🎭 Character Development

Overview

Flat characters sink stories. When a character behaves inconsistently, drifts off-voice, or breaks under pressure, readers disengage. Great character development is specific and thorough — the author knows the character's fears, speech patterns, blind spots. Before a major character appears in a key scene, skilled authors write a Character Bible: a comprehensive reference critiqued by collaborators before the first word of dialogue is written.

The Snap AI Author applies this to major features through the Feature Character Bible — a comprehensive design document completed and reviewed before a line of implementation code is written. It covers the feature's role in the story, input/output contracts, data model, integration dependencies, edge cases and failure modes, and test strategy. Teammates review it before implementation to catch design flaws at the point when they are cheapest to fix.

A prompt is a character brief. A shallow prompt produces a shallow AI — one that responds generically, drifts off-voice, and breaks character under pressure. The Snap AI Author iterates on prompts the way a novelist revises dialogue: write, test in-character, identify drift, refine, and snap again. The final working prompt is documented as a character sheet — version controlled, annotated, and treated as the canonical reference for the feature.

Core Concepts

• The Feature Character Bible: A full design document — role, contracts, data model, dependencies, edge cases, test strategy — reviewed by peers before any code is written.
• The Writing Room Review: Share the Character Bible with teammates before implementation. Catch design flaws while they're still cheap to fix.
• Persona Definition: Who is this AI? What does it know, how does it speak, what is it for? Specificity produces consistency.
• The Snap Prompt Loop: Write → test in-character → identify drift → refine → snap again. Lock the final prompt as the canonical character sheet.