The Underlying Issue

he single design decision I probably spent the most time agonizing over is whether or not my vision for Dawnshadow was worth the "Nudity" tag that it required be placed on the game's store pages. There's even a kill switch built into the code so I can censor the game with a single keystroke. In the end, I decided to leave the nudity present but locked behind both a story gate and affirmative player action; nobody will accidentally stumble into pixel dicks or tits in the game (or this blog post if you were concerned.) Today I want to talk about how I got there.

There are two major points that go into the player's experience with nudity in Dawnshadow. The first is the customization of Sai's appearance at character creation. The second is their decisions during the encounters with the dapper werewolf. We'll start with character creation, since it comes first.

In the beginning, Sai was male, and I will refer to him with male pronouns throughout this post. He was an existing character with an existing backstory, and that was how I knew him. As I continued developing Dawnshadow, however, I came to the realization that Sai's gender was irrelevant to the story that I was telling. So I modified some pixels on the menu image for Sai and made a female version of him. And it was good.

But as I sat with the male/female Sai for a few days, doubt began to creep in. I have enough LGBTQ friends to know that if I'm going to let a player pick their avatar's appearance, a binary choice is insufficient. So I altered more pixels to make two more versions of Sai. As I stared at my lineup of Sai's, wondering if the extra bodies were worth the extra effort (extra bodies require extra armor that fits them,) a thought occurred to me. All four bodies are generally the same size since they were built from the same template. Why not slice them up and let the player decide how to put them back together?

The end result is that one of the first things a player does after starting up a new game is decide how big a crotch bulge their character has (yes, that's what that arrow is for.) It's only a few pixels, and two options look identical with underpants in place, but it's still a choice the player encounters early. I rationalize it to myself by noting that we don't often think twice about customizing a character's bust size, which is almost omnipresent at this point. I'll admit to being nervous about including it, but the principle was important enough that I left it in place. And the setting supports a non-binary customizable character.

The second point, and the one that can lead to the presence of nudity in the game, is the player's interaction with the dapper werewolf. For brevity's sake, I'm going to call him Khyle.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time defending Khyle's actions. He's a creeper. Unapologetically so. He means well, but he consistently tries to make his point in the worst possible way. The armor he creates for Sai highlights Sai's features by being, as Sai puts it, "kind of skimpy." The player would be justified in avoiding Khyle after that initial encounter.

But Khyle has more to say. If the player indulges him, Khyle will eventually get around to the heart of his body-positive message. I talked last time about how themes of depression ran through Sai's encounters with Syn. Khyle's arc revolves very tightly around ideas of self-image and self-worth. Central to his thesis is the need to be comfortable in your own skin. His extension of that idea to the need to be comfortable in nothing but your own skin was compelling enough to make more than one playtester take him up on his request. And as the game warns, Sai is naked under those smallclothes.

Fantasy grants an abstraction that lets us see our own fears from outside, and games grant the safety to make choices that might not otherwise be made in life. If Khyle's impassioned monologue about how unrelated "who you are" and "what you look like" actually are makes a difference for just one person, then Art will, once again, have proven why we should still care about it. And, for me, it's worth the "Nudity" tag.

As a closing thought, the playtesters seemed to find Khyle's character and arc quite compelling. When making the difficult decision of which among Sai's allies would be the one allowed to escape with him, they chose Khyle. And probably not just to steal his very dapper hat.