Are you a Boy or Girl? RPG Maker: How to Change Character Genders.

[@Sl4wt3r]

I actually use the gender determined by variable method because the gender selection in my game affects more than just visual aspects. Some quests have additional options or fewer options depending on if the player is a man or woman, and I'm making certain dialogues vary significantly between the two.

[@Sl4wt3r]

An example would be that I have a quest in the works where the player needs to find some evidence about back-room dealings of a sleazy politician. One way to get info is to eavesdrop at a cabaret club he frequents. A male player would need to enter as a guest and sneak close enough to hear. A female player could go undercover and join the staff of the club to get close that way.

[@Petq011]

@@Sl4wt3r It depends on the looks of the male. You'd be surprised how some males can go undercover better than females. :D That's a good idea though!

[@Sl4wt3r]

@@Petq011 Oh, yeah some male characters can totally pass off really well, but so far, I don't have any main cast that are bishounen types, unless you count the Kiryu Kazuma type to be passable. Hmm... I might throw a joke in there where the male PC could sneak into the staff but gets selected by the wrong customer...

[@Petq011]

@@Sl4wt3r You totally should! :D

[@LiveLXStudios]

You should probably use variables/switches anyways. Just so you can account for pronoun usage alone.

[@nikolartwork1471]

That edit when you misspoke was so funny 🤣 Just started using RPG Maker and have been binging your videos, love the voices you do, thanks for all the tips!

[@mnmrocks2756]

Technically speaking on a hypothetical purpose of course, you could have [4] that is the name of the actor and [5] that would be called He or She depending on the gender that the player picked.

[@kirbwarriork3371]

You'd probably want to set aside a few actors for oblique, independent genitive, dependent genitive, etc types of pronouns. And possibly more if you care about capitalization (or you can just avoid putting the player's pronouns at the start of a sentence). You probably don't need reflexive pronouns since those are just adding "self" to the end of another pronoun. I did this for one game and I really liked the result.

[@khveteran013]

Another way you can reference the character without using pronouns is by using nicknames or titles. "Good going, slick!" "I saw the captain slay a dragon!" "Whaddya want, dweeb?" "You got it, hoss." Etc. Etc. Etc. Although, I would still include sex/gender variables for unique events such as romance options or quests that require you to be a certain gender. It's just a good way to add replay value to your game.

[@zeehero7280]

Seems like a huge oversight if you can't make the dialouge coded so the character name is a variable and so are the pronouns.

[@khveteran013]

@zeehero7280 I respectfully disagree. Such a thing might be feasible for a short game (2 hours or less to complete), but for long games like your typical RPG that has thousands of lines of dialogue it's not always feasible. And if the lines are voiced, forget about it. There's a reason why the party members almost never use pronouns in reference to the Inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition or why Tidus is never referred to by name in Final Fantasy X. For an Indie company especially, there's just not enough in the budget for such a thing. The only way I could see it working is if the game was designed from the beginning to accommodate multiple pronouns, and even then the dialogue would have to be text only. The way I see it, the best way to deal with this problem is to just not have it in the first place. In Undertale, the protagonist is a blank slate for the player, including sex and gender, thus every character that interacts with Frisk uses gender neutral terms in reference to them. And might I point out, Undertale is a game that can be fully completed in just a few hours and has hundreds of lines of dialogue. If Toby Fox didn't feel like including gendered language for this purpose for such a short game and created a cultural sensation that persists in the fandom even to this day, then why should I feel as though it is necessary to do so for my game? Never mind the fact that if you change your mind halfway through development, changing the coding in all those lines of dialogue is just more work than it's worth. You also have to consider the flow of the dialogue, some pronouns can absolutely wreck the impact of a well-crafted sentence if you're not careful. Finally, you have to consider your audience. Pronouns are a hot-button issue right now. You have to ask yourself, "is it really worth courting this kind of controversy right now?" My answer is no. It isn't worth virtue signaling to a group of people who aren't going to buy the game anyways. I have no issue with non-binary characters, but most people (and by extension most gamers) are tired of being lectured at or preached to. Again, it'd be better to cover such things up with clever writing. I certainly don't want to create the next Veilguard, Concord, or Dustborn. But I guess that just makes me a hateful bigot transphobe in today's world. 🙄

[@silverfoxex2144]

i have unfortunately done that with a Var for M/F and after the first 40 or so dialog you realize just how much of a pain it can be then you make a common event to check if its a M/F and it inputs the correct suffix but still a pain but it gets a little better, sigh..... memories :P

[@linglw6592]

quite interesting but I have 2 question 1. how to create a slightly different event for each gender like boy cant enter girl toilet and the opposite 2. how to made the character start their story from different places like warrior boy start from town A while mage girl start from town B like Octopath Traveler

[@vlaandhael]

you can either use switches or variables. Say you choose boy, turn the "boy" switch on.

