A character is similar to an object, except that it can change rooms, maintain its own inventory, and take part in conversations (more on these later). It can also have its own custom animation speed and movement speed.

Go to the "Characters" node in the main tree. You will see under it a list of all the characters in the game. To create a new character, right-click the "Characters" node and choose the "New character" option.

You will see that there are a lot of options which you can set for each character. The most immediately obvious one is the "Make this the player character" button, which allows you to change which character the player will control at the start of the game. When the game starts, the first room loaded will be this character's starting room.

The rest of the options are hidden away in the property grid on the right. Some of them are described below:

The "UseRoomAreaScaling" option allows you to specify whether this character will be stretched or shrunk in scaling areas of the screen. You might want to disable this if you have a character who always stands still in the same place, and you want the graphics on-screen to be the same size as you drew them, even though he is standing on a scaled area.

The "Clickable" option tells AGS whether you want the player to be able to click on the character. If Clickable is enabled, then the character will be interactable, like the way things worked in Sierra games. If it is not enabled then the character works like the main character did in Lucasarts games - if you move the cursor over him or click to look, speak, etc, then the game will ignore the character and respond to whatever is behind him.

To set which room this character starts in, change the "StartingRoom" property. You can set the character's location within this room by using the "StartX" and "StartY" properties to type in the X,Y co-ordinates you want him to start at. These co-ordinates define where the middle of his feet will be placed.

The "NormalView" is where you set what the character looks like. You must create a view in the View Editor, and this view must have either 4 or 8 loops. If you use 4 loops, then when walking diagonally the closest straight direction is used for the graphics. Each loop is used for the character walking in one direction, as follows:

 Loop 0 - walking down (towards screen)
 Loop 1 - walking left
 Loop 2 - walking right
 Loop 3 - walking up (away from screen)
 Loop 4 - walking diagonally down-right
 Loop 5 - walking diagonally up-right
 Loop 6 - walking diagonally down-left
 Loop 7 - walking diagonally up-left

NOTE: The first frame in each loop is the standing still frame. When walking, the game will cycle through the rest of the frames in the loop.

The "MovementSpeed" option allows you to control how fast the character moves when walking. Here, a larger number means he walks faster. If you find that a movement speed of 1 is still too fast, you can use negative numbers (eg. -3) which will move even more slowly. The lower you go, the slower the movement speed.

The "SpeechColor" option specifies which colour is used for the text when this character is talking. It effects all messages that are said by this character. You can find out the colour for each number by going to the "Colours" pane.

The "IdleView" option allows you to set an idle animation for the character. To do this, create a new view, with one or more loops of the character idle (eg. smoking, reading a book, etc). Then, set the "Idle view" to this view number. If the player stands still for 20 seconds (you can change the timeout with the Character.SetIdleView script function), then the current loop from the idle view will be played.

The "ScriptName" property sets the name by which the character will be referred to in scripts and in conversation scripting. The difference from the RealName of the character is that the script name may only contain letters A-Z and numbers 0-9 (the first character must be a letter, however). The convention in AGS is that character script names start with a lower case "c".

To set what happens when the player interacts with the character, click the "Events" button (this is the lightning bolt button at the top of the property grid). You will be presented with the events list; select an event and press the "..." button to allow you to enter some script to handle the event.

You can also set a talking view for the character. To set one, use the "SpeechView" property. If you set a talking view, then that view will be used to animate the character while they are speaking. You should generally have about 2-3 frames in each loop (the loops are used for the same directions as in the main view).

There is also an available "Blinking view". This is used to play intermittent extra animations while the character is talking. You may want to use this for effects such as blinking (hence the name). If you set a view here, it will play intermittently while the character talks (it is drawn on top of the normal talking view). The default time between it playing is 3-4 seconds, but you can change this with the Character.BlinkInterval script property.
NOTE: the blinking view is currently only supported with sierra-style speech.

"UseRoomAreaLighting" allows you to tell AGS whether this character will be affected by light and tint levels set on room regions.

If you disable "TurnBeforeWalking", it will override the General Setting for turning and tell AGS not to turn this particular character around on the spot before they move.

"Diagonal loops" specifies that loops 4-8 of the character's view will be used for the four diagonal directions. If this option is not enabled, the character will only face 4 ways, and you can use loops 4-8 for other purposes.

"Adjust speed with scaling" modifies the character's walking speed in line with their zoom level, as set on the walkable areas.

"Adjust volume with scaling" modifies the volume of any frame-linked sounds on the character's view (eg. footstep sounds) with their zoom level, as set on the walkable areas.

"Solid" specifies that this character is solid and will block other characters from walking through it. Note that both characters must be solid in order for them to block one another.

AGS allows you to export your characters to a file, and then import the file into a different game - so you can share the same main character between games, or create one for distribution on the internet. Right-click on the character and choose "Export character". The entire character setup and graphics will be exported to the file, including the character's walking and talking animations. To import the character into a different game, load it up, right-click the "Characters" node and choose "Import Character". The file selector appears, where you find the CHA file which you exported earlier. A new character slot will be created and all the settings imported.

NOTE: Because importing always creates a new slot, you cannot use it to overwrite an existing character.