relly is that hard? i dont even know about art, is not my "signature", but i though it would be easy to just take tthe male mc and change him for a female and the text refering him to refering her and the rest the same, idk imagine a dating my daughter but is a mother, and thats it alll the same, idk, really not my area
If you really don't care about quality, you can do it, it's just that it won't be good unless you put a lot of effort in, and that effort is nearly identical to what you'd have put in to making your own game. I'll stick with Ren'Py games for this, as they're probably the easiest to edit and are easily over half the games people would consider editing anyway:
Changing the text is fairly easy - it's all stored just as plain text once you decompile the game, you can rewrite and change text to your heart's content. Just skimming through all the text and changing any reference of a male MC to a female MC would be simple. But if you want it to be good, then you do have to think about whether the overall story makes sense anymore, and whether each scene makes sense. I've played very little of Dating My Daughter so I'm not sure how far the sex goes, but to take it as an example: Changing the MC to be the girl's Mother would remove some of the gender-based friction about, say, whether it's OK for them to be in the bathroom while she's showering, or whether they share a bed. It wouldn't make sense for the Daughter to give her Mother a blowjob (y'know, unless she's a Futa or w/e) or worry about getting pregnant. There's also way less chance of them having to worry about what people think about them going out on "dates." Again, some of this you could just half-arse and take out some of the relevant text, but you'd be better off actually shaping the story in a way where this flows organically, which means rewriting big chunks of it.
Artwork is a bit more dependant on what's being edited:
- The character sprites (the stock character images in most VN's where the MC stands on the left and the talked-to character stands on the right) can be swapped out easily and wouldn't be a problem at all. Only issue is matching the existing style, drawn or rendered.
- Drawn CG (i.e. the whole-screen stuff that is a pre-made image) has less issues editing than renders, but still requires a competent artist able to match the style reasonably well. Drawn art has a much higher barrier to entry though skill-wise, so unless You are the artist, expect to be paying good money to get someone to edit, if they'll even agree to that (there's a good chance they won't, even with explicit permission from the original artist). You may also have to make whole new art if making a scene that can't be edited/doesn't otherwise make sense (e.g. changing a blowjob scene to cunnilingus) but this might actually be easier with drawn stuff.
- Rendered CG is far more complicated. The barrier to entry is much, much lower, sure, but when editing or combining work from different people, even a half-arsed attempt takes a decent amount of effort and skill to not look really out-of-place. For one, you're going to be have to be good enough to at least halfway match the lighting each scene (which is harder than it looks - frankly most people can't get the lighting right to begin with), but beyond that:
- For images where nobody interacts, you'll need to either:
- Make sure the pose that the new MC takes totally covers up the old MC, which (unless the new MC is also a giantess), is going to lead to a weird scenario where the MC looks huge or other characters look small, and this could be a problem if it also makes the other character look too young as a result.
- Also be good at image editing so that you can scrub the original MC out of the image, and make a normal-looking MC, but even this can only go so far (unless they're the only scenes in the game), as...
- For images where people do interact (hugging, kissing, etc) you're basically going to have to redo the entire render. Even if you have some god-tier image editing and posing/rendering skills, there's just not much you can do to make every scene compatible. Which means recreating the other models involved to a decent degree of accuracy. And getting the same room setup. And so on.
So yeah, that's basically what I mean - If you want to do it well, you're going to be rewriting decent chunks of story (which, as someone who's primarily a writer, is
not the source of most of the work in these games), and either hiring an artist (expensive, and even more time-consuming than usual to find someone who matches style and will do the work) if you aren't one yourself, or remaking basically all the game's assets and re-doing a decent number of the renders. At that point, you may as well just make a game yourself.
The problem with lesbian tag it's not always clear what is meant. Lesbian as main focus? Or just optional content, side content, maybe even just two side characters that appear only once. Or false tags that say lesbian but actually mean bisexual. It's often too vague or people use it too frequently. Bisexual is not lesbian. Why not tagging bisexual then.
To be fair to most game authors, the site doesn't have a Bisexual tag, as far as I'm aware. I would be all for some additional ones (e.g. Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Protagonist, in the same vein as the Male/Female protag ones; "Lesbian/Gay Only" and/or "Primarily Lesbian/Gay" for general content) although it would also be nice if the overviews stated "this game is mainly lesbian/gay content" or w/e. The only argument I can really see against it is that it means a lot of old games would need re-tagging for this, and there's a decent risk they won't be and they'll just be forgotten about. Hell, I'm pretty sure this is already a problem - I'm pretty sure there's some very old games which only have some basic protag tags with no content updates.
