First, thank you for sharing your thoughts. I’m always open to feedback about the ROs. I do want to direct you to a few threads though, as I’m not sure this is the appropriate place to be discussing RO gender balance, as it’s a fairly common debate on this forum (and basically in all games where there are ROs):
- Gender-locking ROs and the importance of gender in relationships
- RO Design Theory
- Letting NB characters romance same-sex locked ROs
The third link is a post that I made when I was laying the framework for my game, and I wanted to bring it up to very quickly nip this in the bud:
I’ll put my response to this under a cut since it’s getting rather long and isn’t really ultimately relevant.
Non-binary romances
The way I decided to handle this was to add a presentation variable to player gender. The gender select screen in the game currently looks like this:
From a variable perspective, you set your ‘base’ gender as male, female, non-binary, or genderfluid. If your gender is male or female, you can also choose to be transgender, which sets the trans variable to true; if your gender is non-binary, you get a third variable, a presentation variable, which can be one of three things: masc, fem, or androgynous.
TLDR, someone who selects ‘a woman- or at least, that’s what people see’ would be able to romance Rhunea, but not m!Finch. A person who selects the last option (androgynous in the game code) isn’t able to romance either Finch or Rhunea.
As for everything else:
I debated putting this under features and ended up not including it, but I’ll go back and edit it to include this now:
- All characters, even gender-variable ones, have established sexualities and were written with them in mind. Finch is always same-gender/same-gender-leaning attracted, and Nakoa is always bisexual.
This was my goal going into the writing of this WIP. While there’s some merit to the ‘playersexual’ approach, I personally feel like I don’t see a lot of games that have exclusively gay/lesbian RO options, or games that have characters who are written as explicitly bisexual and not just coded to be available to all genders. Rhunea being a lesbian is a key part of her character- not for any weird plot reason, but because it has shaped her personality and her views. Leo being bisexual is a key part of his character because it’s a part of who he is. If I chose to make Rhunea available to men, or Leo exclusively gay or straight, they wouldn’t be themselves anymore- they would be two new characters. Maybe if I chose to write all new characters, I might be more interested in balancing the ROs, but for now, these are the characters and stories I want to examine.
As for adding more romance options, it’s something I might consider as I continue to write. Adding Salem wouldn’t help balance the numbers, but there are other characters that will be introduced that could have interesting dynamics with the MC. I’ll very likely keep your concerns in mind as I consider who I might want to add. 