Character

​

What it controls

A character node establishes someone the player can meet. The portrait makes the person recognizable; deeper settings keep their behavior and speech consistent; act goals give them a reason to act. In Letter from Mist Harbor, the main non-player character is Lin Zhou, the night clerk at the Tidebound Post Office.

​

Basic profile

Keep the name and identity consistent, and enter age as digits only (for example 32); “32 years old” or a spelled-out number fails validation. Add a new portrait only when the character’s state or time really changes.

​

How to fill the basic profile

• Keep the name consistent; do not change how the character is addressed between acts;
• Write the identity as a relationship the player can understand, not an internal shorthand only the author knows;
• Match age to the character’s experience and way of speaking;
• Add a portrait only when the character’s state or time really changes, not one per act by default.

​

Portrait specs and production

Portraits appear in scenes, dialogue avatars, and character details. Besides a default portrait, you can set a portrait for a specific act; an act without its own portrait falls back to the default.

• Size and scaling: vertical 768×1024. The editor scales to that size on upload; when the ratio does not match, it fits the whole image inside and pads the rest with transparency.
• Frame: a mid-shot from the top of the head to mid-thigh; do not draw below the knees or use a full-body image. Do not crop the top of the head, arms, or upper-body clothing.
• Background and transparency: use a PNG or WebP with a real transparent background (alpha channel), not a white, green-screen, or scene background; the editor does not remove backgrounds for you.
• Format and size: PNG, JPEG, or WebP, under 4MB; prefer PNG or WebP when transparency must be preserved.
• Cross-act consistency: keep identity, face, hair, and clothing cues consistent across acts, and change only the confirmed outfit, light, or pose.
• Prompt: state a real transparent background, the mid-shot framing, and nothing below the knees, and exclude green screen, white background, scene, ground shadow, text, watermark, and extra characters.

​

Deeper settings

These guide the story but are not displayed as editor instructions: Write behaviors a player can notice rather than labels such as “brave” or “mysterious.”

​

Act goals

Fill a goal for each act the character appears in. For Tide Before Midnight, an example goal is: Confirm whether Shen Yao noticed the salt mark, then decide whether to hand over the old-pier key. Act goals are background fields: the player never sees them as a task list, but they keep the character’s direction stable across different conversations in the same act, so the character does not forget the problem they are trying to solve.

​

From fields to the game page

1. Name, identity, age, and gender let the player recognize the person in the character menu;
2. The portrait lets the player see the person in scenes and beside dialogue;
3. Deeper settings show through the character’s dialogue, actions, and reactions under pressure;
4. If the character is bound to a visible state component, its name and current value appear in the character details;
5. Whether the character can appear in an act also depends on binding them to that act; creating the node alone does not put them on stage.

​

Check it

• Name and age are filled in;
• The profile details the player needs do not contradict each other;
• For non-player characters, deeper settings describe behavior and reactions, not vague adjectives;
• The character is bound to an act where the story actually happens;
• At least one test confirmed how the character appears in the character menu and beside dialogue.

Next: Location.