Choosing genders

Right, so one of the games I'm working on, I was thinking of letting players choose whether they'll play as a male or female.

Think Hawke from Dragon age 2, pretty much same character though the gender influences how some people react to you, plus who you get to romance in the party.

Though both characters will have slightly differing personalitys, the male will be more happy go lucky and reckless, the female a bit more reserved.

So is this something you'll all be interesting in? Or shouldn't I bother?

I think that'd be cool, but I have NO idea how to do it lol

Well it's pretty easy to implant. The only problem is that you'll have to wrote twice as much dialogue.

Have an choice at the beginning of the game that ask the player if they want to be male or female. Then make two switches, one for male the other for female. Change the main character's sprite through the "Change Actor's Graphic" command depending on male or female choice. When you write the dialogue just make conditional branches that check if the male or female switches are on and you're pretty much done. 

Not necessarily twice as much. If they have similar personalities then for most part they can stay the same, but yes conditional branches will be your best friend. The only/ main changes will just be sex specific questions and how they may react out of their comfort zone.

The romance on the other hand... ho boy you'll have a lot of writing to do. Kudos if you can pull it off, personally I quite like that. A great reference would be the DS game Avalon Code.

It could be interesting, but depending on how different the male and female experiences are, you'll end up creating more content that is gender specific.

Romance in an RPG can be great, if done well, but I think it's really hard to show well.

I love gender options! It's a nice choice, and it adds replay value, even if it doesn't affect the story.

I recently thought of taking it one step further, and giving every party member a gender option...Or rather, some way to allow any party member a way to change gender. Partially for the shenanigans it could bring...Umm, this is a different subject kind of, lol.

I am doing that in my collab project with my Japanese friends.





As mentioned above, everything is done with two simple switches, one called "male" and one called "female".

Or rather, I just use one, because that's really all you need. One is default, and therefore doesn't need a switch,

and then the other is a switch. Using two is actually a waste of space.

Whenever there is dialogue there's a conditional branch that checks for the switch.

In most cases of NPCs you can just copy the dialogue and switch out the snippets in regards to gender. And, add a little bit, or detract a little bit depending on how much work you feel like doing.

Our game is an action-adventure-RPG, so the protagonists are largely silent, and when they speak it's the player's choice what they'll say, so we'll mostly provide the same choices for both genders.

The option is really just there to give players the ability to pick a character that they can relate to viscerally, not really as a means to provide replayability or something like that.

There are some small stat differences, differences in standard equipment, and some unique scenes though, just to liven things up a bit.