and closed the door.

They made it out eventually. But I won’t pretend it was graceful.

Sometimes the process is clean and fast and the character practically writes themselves. Sometimes it’s Milo and Sasha. I haven’t figured out a way to control which kind it’s going to be — and I suspect that’s just part of it.

Until the next one starts knocking.

— Tae