Set Waifu or Custom Waifu?

Laura Bravo

Member
So making a game, that will have many female characters similar to many games already out IE Azur Lane (Its not a ship girl game I'm making that's just an example)

Now most of these games (near all) have different ones to collect and have a type of ranking system IE C,UC,R,UR,SR ect. Ive already decided to do away with the ranking system, or at least not make it tied to a character so all will have the same chance to be of use AKA no throw away characters, but what I am toying around with is the idea of custom characters. Similar to the way one would create their own character so they will create the various girls in the game.

So the upside is obvious as you get the characters you want, make your area your way. With set build options I can spend less time designing characters as with set characters I will need to design each and every one of them and make them unique.

The down side is that such a game would probably be more bland. Also many of these games characters are extremely popular and result in fan-art which further advertises the game. To this end the main support NPCs will be set IE quest givers, shop runners, ect. Those that make up the unit heads or the "playable" ones are the question.

Its worth noting that most of these games use a lottery type system or gacha that produces these characters at random, so they make the good ones hard to get as a way to sell in game chances to win. I am trying not to take such a direction on characters so I do not need a large pool of useless characters or those that are hard to get to bait in game purchases for more chances at winning. If set and not build your own the player will get to choose (or pass) among random determined applicants.

so if you play this type of game what you'd you rather have?
Set Waifus pre-done with their own style and personalities?
or Build your own in your own style with pre-set personality types to chose from?

Please let me know if you play such games if you reply, I am looking for feedback from those that are interested in such games but will appreciate any feed back if you care to give.
 

Joh

Member
Interesting topic, not a player myself but I encountered a similar dilemma.
My game (which may never see the light of day) was build your own characters (a trio). I eventually realised my game was very much like a gacha game, even if I never intended so. Looking back, maybe the gacha similarity never occured to me because I wasn't thinking of waifu for characters. I entertained the idea of pre-done cast, but stuck with your own character, lastest idea was to have both: main cast trio + chosen helper premade gacha.(game in hiatus)
Not so sure why I shared my experience anymore but here were some things i thought about:
  • As you've mentionned: personality and life; havent played much gacha myself, but I know the feel of liking/wanting a character, it a strong incentive, motivator and marketor!
  • Your characters bond; I thought Its nice to make your own character. But I feel gachas have done well to emulate the feeling with "your team", sure its a group of pre-made characters, but you chose and raised them all the same!
  • Progression system; you mention you dont have "better/worse" units and neither did I. But you know the gacha system is evil (which is why I avoid). It stalls progression and sometimes you have to start over because your new unit is better(rarity/waifu/potential), but lv 1. Would you benefit from such "engagement", can you sustain it?
  • Are they waifu though?; Simple yet strongest point to me: Can you deliver on those waifu? You've called out the "throw away" characters, yet even those tend to look nice if not bland. It reaches insane levels at the highest rarity. I'd argue no point in attempting a waifu game if you can't deliver the waifu. What counts as waifu is in the eye of the beholder and its certainly possible to have an appeciated unique aesthetic, but seeing the homogeneity in boat, plane, horse, gun, brocoli, historic girls: the bar in the tradional look is pretty high. I had no artistic talent to come close nor budget thus I felt it was a bad idea.
There wasn't enough info to know exactly what kind of game you are making but maybe an inbetween would be a small set cast, like the touhou games, maiden & spell, suguri, fighthing games. I see it as different as all characters are unique and knowable, not a gotta catchem all kinda deal.

I hate to have a non-answer but to me it depends a lot.
I like building my characters, if self insert: I prefer custom made.
I wouldnt want to make Many characters (more than a main party size)
I think at small cast <~16, you can have a nice and quirky unique and memorable cast
Beyond a point might as well go gacha, some characters become throwaway and you essentially ask the player to define their own "memorable cast". If you dont think it can look good enough, randomly generated from the custom made option seems like a good compromise.

