Help:Writing Character Pages

Emphasis on Competitive Gameplay

The Dustloop Wiki is not a place to talk about the lore of the games - there are other wikis for that. The purpose of the character pages is to give information about how a character plays in a competitive/tournament setting. Try to keep any backstory/personality section for characters brief - think about a paragraph total. Use the majority of the overview section to discuss the character's play style/unique abilities in the game, like how would you describe to a new player what this character does in a conversation.

Remember the Intended Audience

When writing guides, remember the intended audience is beginner and intermediate players --not experts.

• Move explanations should not be very long if possible. Use bullet lists to list interesting properties, and paragraphs for deeper explanations.
• Do not waste words describing what the attack looks like - that is what the image is for.
  • An exception is when the move is too visually complex for a small set of images to explain. In these cases, describing what a move looks like is acceptable.
• The combo section should not list ALL combos for a character. List enough for a person to learn the basics for standard situations (common starters, big punishes, corners, etc.)
• The strategy section should explain the goals of the character and how to achieve said goals. Be sure to explain tips and tricks the character uses such as Yosuke's glide technique, Arakune's fast-fall, Slayer's BDC, or Kagura's easy drive attack inputs.

Tone

The primary goal is to transfer information to the viewer - think technical writer rather than story writer. If information can be conveyed while being entertaining, then all the better, but do not sacrifice informational value simply to be entertaining. One suggestion is to mix the two; incorporate use information into the entertainment and not simply joke around.

The main offender of this is adding joke captions for images.

Creating Images

• The two primary goals for the images are:

1. Make the attack easily identifiable by players who do not know the character and have seen the attack once or twice at most.
2. Be a visual aid to explain how an attack works. See examples:

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• Use sprite rips with a transparent background for images even if the sprite does not use all the special effects used in game as long as the attack is still identifiable. If no rips are available, use high quality screenshots taken with a capture card.
• Characters should use default colors and face right (as if they are player 1)
• Combine multiple sprites together if the attack does an animation that can not easily be understood by one sprite alone. See examples:

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• Crop the image so that extraneous details such as long ponytails do not take up too much space.
• Name the image with the following format: GameAbbreviation_CharacterName_attackName. So for example, Sol's 5P in Guilty Gear XRD would be named GGXRD_Sol_5P.png
• Nearly all images that have text use the font Arial bolded. Please continue to use it for the sake of consistency.

Use the Templates

Templates are pre-defined sets of text used to maintain a uniform look throughout pages on the wiki.

Most users won't need to worry about them as they will already be in place. But just in case all the pages follow the same pattern:

• Each move uses the template Template:MoveData to lay out an attack with move name, images, captions, and truncated list of frame data.
• Each game uses an AttackData template (or in rare instances a FrameData template) for frame data to be used on the character pages. for example Template:AttackData-BBCP, Template:AttackData-GGACR, and Template:AttackData-P4AU
• When in doubt, look at other character pages, copy, and adapt for your own uses.
• When creating AttackData templates for new games, remember that not ALL frame data should be included. For example, Template:AttackData-BBCP does not include P1, P2, or SMP values while Template:AttackData-GGACR does not have GB+, GB-, or TG values.