Questions regarding protagonist and customization

[Makitatsu]

Long time lurker. Think this might be my first actual post outside of replies.
Longer time fan of the games we have here. Been thinking of giving it a go myself.

Only have the bare workings of an idea at the moment. More been focused on getting to know Twine as a potential engine.
Built a base character creation, time system, random event generator, map and am thinking about further systems.

Had a couple of questions for the community about preferences in regards to the protagonist of a Twine game, and any customization involved.

1. Do you prefer to have the choice of a male or female protagonist?
Kind of torn between adding the option, or just picking a single one. Played a number of games where you have the option, but outside of extremely text heavy games such as CoC/TiTS, most scenes tend to be written from a gender neutral perspective with chosen gender flavor text added in (from my experience) - which results in a lot of additional effort without much payoff (to me).

2. How in-depth do you like your character customization to be? Or, how relevant is it to your enjoyment of the game?
I know a lot of Twine games focus on customization, such as appearance or clothing, but similar to the above concern - sometimes it can be a lot of effort for not a lot of payoff. Some examples I'd highlight here are Friends of Mine and Course of Temptation. FoM has an outfit system were most outfits results in little to no change in scene or options (outside of some specific ones which grant access to a scene). CoT has one of the most expansive customization systems I've ever seen in a Twine game, but so much of it seems to have so little effect on events and scenes that play out. For example, every individual clothing item has their own stats that contribute to a style, and characters have style preferences - but with enough points in your skills, any limitations brought in by the style system can almost be ignored. Add to that, events barely acknowledge the style element.

I guess the reason for these questions is as much as I like diving into Twine and seeing what it can offer, I don't want to spend big blocks of time on building custom functionality that will ultimately be ignored, or even a hindrance (too many choices, too little payoff) to any potential player. If I do go ahead, this will be my first project so I'd like to gauge the community for what sort of foundation to any potential game I should go with.

Any responses are both welcome and appreciated.

 

[Kallel69]

I'm not familiar with the Twine engine at all so i dont know what its capabilities are (2d, 3d, lighting, sound, etc) or how easy or hard they are to implement.

1. Personally I've enjoying female protagonist games as of late, gives me something to look at.

2. Sets of clothes for me are all visual appeal but better if they also have impact on things and not just for one offs. Use or don't use but it'll be a lot of extra work that could be better used for polish, an additional game mechanic, larger world, more characters, or something imo. Unless its a bunch of small changes that are fast I'd focus on other things to starting out OR unless you have a lot of heart and patients and time and thick skin incase it flops or you dont get the reaction you want or expect then go for it cuz you might surprise ppl.

FYI i dislike playing purely text adventure games and visual novels as they rely entirely to hard on story imo and a lot of writers are over confident imo, so you i might not be your niche audience.

 

[Doorknob22]

Long time lurker.

Here are all your answers. If you're a long time AVN player, think of the game you wish someone had made or even AVNs you played and said "this is great, but I wish they did X,Y or Z" and then do a game similar to the ones you liked but with X, Y and/or Z.

There's nothing wrong with asking your fans questions from time to time, as long as the topics are trivial and the game already exists. When you're asking fundamental questions before even starting, it sends the message you have no idea what you're doing and that you're unsure even about the very foundations of your game.

Before Mark Zuckerberg became... whatever he is today, Facebook's motto was "Move fast and break things". They changed it in 2014 but for a starting developer, these words are still golden. Get something out there. Do now, and maybe change later. See how people react to your game and what you like and dislike about it and change it, but the most important thing is to get it out there.

Good luck!

 

[MarshmallowCasserole]

1. No. For me, neutral perspective is kinda underwhelming. Games that do pick a "side" and stick to it perform (to me) much better.

2. Yeah, I very much did not like CoT specifically because of that. Oh wow, I can pick from a hundred of articles of clothing in a dozen of colors, and wow, these choices don't matter, and I don't see them. So the answer for me is that customization needs to have an effect. Either I want to have customization presented to me via the character sprite, so I will customize for my personal eye candy, or the customization needs to have different, well-communicated effects on the gameplay.

 

[Pretentious Goblin]

What I care about is having good female-character corruption, and some gameplay. Now, if you're going to offer an option for male MC, that either almost doubles your workload writing scenes as well as your art, or makes it text-only and generic. Basically the more options you have, the more your work will seem like stitched-together slop unless you really commit to having quality dedicated content for every available permutation that the player could choose.