[@wispurkultus9585]

Seems like this could very easily be adapted to picking a race (Human, Elf, Dwarf, etc) Would it also be possible to use this to even select a class? ie, a different set of skills? I'm picturing basically having a variety of premade characters, a Warrior, Mage, etc, and this dialogue sets the player character to the chosen premade character? (that can then be renamed) Is that possible? Seems like it should be.

[@LvLUpDesign]

That should be easy enough to do, you would just make the characters ahead of time and using a 'Choice' Event, have your players decide which character they want to play.

[@MichaelR1975]

I followed your opening cut scene tut before this one. where we created an opening bgm in Audacity and then made a little opening cut scene. I went ahead and implemented this on the same blank map where we created the BGM. Then we did a screen fade did a change party to get rid of our blank character then added our main character and second character for the cut scene. Everything works up until the cutscene well the cutscene still works there is just no character there. I changed the add party member to the input char we used for boy and girl but that did not work. Edit: I figured out the issue I had to add the number of the char I created in the database system starting party. I also added a boy and girl variable so I could switch between a boy or girl photo depending on which one the player selects for my cut scenes.

[@amexmac_1]

What about face images?

[@MegaKabutops777]

Cant this be used for games with avatar characters such as pokemon and fire Emblem

[@adiasutton6360]

Is anyone else having trouble with the change character graphics option? When i select none for the image it wont let me pick a new one with that command...

[@blazequakes]

I looove the voices you do!!

[@greyraingames]

Is there a way to allow the player to create their character at the beginning? Choosing not just gender but hair color and appearance options

[@afish4086]

This is so much simpler than what I was doing! Thank you! I did try a thing that might help? I added a flag for gender when the selection was made; that way I could keep everything the same for both genders, but if there was an event that needed to be REALLY different for either, I would use the flag in a conditional branch. The games I make are pretty short, so maybe this wouldn't work for large-scale games? Especially if you need to limit the amount of total flags used or use them for other things? Idk lemme know your thoughts I'm really new at this

[@zeehero7280]

So like, some magic shenanigans? can lead to some funny humor.

[@NaotoUzumaki]

Speaking of, after I made mine I wanna do a quest that goes into it right after that choice. Is another auto event after this one?

[@roden8699]

I've been looking for this for a long time and I've only found plugins. or a hooded character sprite (which MV doesn't have)

[@vkongzxsw]

I've tried hundreds of times like you do but when I choose Male or Female my player doesn't change at all. I don't know what step I did wrong and I refer to similar videos but still the same

[@INSKIMAN]

Hey! I really enjoy your tutorials. Can you plz make a tutorial of how to make a skill learning system like in lord of the rings the third age? It works that every character has 2 types of moves. Theres one character that has sword craft and leadership moves. Using sword craft moves for a certain amount of times makes the character learn a new sword craft move. And using leadership moves enough lets the character learn a new leadership move. I would be so happy if I could add this to my own game.

[@melanatedindie]

Sounds like you can do this with variables and a common event but I'm not sure.

[@samachu09]

I won't be referring to the player as "them" because what's the point of having the two gender options if you're gonna throw it out of the window? I'll be going the extra mile to make people referred to as people and not as some genderless blob. You can store the gender as a variable (I'm using 1 for guy, 2 for girl). When you reach a dialogue branch that requires he/she, have a conditional branch to see if the Gender variable is 1 for the guy dialogue and create an else branch for the female dialogue. It's really that simple.

[@roden8699]

Works great. but now I have to change my title screen again

[@squaregameseurope3]

Good Morning, do you also able to parallax mapping ? is there a possibility for an tutorial ? Greetings

[@riot4454]

off topic but im loving that coat your wearing

[@MrClockworkable]

I mean, if you designing the game with the variable in mind that you can choose your own gender, then you wouldn't be changing your script. You'd be just writing the script with that in mind. Additionally, the same way you had code for the game to reference the players name, could you not also have code for Gender? Again, very new to RPG Maker, but with the status of like, when you pick a gender, it changes a LvlUp to boy or girl? Again, not familiar enough with the software.

