The latter.
In one case it’s an always genderfluid character who is very very very blunt bout what they’re birthcertificate said, the other is the parent PC’s rival
Genderfluidity is different than randomness–and nonbinary rep is good, so that’s good.
As for the rival, I think it’s a good move to have … I’m trying to figure out how to word this, predictable ROs? So, if they aren’t one just disregard all of this and yeah that’s totally fine I doubt anybody would really care. But if they are, I feel like they should either be one consistent gender, or have their gender set by an orientation question, or if the MC is bi/pan, random is probably fine. My thoughts are that I don’t wanna romance a guy character, and I would have a bad time if a character was my preferred romance but I had to restart the game three times to get them to random into being my preferred gender, if that makes sense?
But again, people might disagree with me. NPCs that change genders are something I know some people on this forum have stronger opinions on than I do
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I know it’s different from randomness, don’t worry.
As for the rival… they might be a predictable RO, but they are one of… err… 5?.. for the parent MC in my thing.
That sounds overall fine to me. If it’s something very concerning, asking the people who have played your game what they think is probably the best move, but as an outside observer I don’t really see any issues
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You’re always welcome to give it a try and say what you think =D
But back to the topic now…
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Uh sorry, I’m not familiar with these terms, what does ace and aro mean? And what does using asexual as shorthand for these mean?
Sorry for any terminology confusion! “Ace” is slang/short for “asexual”. “Aro” is short for “aromantic”. What I mean is that sometimes people use “asexual” when they really mean “both asexual and aromantic”. Loads of asexual people are interested in romantic relationships! So a person can be both ace and gay, for example, and they’d be interested in having a gay relationship, just a non-sexual one. Does that make more sense?
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Ace = asexual. Not feeling sexual attraction, not necessarily sex-repulsed.
Aro = aromantic. Not feeling romantic attraction as such.
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I think? So for example the player wants to romance a character, but he does not want to have sex, this means he is asexual?
And the aromantic means the player does not want any romance with anyone?
Hmm, sort of. There are plenty of reasons that a person might not want to have sex, though. Being asexual is only one of those reasons, and it’s not like an asexual person can’t have sex at all. It just means that the person doesn’t experience sexual attraction. They can still feel romantic attraction, though. Here’s a really basic flyer that explains what asexuality is: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c3/bb/bf/c3bbbf21222605d235fc88da255a7b72--asexual-problems-asexuality.jpg
Aromantic means that someone doesn’t experience romantic attraction at all. They might still experience sexual attraction or desire, though!
Ace/aro means both of those things - that the person doesn’t experience romantic or sexual attraction, and so probably doesn’t want any romance or sex with anyone at all.
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And if said aro/ace character does want a long-term relationship, it at least isn’t likely to be because of romantic feelings or sexual attraction.
Then. :D There is also demi-aro or demi-ace, which I believe is generally used when someone does experience romantic/sexual attraction but only after getting to know a person, and grey aro/ace, which is generally used to mean someone who occasionally experiences romantic/sexual attraction but usually not.
Edit: I nearly posted this earlier, but deleted it as irrelevant, but I think now I’ll just mention. I’m also happy to see less of ‘you can play as aro/ace, but wow character C is so hot look at the hotness!’ It’s just…not how I ever think? So that was much more immersion-breaking for me, playing an ace path with ‘look at the hotness, wooo’, than just playing a ‘regular’ path and assuming everything would be through the usual lens of what I once thought was just Hollywood-ised shiny sexiness.
After extensive beta testing and chatting with a few different authors, I’ve slowly realised that my perspective in this is, in large part I think because of my being somewhere fairly far along on the ace/aro spectrum, quite, quite different. Having an ‘ace’ path and leaving in the ‘sexy glasses’, but just cutting off any romance routes, reads much more strangely to me than playing a non-ace/aro character and just telling characters ‘no, go away’ whenever the opportunity arises.
Good ace/aro paths are really exciting to me, though. My dream game is a story-based, plot-heavy piece with no combat and no romance. Some day. XD (And with that said, I should probably hush and stop posting on the ‘romance options’ thread, heheh.)
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I think that makes it easier to understand, I thought asexual meant not liking either gender. On my game I set that the player can have no attraction to either gender, effectively disabling flirts and romances altogether. I did not think of romances without sexual relationships.
Should be alright to make, I didn’t start romance scenes yet anyway. I just need to think the response of the NPC when this is requested by the player.
Another problem here is say the player selects that he is attracted to females at the start of the game, but the player is asexual. Would it be problematic if I add like parts where the PC is intrigued about a female’s appearance?
This certainly adds another layer of complexity.
Lol, I exploded. All of this is difficult to implement.
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I think it depends on how it’s implemented! Like @Fiogan said, it can definitely be immersion-breaking to be playing an ace character when the text keeps talking about how sexy someone is… but also, this is something that’s on a spectrum and is highly personal to an individual.
