Female character

[Vix]

Can you play as a female? :v I love survival games, but just as a personal preference, I prefer my character to be a female.

[vinnygunnz]

I was going to ask the same question.

It's not a deal breaker but I do tend to prefer a female character.

[Cutlass Jack]

Is there any character creation at all or are you just set underwear guy you see on the store page?

[temper]

That would be the dream, and maybe even have different "main quests" for different characters, but being a very small team, at the moment we are focusing only on that one guy.

BUT we have made technical decisions so that we could change it down the road. The head is a separate model from the body/outfit for example. Some other solution could be used to change the skin color in shaders maybe -- especially the "no outfit" / undies model has lots of visible skin. Similarly we could do female characters like we did in Neon Chrome, but in this game it would mean doing two versions of ALL outfit models and some of the animations or it'd just look ridiculous. Those assets could be made using the existing assets. But we haven't burnt any bridges in terms of technical solutions chosen.

HOWEVER, for the sake of clarity, I do want to state again that the current plan is to focus on that one guy and his story. Don't get your hopes up!

[Vix]

Ah, dammit. :/ I'll keep a lookout for this game in case a female character gets added in later.

[Dirty Wizard]

Most gamers prefer playing as a male or don't care, so I don't think they'll be missing out on many sales

[temper]

Originally posted by Dirty Wizard:

Most gamers prefer playing as a male or don't care, so I don't think they'll be missing out on many sales

Well, that's most likely the reason why (single gender choice) "gamer" games tend to have a male protagonist. It's simply seen as a safer bet. I guess this varies from audience to audience. We did a few PC casual games about ten years ago, and for those markets, the protagonist was female in over 90% of the games out there. About 60% of the audience was women I think.

But it's not just about that though. We'd very much like to give more options to play - especially in DYSMANTLE. The dream would be to have multiple characters to choose from. Maybe even have a slightly different progress path for each one. Start at different locations in the open world, and end up in different spots in the end. But we know that's out of scope at the moment.

[Vix]

Originally posted by temper:

Originally posted by Dirty Wizard:

Most gamers prefer playing as a male or don't care, so I don't think they'll be missing out on many sales

Well, that's most likely the reason why (single gender choice) "gamer" games tend to have a male protagonist. It's simply seen as a safer bet. I guess this varies from audience to audience. We did a few PC casual games about ten years ago, and for those markets, the protagonist was female in over 90% of the games out there. About 60% of the audience was women I think.

But it's not just about that though. We'd very much like to give more options to play - especially in DYSMANTLE. The dream would be to have multiple characters to choose from. Maybe even have a slightly different progress path for each one. Start at different locations in the open world, and end up in different spots in the end. But we know that's out of scope at the moment.

That'd be lovely. ^^

[Hatsya]

Will watch this game grow, and hopefully be moddable like Neon Chrome (that someone replaced the female hacker into a male one).

[Mashee]

...Would rather play something in a game that I can't be IRL. Perhaps a bipedal wolf-beetle-man. I don't really care, other than I care more about wolf-beetle-man than I care about being able to play a female char.

The color green also upsets me, so don't include any green please.

[temper]

So many people have been asking this that maybe we'll have to consider what it'd mean in practice at some point. That'd mean some sort of character customization in general. There are a few ways to do it. Doing a few new 3D models for the head part is easy, and maybe we could use most of the same animations for swinging the axe etc, but all the outfit models would probably need separate female versions or it'd just look weird. Also would need some extra voice overs, and maybe a few changes to the planned story part.

Anyway, to be clear, at the moment the plan is to have just that one dude, and it's more likely that the version 1.0 will be that way. Ideally we'd have character customization though.

[Dirty Wizard]

Just plan that stuff for Dysmantle 2. Don't get bogged down by feature creep - finish your game according to its original vision, make sales, then start making a multiplayer sequel with in-depth character customization and all the stuff you wanted to put in the first game but couldn't.

[temper]

Originally posted by Dirty Wizard:

Just plan that stuff for Dysmantle 2. Don't get bogged down by feature creep - finish your game according to its original vision, make sales, then start making a multiplayer sequel with in-depth character customization and all the stuff you wanted to put in the first game but couldn't.

That is actually a very sane thought.

And we've had that thought once in a while. But not too often it seems

[Rous]

I totally agree that these types of games should have a female character.

I think this will be my first game that I play with a boy.
I don't like having to play as a boy, but I think it's a good game and very original.

The developers seem like good people and at least they give importance to things, so I'll wait for the girls one day.

First I know, that there are other things to focus on more important than the female characters, so I will wait and while I survive with my boy xD

Thank you very much for this great game

[Diarmuhnd]

Originally posted by Dirty Wizard:

Most gamers prefer playing as a male or don't care, so I don't think they'll be missing out on many sales

Why TROLL that? Your not contributing, your just being a ♥♥♥♥.
Do you need a hug? Is that it?

edit: some girls, and women, prefer playing a character of there own gender. Regardless of your thoughts on the amount of sales they will, or will not, lose because of no female characters.

edit 2: i jsut asked my gf and she said "hells no, i ain't playing no CENSORED". lol

edit 3: so many typos i give up. maybe later.

[temper]

Originally posted by Rous:

I totally agree that these types of games should have a female character.

I think this will be my first game that I play with a boy.
I don't like having to play as a boy, but I think it's a good game and very original.

The developers seem like good people and at least they give importance to things, so I'll wait for the girls one day.

First I know, that there are other things to focus on more important than the female characters, so I will wait and while I survive with my boy xD

Thank you very much for this great game

Thank you for your kind words! We'd definitely like to make proper character creation, but we'd like to do it well instead of just slapping a girl head model to the character and be done with it. Tech-wise we've sort of prepared for this, but, again, lots of work to be done still. There's no reason the protagonist needs to be male story-wise.

Alternatively it'd be cool to maybe do different "stories" for different characters (different starting point, different "main quest"). But at the moment we're just trying to make sure the early access launch build is stable etc. So far so good!