[@WakeNBakeMusic]

Nope, but I did create the variable so that I can have different reactions to male/female heroes. I agree having to re-type every he/she would get old though

[@Mrjedite]

You skipped some stuff when it comes to the female version, im confused

[@sen641]

I have a question that has plagued me for the longest time. Is it possible to input BOTH a first name and a last name as separate values in the "Name" section for a character's profile, and to have only the "first name" show up in the "Nickname" section for a character's profile? Or is that simply impossible? Would I need to get a script for such a thing? I've tried to get it to work (even using guides from the official RPG Maker website), but I just can't do it. It's extremely annoying as that function is something I'd want for most, if not all the RPG stories I'd want to make. Many other RPGs have done it and it's worked--Persona 5 is what comes to mind for me--but it seems like I'll never be able to do it myself. If anyone else in the comments sees this, do you have solutions for me as well? Because I really do want to make players be able to name not just the first name of the character, but also the last name, and only be referred to as the "first name" or "last name" when it's needed in story. Can someone please help me out?

[@kirbwarriork3371]

It's probably easier to do something like "Name" be their first name and "Nickname" be their last name. Another thing I've personally done is in a game without class changing, you can instead use "Class" for the last name of characters. In MV, for instance, this would make it line up naturally from First to Last name. Or you can flip it around; for languages that go Family Name -> Given Name, you can have "Name" be the family name and "Nickname" be the given name. However, I don't know of a way without plugins to display the nickname in a message box. And you might want to change the layout of your menu anyway to take into account of how you want the name to show up. Who knows, maybe you could solve some of the problem with something like a placeholder actor whose name is equal to an actual actor's nickname?

[@marcelaeroka6807]

Lvlette :D

[@xiliangyao]

我看了三遍，總算弄明白了~謝謝！

[@Petq011]

I knew I was forgetting something! I was forgetting to drink water. Thanks! :D Not joking btw. :D

[@LvLUpDesign]

It is very.... very important

[@DeckerJimenez7014]

@@LvLUpDesign how can i make a enemy to actor am in the Nintendo switch

[@chancehensley4478]

hey man, ive got an issue that makes zero sense to me. ive looked across every tutorial i could find, read tons of articles, and just beat my head on it, but i'm coming up with nada. could i bend you're ear for a moment about it?

[@LvLUpDesign]

Comment it and I'll have a look

[@chancehensley4478]

@@LvLUpDesign so i have an event that worked perfectly fine for like fifty new game test runs in my starting village. even had my cousin play it and it worked fine. then it just randomly started breaking the game. i know its this specific event because when i take it out the game runs fine again.

[@chancehensley4478]

but i haven't changed anything with it since i put it in so i dont understand why it suddenly started breaking the game

[@LiveLXStudios]

@@chancehensley4478 No one would be able to fix your problem with so little info What does the event do? How does it break the game? Etc

[@chancehensley4478]

@@LiveLXStudios well when you load into the map it freezes the character in place. its just a simple event where old guy walks up and says hey i saw some monster over here can you go check it out, which is meant to direct the player to the tutorial dungeon. nothing crazy. no switches other than self and a check to make sure a certain scene has played. i'm sure my event building is sub optimal as i'm still getting a feel for the system, but like i said, it worked perfectly fine for three days or so, then out of nowhere started being a problem

[@joshuaemile6551]

My vision seem to be failing me are you a boy or a girl Only true games remember this

[@kenzuleisti2779]

HAHAH amazing xD So funny.

[@TripTropLove]

Yes... I do want to change all the he's and she's.........

[@Gyrannon]

And what if I do want npcs to mention "He/him" if a boy and "She/her" if a girl? How would I go about doing that? They/them should honestly be used in plural context, not singular, and I don't wanna follow pronouns.

[@LvLUpDesign]

In that case, what you'd need to do is assign the gender to a variable. 0001 set to 1 being male or female and 0001 being set to 2 being the opposite. Then whenever a pronoun is being used in a text box, you'd need to check what the value of the gender variable is, and then have the text box print what ever the variable is. E.g. conditional branch, if variable 0001 = 1 (make the text boxes say she or he) and another conditional branch, if variable 0001 = 2 make the text boxes print the opposite

[@rainydeestar]

Good tutorial Even though, in more recent game, instead of asking the player "Are you a boy or a girl", they ask "Do you want to be a boy or a girl" It just is kinda better