When it comes to trying to make the MC neutral.

[Ibitz]

Would you prefer there to be no avatar, so that way you can control the gender, name, and appearance of the character or would you prefer to have an avatar with different appearance options to choose from?

In the case of my game, your history and the basics of your life and what kind of race/skin color you are is picked for you along with your foster family and the basic skills you are given, but that's about it. Otherwise, you choose the path and whatever friends and enemies and lovers you make. Would you prefer to remain neutral (the first choice I mentioned) which is what I have in my current game or should I assume a main character (I went with the name of Alex in my head because that's pretty neutral) and then you can just change the name or appearance?

I would like my game to be appealing to people, so I'm just curious about what others think.

[MapletreePaper]

In my opinion if you're going to make an MC for the player to "project" onto, you need to go all in. If you're already allowing people to choose their race, then gender and name customization seems obvious and kind of necessary. What I mean to say that while Alex is a unisex name, it won't work for most non-European cultures. If an Arab or East Asian person plays your game, the name only makes sense if they're part white or descended from immigrants. I'm only saying this because you seem so adamant about being inclusive.That's a noble goal, don't get me wrong, but I don't think there's anything inherently bad about assuming your audience's race and gender like many dating sims do. This is, of course, also assuming you're talking about real life races and not fantasy races. You didn't make that entirely clear and it would make my concerns a little moot.

Ultimately I'm not the biggest fan of "boilerplate" MCs, but I do believe they can work. Just make sure to put a lot of effort into the other characters to make up for the protagonist's lack of depth.

[Elsa Kisiel]

If the MC is a blank sheet, if the goal is that the player project themself on it : customisation of the avatar. It's fun to create a character after all ! In that case, I think the player should be able to choose the name of the character too.

However, if the character is a real character, with a name and a personality : one design only. Having the same design for everyone help with marketing, fan-art, community ... And let's not forget that the character appearance say something about them.

[Mutive]

I'm okay with both. I've played games with neutral avatars (think most Bioware games) and those with very set ones (think the Witcher) and liked both. There are advantages (and disadvantages) with both options. The nice thing about a neutral avatar is that I can truly create the character the way I want (think looks the way I want/acts the way I want/has the name I want, etc.) But it's much harder to do CGs with a neutral avatar (which means they tend to be rare or non-existent), voice acting can be weird (what do you call your neutral avatar? Think all the kind of nonsense "Warden" stuff in Dragon Age...does your lover really not know your freaking name?), etc.

Also agree with above that if you're allowing heavy character customization, name customization is also a must. (Or at least very critical. As noted, *names* aren't culturally neutral even when they're gender neutral. And I might not even imagine my super girly Alexia going by "Alex".)

[parttimestorier]

In my opinion if you're going to make an MC for the player to "project" onto, you need to go all in.

I think this comment is really well put and I totally agree. I think that if you want players to be able to roleplay as the protagonist and really immerse themselves as if they're the hero of the story, they should have as many customization options as possible. It can be really jarring if you start out thinking like you're the protagonist, but then they do something you would never do and completely throw you off. (Very minor example, but I remember playing one game once where the self-insert protagonist turned down an offer of a cup of coffee or something, and I was like, "Hey! I thought this was me! I would never say no to coffee!") And making the protagonist that much of a blank slate can be really complicated and time-consuming to write, so depending on the story, it might sometimes be a better choice to go with a developed character protagonist instead.

[puppetbomb]

While I do like the idea where you decide the basic socioeconomic, cultural and gender status of a main character, it creates a massive amount of work if you want it to affect the story and NPC dialog. Even with only three options of each of these categories, it means you will be mapping out 27 different dialog trees for every single combination of a user-created backstory, not including choices.

You can try to cover a few bases by using gender-neutral terms, never illustrating the POV character, avoiding using verbs that imply full functional use of the body and so on. But if you are writing dialog that is not prompted by a choice or have insufficient choices, it always increases the risk of making the avatar do or say something that is not consistent to the player (as illustrated by parttimestorier).

As for personal preferences... I don't mind blank slate characters if it's a shorter game that lets me to poke around a lot of different paths and endings. For longer games, I prefer being stuck with someone relatable and interesting.

[Mutive]

Even with only three options of each of these categories, it means you will be mapping out 27 different dialog trees for every single combination of a user-created backstory, not including choices.

That assumes you use all options at once. I can see a number of dialogue options where the race of the character doesn't matter, but the socioeconomic status does. (Or whatever.)

So you might have:

Rich MC "I loved taking riding lessons when I was a child!"

Middle Class MC "I went trail riding once or twice as a kid, but it was never like this!"

Poor MC "I'd always dreamed of having a horse as a kid, but never got near one. They're a lot bigger in person, aren't they?"

(Or something.)

Clearly you're not going to get perfect customization, but at some level, that's impossible anyway. (Even games that do a phenomenal job of letting you customize your character still will only let you wander into certain areas/do certain things because programming infinite options isn't doable.)

[Elfie]

While having customizable MC sounds cool, it is not really best option for VN. When I was only a gamer, I always wondered why there aren't many RPG's (not only VN's), with fully backstory-wise customizable MC's. Now as a devloper I see why.

Because you will either:

a) Complicate things too much, which would extend development process over years just for this one thing (while it could be spent on other things)
b) Dilute and downplay these differences by not giving them much attention. Basically what even is the point in choosing a race or gender if that will not have any significant impact on the game?

There is a way to kinda add customization without much extra effort - you can add character editor, where you can edit the looks of the MC, and maybe choose a backstory trait out of 3-4, but only these 2. While the main backstory will stay pretty much the same regardless of your choice.

I believe Hanako did just that in their latest Magical Diary VN.

[JRaw]

Would you prefer there to be no avatar, so that way you can control the gender, name, and appearance of the character or would you prefer to have an avatar with different appearance options to choose from?

In the case of my game, your history and the basics of your life and what kind of race/skin color you are is picked for you along with your foster family and the basic skills you are given, but that's about it. Otherwise, you choose the path and whatever friends and enemies and lovers you make. Would you prefer to remain neutral (the first choice I mentioned) which is what I have in my current game or should I assume a main character (I went with the name of Alex in my head because that's pretty neutral) and then you can just change the name or appearance?

I would like my game to be appealing to people, so I'm just curious about what others think.

I mean, definitely have a customizable avatar (even if its just options) if possible. No question about it. But that takes money (especially for CGs) and technological know-how. If you don't have those things, then obviously you're more restricted -- and there's no shame in that.

But if you have the opportunity, if you give players options, guarantee people will always appreciate them.