So, there’s a game I’m working on right now, and there’s an aspect of the game that I’m really unsure of. Basically, I would like to include a part in the game where the player gets to choose their appearance, and there are two possible ways I can think to do this:
The old-fashioned way. The player gets to choose their skin tone, eye colour, hair colour, hair style, ect, and it can be anything they want.
They choose from a list of possible appearances, and this presents the player with a small profile picture that will show up on their stats screen.
I do really like the idea of option 2, since profile pictures aren’t something I’ve come across in any Hosted Games yet, but there is a problem with this option. With option 1, the player can have pretty much any appearance they want, whereas, with option 2, being able to personally choose several different aspects of the character’s appearance would be practically impossible. If the player only had 4 aspects to choose from (skin tone, eye colour, hair colour and hair style) and each aspect had only 5 options to choose from, that would lead to a total of 625 possible images (and that’s not even including gender.)
The alternative, would be to have a selection of possible images (I’m thinking ten per gender) and have the player choose which image they want their character to have. Of course, that would mean their options were a lot more limited. For instance, there could be a character with short, brown hair, and a character with long, black hair… But if the player wanted a character with short, black hair, they wouldn’t have that option. They’d have to choose between them.
Just wanted to do a poll to see what people thought would be the best idea. I do really like the idea of the game including a profile picture, but I don’t want to limit people’s options if they’d rather just choose their character’s appearance themselves.
Let people choose from a selection of profile pictures.
Let people choose every aspect of their appearance, without a profile picture.
I wouldn’t mind Option 1 as long as there are enough profiles to pick from. And I think it might work better if the entire game is like that. For example, instead of the game being a CYOA as in you’re in the game and you’re trying to make decisions on how you’d do them, instead you could go with something similar to Study in Steampunk where you’re given a character with some simple uncustomizable features, even though you make the decisions. Option 1 could also feature more NPC interaction about appearances as well.
In other words, if Option 1 is done well, it could be fantastic. If you’d rather focus on other parts of the game more, rather than the MC or if you have limited time, Option 2 would be better.
I feel like the non traditional way could be great but if I were you I’d be careful to make sure that there are a LOT of options because we want to stay inclusive. Or you could have less of a selection with more broad questions to make a profile at the end like the game caught in a reverie you should check that out (it’s a wip so it’s on the forum).
Oh wow, I haven’t come across this WIP before. This is really cleverly done! I’m not sure if I like the idea of having less of a selection of aspects to choose from though. From the selection of cards in this WIP, the character will always have blue eyes and dark hair, and I think I’d rather have a variety of hair and eye colours.
Either could work depending on the circumstances, but I think the images would work best if you planned to have some degree of a preset protagonist, otherwise you might as well let people pick their appearence I think
If there’s enough diversity with option 2 I wouldnt mind but unfortunately more often than not the options we’re given tend to be thin/average/muscular and tbh I’m a fat dude so alway having to disconnect myself from the story cause none of the characters are like me alway bothered me and kept away from games with premade MC.
On the other hand, peoples who use option 1 recently begin to include more options for non-traditional looking peoples so I’ve been attracted to those a lot more. If done well tho option 2 could be great.
I’m mainly opposed to the second option because the ‘profile picture’ might not be to my liking for some reason, which would detract from my enjoyment of the game.
I don’t see much point in having preset appearances anyway if there is no difference than if the same options had been chosen using option one (profile picture aside), which from your description there doesn’t seems to be.
I’m not sure what kind of portraits you’re going for, but have you considered since kind of paper doll generator? Those tend to allow for pretty broad customization, though the images themselves are rather basic.
That would be awesome, but I seriously doubt there would be any way to code that into a choicescript game. The only way I can think to do it in choicescript would be to have a different image for every possible combination.
The easiest way is to create a selection of choices that boil down to influencing the following features,
Eye color
Hair length/style
Skin Color
Personality/Expression
Then like you said and Reverie does make a preset image for every permutation. A lot of effort to be sure, but at least it’s something you only have to do once.
I do understand how to code it, but the issue is that it would result in hundreds, possibly thousands of images, depending on how many choices and options the player has. And of course, each image has to be made individually, and coded into the game.
I’m very impressed with how Reverie has included a character profile, but the reason this is possible is because they’ve made the choices quite limited. You don’t get to choose the character’s eye colour or hair colour. You get to choose their skin colour, hair length, facial expression and gender, resulting in a total of only 54 possible combinations. If I wanted to give the player the option to choose their hair and eye colour, that would result in considerably more combinations, and I don’t want to give the MC a default hair or eye colour.
There is also the group of people that does not enjoy any kind of character creation regarding their looks. It would be cool if that sceen waa skipable since it mostly does not have anything to do with the actual plot? (One exception that comes to my mind being silverworld)
I don’t know if that would be possible, since aspects of the character’s appearance would be mentioned later in the game, and I wouldn’t want the game to say something like, “Antonio looks longingly into your deep, unknown eyes.”
