Character Profile Series #07: Buck Wampum

Welcome back to our weekly Character Profile Series! This week, we take a look at Buck Wampum, the rogue rebel renegade and main character’s foil in Undead Darlings. Let’s examine his basic stats and talk about why they are what they are!

 

Basic Stats
Blood type: Red
Height: 5’10” (~178 cm)
Weight: 92 kg (~203 lbs.)

 

So we added both versions of measurements to height and weight, but to keep being weird we switched which one is in parentheses. Enjoy!

Buck will only say that his blood-type is red; he’s a red-blooded man and that’s all anyone needs to know. This really speaks to his character in general, so even as a bit of a non-description, it gives insight into the type of man he is. A bit of a good ol’ boy who keeps science away from his personal beliefs.

He’s relatively tall compared to the female cast. Similar to Emily, he started taller, but because he wears that awesome hat all the time, it adds more to his bust-up image and nearly gets its tip clipped off the screen. We futzed with it and ended up placing him almost an unnoticeable amount lower to prevent this; when he and Emily are compared, they have the same height—Buck’s hat should make him taller, though, but it doesn’t. Like we said, now we know how carefully we need to consider something as innocent as character heights in UI design!

As a bit of a muscle-head and stereotypical truck-driving, gun-shooting man’s man, we decided to push him just over 200 pounds to hit this point home. Still, how has he been able to keep himself looking so healthy when the world’s grown so sick? Reggie is free to talk with Buck and uncover his past and his journey prior to joining up with the party, but because he’s a bit rough around the edges, the girls don’t really like the way he talks, and it bugs them when Reggie treats Buck like a role model. Or maybe it’s something else entirely…

Character Relationships
Pearl = “A real clinger. She needs to relax.”
Jordan = “Red can’t get her story straight.”
Summer = “This chick’s feisty and spicy—now we’re talkin’.”
Kairi = “I can’t take bossy broads seriously.”
Cici = “I mean, she ain’t bright, but… Damn, what a woman.”
Emily = “This kid’s got more problems than being a zombie.”

We made a basic character relationship chart for everyone in the game, written as the character, so that we could best assign roles in event scenes. Who would say what, who would chime in or be critical of the speaker, et cetera. Such a small effort yields characters who don’t have to voice their motivations or feelings; rather, they come out organically based on the conversation’s topics.

Fun Factoids

• Buck drives a hybrid pick-up truck and he loves to mention it every chance he gets. The others don’t really share his love, since the truck tends to have stereotypical post-apocalyptic problems at every turn—breaking down, requiring expensive batteries that they can’t find replacements for, et cetera. Even as a hybrid, it’s a large truck, so gas mileage is still an issue…
• Listening to Buck’s stories will reveal a lot of the world’s backstory on a more macro scale. While he doesn’t know how the outbreak happened, he was close to the heart of it and had a pretty wild trope-filled adventure before finding Reggie and the others.
• Buck serves as a foil character to Reggie—while using some of these terms causes great pain to my fingertips, he could be described as misogynistic, crude, and disrespectful. A lot of the actions he takes both in the game and in his stories prior to the game’s events can be seen as rather villainous, selfish, or for the lack of a better term, “asshole-ish.” This is completely intentional because in many similar films or games, similar actions are framed as being heroic or survivalist, but because of the type of no-nonsense guy Buck is, they come across as terrible.
• Buck does have his own ending in the game. It isn’t a default ending, either! Please be excited to find it!
• Despite coming armed with a shotgun, Buck is not playable. He refuses to leave his truck unguarded, and later on, he serves as the party’s storage facility. Use him to rearrange your inventory; stow away really cool or rare items and equipment; and (potentially, based on crowdfunding goals met) use scrap to repair weapons, increase storage space, or increase your carrying capacity in dungeons.

Undead Scars
Having avoided infection thus far, Buck’s only “scars” are of the mental variety. The things he’s done to survive, the choices he’s had to make… It’s a lot for a guy to live with all on his own, but he has such thick defensive walls that it is rather difficult to know whether or not he’s really bothered by all that’s happened. Perhaps this world is a little more his speed?

Gameplay with Buck
As mentioned in the Factoid section, Buck isn’t a playable character, but he does serve a purpose in terms of game mechanics. His truck bed acts as a storage facility, and it will most likely be where you can change your active battle party. We have more functionality plans for him, but we will need some extra funding to keep programmers on payroll to incorporate these systems. We’ll dig deeper into that stuff on our upcoming Prefundia page!

Sub-events with Buck are relatively low, but drastically alter your ability to learn about the female characters because he rambles on for such a long time. He doesn’t go into the dungeons with you, so his events are primarily found through the visual novel segments.

Thank you so much for reading Buck’s profile! He’s a really interesting guy and carries a lot of non-sequitur and what might be considered "dad humor" in his events, so give him a shot if you’re looking for something a little different. We’ll be back on Tuesday with our regular weekly updates; we’ve gotten a veritable cornucopia of stuff over the holidays, but we want to keep some stuff as surprises for the upcoming demo, [insert knowing smiley face of your preference].