As an asexual but not aromantic person, I do notice when someone is exceptionally beautiful, but what I find beautiful is probably totally different to what another person finds beautiful – let alone what an allosexual person finds beautiful or attractive. And noticing that someone is beautiful never links to something sexual for me, to thinking that someone is “sexy” or, like, focusing on certain parts, lol. Beauty for me is almost always in the facial features & sometimes hair.
I understand this is hard to implement, but I kind of think of it as a “Don’t tell the player how their character feels about X” kind of thing? Maybe one way to do it would be to have a choice that’s like, you meet someone and you have (in more detail, obviously):
Option A: I think person X is sexy
Option B: I think person X is beautiful in a non-sexual way
Option C: I don’t really pay attention to that kind of thing
But frankly that’s just me spitballing and I don’t know if that’s the best way to handle it either.
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How would you feel if the attractivenes was given more by the narration than the narration implying this appearance is something the MC is enjoying?
Like, here is a scene I’ve been working on, I tried to write it so as to not assume what the MC is thinking about how attractive she is, but instead the narration is giving that information to you. I also tried to create options suggested by @ElliotEnjolras
How would this sound? Or does it still sound like it implies the MC is finding her attractive before the choice is made? If this is fine it makes things much easier because then I don’t have to add an *if to check if the player is attracted to females before providing this description and it would fit other characters as well, as it is the narration that is providing it.
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Far from the pool is a woman standing against the hotel’s railing. Clad only in a white bikini, her long black hair covers part of her back as she enjoys Miami’s sunset, which saturates the scene.
As you come closer, she turns around, sensing your steps along the wooden floor. Vibrant blue eyes pierce you as she has her hand in her upper leg, drawing attention to her body through colorful lilac fingernails. Holding a half filled martini glass with the other hand, she breaks the silence as she speaks through scintillating red lips.
“What’s the matter? Afraid to get wet?” Her heavily accented voice drowning out the sounds from the rest of the hotel.
Option A #[Flirt] “Not if we share the glass.”
Option B #“I just came to enjoy the view.”
Option C #“Not at all, sunsets don’t drench me.” - Or something else that more clearly implies that her body was not drawing your attention
Sounds like what I’m doing wouldn’t interest you then, lol. Combat is HARD to make though, I felt really drained.
Oh man, I’m feeling like such a noob. What does allosexual mean? lol 
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Oy, normal narration isn’t any easier to write than combat narration ._.
But it’s also fun to write them! Combat is the only place where your character can grab an arrow mid-flight and launch it back to another incoming arrow 
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It’s a lot less fun when you end up with a mess of a code and did not add commentary at each label and branch, lol. Then you come back to it 2 weeks later and have no more idea of what is going on.
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Allosexual means a non-asexual person, an umbrella term for all the other sexualities, if you will.
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I actually discussed about this somewhere, but you can choose to write a combat scene via gameplay-mechanics or pure narrative (which is surely minimum/no code involved).
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Oh wow… this thread is barely over a day old, and… wow. Well. I guess I’ll just have to respond to everything that everyone said in nearly one hundred posts, oh no! 
…Or, okay, I’ll be selective 
I’d wouldn’t say it’s always more inclusive. Having distinctly gay romance options is a way to show that, hey, gay people are included in this story. Of course, showing gay people among the characters who aren’t ROs is also useful for inclusivity and representation too… and bisexual representation is important too. And yeah, with 2 male and 2 female romances, having them all be romanceable regardless of main character gender was definitely the right decision.
I think one way that “playersexual” characters sometimes differ from truly bi/pan characters is when the character mentions an ex, and the ex’s gender will automatically match the main character. This is different from a character who only has one ex, but whose ex has a consistent gender across playthroughs. In the latter case, you can say that the character is definitely bi in different games, while the former is constructing it more as if the character’s sexual orientation is contingent on the player.
Personally, I would like to see more representation of definitely and consistently bi/pan characters, as well as gay characters, and there really are lots of ways to do that, even without having to give them both a male and a female ex 
like also mentioning who’s cute, or speaking about “my future spouse” rather than specifying a gender preference there, or even talking about being bi… I don’t know, there’s lots of ways that the gender(s) that people like come up in conversation…
I’d say the big question is whether the set sexualities are serving to give gay playthroughs a disadvantage, which is anti-inclusion, or to represent more gay people, which is pro-inclusion.
Possibly with the occasional character who only likes you if you’re nasty 
—Okay, I see that you clarify later in the thread, and I respect and appreciate this clarification, but I still want to post the reply I wrote here before I read that. Just, uh, take it as a general point rather than specifically directed at you —
That’s not really how sexual orientation works, though? I’m gay, but I don’t care what someone’s genitals are, as long as he’s a cute guy. And there’s a tendency in society for people to act as if homosexuality is all about the sex, rather than other aspects of affection and bonding. It should be possible to represent a love interest as having an orientation toward a particular gender and treat it as a full and normal part of who they are.
