Protagonist poll (Patreon)

     
  So here's a thing I've been kind of having a hard time really settling on; how to present the protagonist of the series. It's mostly a matter of how I want to balance the player's ability to self-insert, vs making the protagonist(s) themselves interesting unique characters.    

Silent vs Independent 

   This is the big one, and it's going to flavor the other options significantly. Do you prefer a silent protagonist or one that is their own distinct character with their own thoughts and feelings? A silent protagonist is typically geared for self-inserting, ie YOU are the protagonist, because the less the protag says the less they can clash with your own personality, but it can also be quite bland, as it forces conversations to be very one-sided; and some people are going to fall out of the immersion regardless since I can't feasibly include every single possibility for 'what would you do in this situation?' choices.       

The other end of the spectrum should be more self-explanatory. A speaking character can easily have their own thoughts, opinions and backstory; while limiting the players decision-making to 'in-character' options that are presented to the player. Isabel's episode used a protagonist that was somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. He had some of his own opinions and thoughts given in the narration, while the player had some limited options to alter his backstory and personality a bit to roleplay within that, and he was kept mostly pretty 'average' to avoid alienating most people who want to self-insert in his place.        

I'm probably keep going to keep going with a compromise/hybrid approach rather than run to either extreme end of the spectrum, but I may move a little further up or down the line based on the answers, so if you want the protagonist as self-inserty as possible, vote for 'silent protag' and if you want them as fleshed out as possible vote for 'speaking' With the third option being to keep it as close to the 'center' as possible.
  

Appearance:

 Customizable:
A straight-up customizable protagonist is a fair bit of extra work and expense; so that's going to need to be a stretch goal if there is a high demand for it, but please let me know if that option would be important to you. 

 Distinct vs Faceless :
For now, the two main easier options are the 'faceless hentai protagonist' whom is shown as little as possible; and is generic-looking as possible when they are actually seen; or to just give the protagonist an actual character design.    
  
  

Consistent vs Variable. 

ie: Legend of Zelda VS Persona.    
Would you rather every episode have the same consistent playable character, in every episode, or have each individual episode have it's own protagonist? This one is hypothetically moot with a generic self-insert silent protagonist, but very important with more distinct protagonists.
Variable protagonists allows for more adjustments to the character to suit individual stories without creating plot holes. It also allows multiple episodes to be cannon witch each other so some datable/playable characters can show up in each other's stories as crossovers without things getting weird. Granted, I could always pull a 'Link' with a consistent protagonist anyway and just flat-out not worry about cannon between episodes.    
  

----

Just to share my own thoughts and a little of the thought process on the first episode. When we started making the pilot episode I thought Persona 3,4 and 5 had a pretty good approach for a semi-silent protagonist and wanted to do something similar. They use pre-defined characters with some lightly implied personalities, but a wide berth to roleplay within their shoes, while they had minimal speaking lines aside from dialogue options.

Then I hired a writer whom never played a Persona game so that wasn't actually really much of a usable baseline. He ended up writing a protagonist with a little bit more of a voice than I'd originally intended and wanted, but I have to admit it made it a lot easier to make the conversations more interesting since you can have some back and forth banter in a one-on-one conversation without needing 9 million dialogue options. I fought him a tiny bit on that, editing in a few more choices and tweaking the protagonist's backstory to be more open to interpretation, but tried not to be heavy-handed about it. People seem to like how it came out so now I'm wondering if it might be a little better pushed a bit more in either direction or not.