You dont seem to want to make a gacha-like game, i would recommend doing what you feel is best, but I hope my feedback helps! best of luck!
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
There's a whole bunch of questions at once, so here's a bunch of answers at once:

"No Throwaway Characters"
  • Have multiple different mechanics that work super-well, decently, or really poorly against different enemies, and try to distribute them evenly over waifus. (E.g. bleeding and poison are effective against armored enemies since they ignore armor, and they're a safer option against evasive enemies since they're guaranteed damage over time, but some enemies are resistant to the effects (e.g. skeletons have no blood, zombies can't be poisoned) and you overall deal much less damage than you do with raw attacks against a standard (unarmored, easy-to-hit) enemy.
    • Darkest Dungeon does an amazing job with this, where each dungeon has its own enemies and pretty clear rules-of-thumb for what to expect, as well as bosses that have unique mechanics that greatly change how to best approach them - one boss is 4 individual enemies that share a healthbar, so it gets to take a staggering 4 actions per turn... but this also means it takes damage from bleeding and poison 4 times per turn. Another boss is a cannon that can't attack on its own, but it spawns in enemies that can fire it, forcing you to divide your attention and have a party that can hit enemies in any position if you don't want to risk being hit with the boss' attacks.
  • Mechanics doesn't need to be battle-related, either. For long dungeon dives, having camping skills, access to shortcuts by jumping/digging, or special thief senses that unlocks unique hidden loot could all give even the most useless character an unique selling point.
  • In short, think of power as a grid, not as a line. If everyone's the best at something, and that thing is gonna come into handy at some point, you have much less of a direct tier list. Especially if you give characters synergies that makes combinations more powerful than either involved character individually (e.g. a character that can invert the sign of all buffs and debuffs for an ally - e.g. turn a -50% ATK debuff into a +50% ATK buff - is useful if you fight enemies that throw around debuffs a lot, but if you put her in a team with the barbarian that has the "Overexertion" skill that is powerful but debuffs her own ATK for 30 turns, you can suddenly turn the one drawback of that skill into an opportunity to make it even stronger!)
    • Characters don't necessarily need to be the best at their speciality, you could have some "mixed" characters that are mediocre on multiple things... think Final Fantasy Red Mages: they can use swords, heal and throw elemental spells around, but they're worse on all those things individually than Fighters, White Mages and Black Mages.

"Pre-Done vs Make Your Own"
  • Why not have both? If you have a system that makes it easy to combine body parts and swapping them out arbitrarily, you could have set characters but allow the player to customize them. If they're into cybermods, let them swap out the waifus' limbs for robotic stuff, let them put on cat ears, change the color of their clothes, etc. And the most obvious customization of all, changing weapons.
    • Visual customizations could have stat changes, e.g. cat ears increase Perception while robot limbs increase Armor Points at the expense of Health Points (armor is much higher than health points, but can only be healed by an engineer, not a cleric, so being too armor-focused on a long mission makes you run out and become much more vulnerable, unless you change your healing strategy - either give up TWO slots for one healer and one engineer, or you only pick an engineer and heal with limited-use potions instead, or you only use a cleric and deal with a sudden massive drop in defenses once your armor runs out)
    • Weapons definitely should have gameplay changes. One idea I'm fond of is having no basic attacks, only skills... it is a very simple tool that lets you give a lot of variability to weapons. A normal sword might just have "Sword Slash", a more evil-looking one might give you "Eviscerate" instead, which has the same power but deals dark damage, and a magical sword might have Sword Slash, Magic Wave and Blessed Emission. Guns could have a single projectile attack, or a wide variety of different ammo types. Gatling guns would need you to use the "Rev up" skill first to add a special buff in order for you to actually shoot them, which means you need to think about them in advance, and so on.
    • Changing dress color could be done with image_blend if you have separate sprites for different body parts and armor pieces, or a more complicated palette swap shader solution that changes the sprite when it's drawn (there's a good one by Pixelated_Pope that I wholeheartedly recommend)
  • Giving the player their own character that they can customize is another option, like Robin / Byleth / Corrin from Fire Emblem. The player can personally romance their waifus using their own avatar, and try to recreate themselves using all the building blocks you use for the other characters' sprites, as well as have this power fantasy character that somehow is able to combine all fighting styles and skills from the entire game in the ultimate broken synergies.
 
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