I also really don’t think any of these situations here are incompatible with respecting characters, either
Well, plus you get more possible configurations for love triangles than are possible with all-hetero all-binary casts, which can be pretty fun 
I think this can work. One classic example would be Slammed!, where you play a wrestler, and there’s a sort of ex-friend rival character who is always the same gender as you, which makes sense given the premise, which means that that character is only available as a gay romance option 
Yeah, I think this is a good key point of advice which is worth emphasizing. If there’s only a few options, you’re limited inclusivity way more by making ROs exclusive. If you have lots of options, then including some gay and even heterosexual ROs helps make it more inclusive.
Ah, people have enough variety that I don’t think you can really say that as an absolute for all such cases. People can mean different things when they self-identify their sexual orientations, so you might have, say, one woman who’s attracted to other women and nonbinary people who still considers herself mainly lesbian, and you might have another who considers herself bi.
I think this happens a lot with bisexual (or “playersexual”) romance options too. There is a difference between a bisexual character with an other-gender preference, and a character who was originally written as heterosexual, but with a “gay option” slapped on as an afterthought, and I’m fairly certain that the latter is oftentimes what we get.
(Plus it would be nice to get more diversity in bisexual ROs…)
Okay, so I’m not asexual, but I am a gay man, so I’m not attracted to women in this way, and I can say there are definitely a few points in that scene that stand out to me as ways that I simply would not look at a woman.
Vibrant blue eyes pierce you
Okay, if they’re vibrant enough, I may notice that, and I may even think “these are quite pretty,” but they’re not going to pierce me.
scintillating red lips.
I’m not attracted to women. I’m not going to find her lips scintillating.
Oh yeah, and the whole drawing attention to her body thing is not likely to be particularly effective, either 
If you really want to include these kinds of descriptions, one technique that you may want to use is to actually have a choice for the main character’s sexual orientation, so that when describing female characters in such situations, you will include the attraction bits only for someone who’s into women that way, and likewise for male characters. This is how Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven works, for example.
Allosexual is someone who does experience sexual attraction, so, someone who is not asexual. So it incorporates bisexual, homosexual, pansexual, heterosexual, and the like into one category.
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I stress that this is just my opinion of the passage given and should in no way be taken to be definitive of anything (but thank you for asking!). I feel that the description was definitely written in a way that I would consider very sexual, but I had more of a sense that the narration was emphasising this character’s sexual attractiveness because said character is trying to give off a sultry vibe—and honestly, I might roll my eyes a little at the description (or, if editing, suggest it be written in a way to leave a little more room for interpretation), but I wouldn’t necessarily assume I’m being told the character is attractive in my PC’s eyes.
On the other hand, honestly it would make me a little nervous about how ace-friendly the game would be. Games with that kind of description (or books), very generally speaking, tend to throw romance or sultriness at me. That gets boring or occasionally unpleasant rather quickly, so I tend to be a bit wary.
I do sort of like Option C because if the narration is willing to be snarky with me about other characters’ ‘hotness’ then I feel much more like the narration is going to be on my side in an ace play through, not just hiding half the games’ content or constantly saying ‘And then his luscious abs, gleaming in the reflected light’ or ‘their silky hair, blowing in loose curls about their smooth, dark skin’, blah blah blah.
I do understand about having to mess about with the *if checks, but on the other hand, I think that kind of thing can be sort of fun from the narrator’s point of view. I have a character in one of my games who can come across as as bit of a blunderer, and I had a blast checking the PC’s opinion of him and then deliberately writing him as more or less competent (from the narrator’s perspective) in order to reinforce the PC’s opinion. I could see this being fun from an ace point of view, too, at least for me. To take your passage, if I may be so bold, and if you’ll forgive the liberty:
Ace-ified, with a dose of sardonic tonic
Far from the pool is a woman standing against the hotel’s railing. She must be freezing; she’s wearing a tiny white bikini that probably affords less warmth than the long, dark hair trailing down her back.
She turns around, looking at you with vivid blue eyes. Contacts? Probably. Her fingernails are lilac, and so long that they look dangerous. Typing must be a pain. She itches her leg.
Raising the half-filled martini glass in her other hand, she breaks the silence. Her red lipstick, you notice, is smeared all over the rim of the glass.
I’m sorry. Please forgive me. ^^;; But I thought it might be a sort of useful window into how those sort of passages read for me (and for at least a few of my fellow ace friends. We have fun with these things).
Oh, not necessarily! I’m quite fond of a few games with heaps of romance or combat; I’m just not fond of games because of either of those two things. I had great fun going through Tin Star—which is a wonderfully-written yeehaw Western epic of a romp, for those who aren’t familiar—and doing my best to play as close to a pacifist as the game allows. I’ve also played plenty of romance-heavy CoG titles, but since they always have a ‘go away now please’ option for characters who might try to romance you, it just felt sort of like life, usually. It doesn’t stop me from reading them.
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