Blog: Are you a boy or a girl?

We are using Pokemon's Green/Red/Blue introduction dialogs as a blueprint for Letalis introduction.

What I like the most from the first Pokemon game is how they keep it short while explaining all the basics of this "unkown" world to the player, focusing on:
*What are Pokemons?
*Player's Long Term Goal

Today, almost everyone in the world knows what a Pokemon is and its game objective, but it was not the same on their first instalment, and they nailed it. We are facing this same challenge with Letalis, that is why, with no shame, I can admit we will inspire our own introduction to answer the same questions for our players:
*What are Letalis?
*Player's Long Term Goal

However, we have the extra challenge of player customization, which I love in every game, and brings me to the title's topic: Are you a boy or a girl?

Pokémon Crystal was the first installment in the Pokémon series to let players choose their gender at the beginning of the game. A big feature at the time (2000/2001) with clear issues in today's world - Poor Professor Oak has a whole collection of Memes inspired by this game step:

And who does not! It is hard today to predefine your player, as it also is to constrain them between two options. That is why we reshape the question to make it fit in our world without offending anybody in the real wold!

The question How do you want to be remembered as? - is just perfect! In Letalis player goal is to become a Caesar and rule your own Colosseum, it make sense to begin your journey with a name according to it - I need to check if a person reaching the Caesar's change their names like Pope's when reaching that rank, but if they don't at least is beliavable as a true fact, right?

Then we use two steps for players to define their name first and then their look in the game (spoiler, they can unlock new looks as they progress in game and replace how they look as many time as they like!).

By design, we avoid to make the call of gender and skin color. It is up to the player to decide how they want to be represented in our four color mix. We only see from [pale green] to [deep dark bluish].

And look how gorgeous they look in their full body portraits! We still need to define where to use them in game, the truth is that I think they will only be shown at this intro and never again!

And that's all for my weekly report! Hope we have our vertical slice soon!!!

Enjoy!
j.