As for customization elements like clothes, if you're not going to visually represent them, having a ton of them probably isn't appreciated by many players. Especially if it clutters the UI. This is where AI generation can be used to at least provide the visuals, like in X-Change Life, at the expense of making the game really heavy. There'll be a lack of consistency, but for text-based games, I think it's fine and expected. I guess it depends on what kind of experience you want to offer; a game like XCL that's supposed to be a life-sim with a focus on body changes and feminization, yeah it's good to have all those options with visuals.

 

[wen149]

female protagonist.
I think girls are more attractive on the inside> <

 

[Makitatsu]

Here are all your answers. If you're a long time AVN player, think of the game you wish someone had made or even AVNs you played and said "this is great, but I wish they did X,Y or Z" and then do a game similar to the ones you liked but with X, Y and/or Z.

There's nothing wrong with asking your fans questions from time to time, as long as the topics are trivial and the game already exists. When you're asking fundamental questions before even starting, it sends the message you have no idea what you're doing and that you're unsure even about the very foundations of your game.

Before Mark Zuckerberg became... whatever he is today, Facebook's motto was "Move fast and break things". They changed it in 2014 but for a starting developer, these words are still golden. Get something out there. Do now, and maybe change later. See how people react to your game and what you like and dislike about it and change it, but the most important thing is to get it out there.

Good luck!

You're pretty on point. I do have a fairly solid idea of what I want for the game, but I am certainly getting ahead of myself in asking what more I should do. Guess I was just worried about locking myself out of any potentially market in regards to the gender choice/customization options.

 

[Makitatsu]

1. No. For me, neutral perspective is kinda underwhelming. Games that do pick a "side" and stick to it perform (to me) much better.

2. Yeah, I very much did not like CoT specifically because of that. Oh wow, I can pick from a hundred of articles of clothing in a dozen of colors, and wow, these choices don't matter, and I don't see them. So the answer for me is that customization needs to have an effect. Either I want to have customization presented to me via the character sprite, so I will customize for my personal eye candy, or the customization needs to have different, well-communicated effects on the gameplay.

Very good point regarding 2. Don't really have a strong reason for individual clothing level customisation, nor would I have a good means of displaying it graphically. Probably best not to implement it for a potential game like this.

 

[Makitatsu]

What I care about is having good female-character corruption, and some gameplay. Now, if you're going to offer an option for male MC, that either almost doubles your workload writing scenes as well as your art, or makes it text-only and generic. Basically the more options you have, the more your work will seem like stitched-together slop unless you really commit to having quality dedicated content for every available permutation that the player could choose.

As for customization elements like clothes, if you're not going to visually represent them, having a ton of them probably isn't appreciated by many players. Especially if it clutters the UI. This is where AI generation can be used to at least provide the visuals, like in X-Change Life, at the expense of making the game really heavy. There'll be a lack of consistency, but for text-based games, I think it's fine and expected. I guess it depends on what kind of experience you want to offer; a game like XCL that's supposed to be a life-sim with a focus on body changes and feminization, yeah it's good to have all those options with visuals.

It truly does double the workload. I half put out the question to ask whether it was worth doing so or not, but think you've answered the question well enough.

Definitely won't be any visual representation, being a text based game potentially, so probably best to not go too deep.

 

[balitz Method]

1. Do you prefer to have the choice of a male or female protagonist?
Kind of torn between adding the option, or just picking a single one. Played a number of games where you have the option, but outside of extremely text heavy games such as CoC/TiTS, most scenes tend to be written from a gender neutral perspective with chosen gender flavor text added in (from my experience) - which results in a lot of additional effort without much payoff (to me).

In my experience it's hardly ever a neutral perspective, it's the male perspective with a couple of those "gender flavor texts" thrown in. To be fair that's probably more along the lines of what the majority of the audience will want unless you're developing for a niche audience, but it comes down to whether you feel that that the customization presents different opportunities that you find exciting.

Playing dress up &c is something people like to do in games, so that's not necessarily wasted effort, but you should look at what the motivation for it is in the game you're making. Like in Degrees of Lewdity it has an effect on the gameplay along with satisfying people's desire to put their character in sexy outfits. Or if your game is supposed to hate a cuter vibe, dress-up can hit that desire to have a really cute-looking avatar to then take into the game. It doesn't necessarily need to be acknowledged overmuch in that case because being able to stick them in different outfits is a fun mechanic in and of itself.

Basically you want to pin down your core gameplay concepts and premise first and then make these considerations based on whether they give you more opportunities to write things you want to include in the game (deciding whether to have a full gender customizaiton) or satisfy an itch the players have to connect with and present their avatar within the game (deciding whether or not to have a wardrobe).