In Desert of Ash, you play as a young queer man wandering the post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of food and sex. The player has a lot of influence on the protagonist: where do you go? what do you say? who do you fuck? However, if I wrote in a variation for every choice the player could possibly imagine, the game would balloon to a ridiculous size or, more likely, never be released at all. I have to reign it in somehow.

One model for me in thinking about how to write a protagonist in a game with player choice is the modern Persona series. In these games, as in Desert of Ash, you are encouraged to name your protagonist and put yourself in his shoes. Over the course of the game, you can make a variety of dialogue choices, and even choose who to develop relationships with and how those relationships will go. However, the player's influence is ultimately limited in a few key ways. For one, you have very little influence over the direction of the main story. For another, the choices you can make are never too surprising; each dialogue option is grounded in who the protagonist is as a character. You can decide, to some degree, how he interacts with others, but you cannot make him into someone he isn't. He has an established personality, and every choice fits within that personality. What makes this clearer is playing multiple games in the series and seeing how the available choices differ and reflect differently on each protagonist. It gets really obvious when looking at peripheral Persona media and seeing how differently each protagonist is interpreted outside of his original game. Even though these boys don't speak often in their primary games, when they do in others, it makes sense.

Like in Persona, the protagonist of Desert of Ash has some key, immutable features. I have made sure he is his own character with his own development that plays out depending on the direction of the story. This then informs other, more specific aspects of his character. For example, I know some players would love to choose, for every sex scene, whether to top or to bottom. However, the protagonist of Desert of Ash is canonically versatile and open to his partners' preferences. Therefore, the way sex scenes play out is largely determined by what the other man likes, which is rooted in his personality and history, too. It's less work on the development side than creating multiple variants of each sex scene, and it has the added benefit of making each sexual encounter another look into who the characters are as people.

But I don't want anyone thinking I've written the game this way as a compromise. It's true that this approach requires less development time than others might, but I also just prefer it this way. I like that Persona's protagonists have personality. I want a game where the player character is a character and not just an empty shell. Like so many devs before me, all I'm doing is making the game I want to see in the world.