Deciding on whether to add custom names...

[Lamby777]

Somewhat of an unstructured issue, because I'm barely awake rn and want to log this for later.

Many games have a feature where you can pick a custom name for all the characters, or change certain other strings that are used in the game. Ever since starting this game back in like 2019, I've just assumed that this game doesn't really need that feature.

Saw a thread today that was legitimately just about naming your character in Celeste. The comments were pretty interesting, and some were kinda relatable. Starting to reconsider this, and that maybe P/E/T/S should have this feature too, if it could make a decent percentage of players happier?

Would be a nice feature to have, but would also add a LOT of complexity... stuff like how to handle the player giving names that start with the same letter...? If the player renames Ethan and Siva to Timmy and Tanya, well, you'd have 3 different Agent Ts. That would be pretty confusing, right? And what if some smartass decides to name Siva "Calyx" or rename one of the main party characters into Quolo/Mira/Juno/etc.?

In Mother 3, I know naming Duster "Lucky" will make his DCMC name become "Gorgeous" instead, and according to some guy online, naming Madeline "Alex" in Celeste would just swap Alex's name to Madeline instead. Undertale just refuses to let you use certain names like Sans or Asgore. Many ways to solve this issue, but I feel like it's way more complicated for P/E/T/S, because everything's so interconnected.

Fortunately, handling dialogue changes would probably be easy with format strings, but you get the idea. There are lots of things you typically don't think about with these sorts of minor changes, and I'm not sure if it's worth implementing. Something to think about for later on.

[Lamby777]

Definitely the biggest advantage to adding this feature would be... hmmmmm...

[Lamby777]

If this becomes a feature, one thing I 100% guarantee will be added is the ability to change the names after the game starts. Could make things even more complicated, but personally, this limitation has been one of the biggest things I hated about character customization.

[Lamby777]

Doesn't seem like much of a big deal anymore, at least with all the recent changes that have made me think more about it...

Could just not do anything about the troll usernames and say "change the names at your own risk," but that seems like a massive cop-out. We're the developers dealing with bugs and weird behavior here, not the players who only come to have fun and expect a basic naming system to work properly.

[Lamby777]

Idea: could just force the player to pick names starting with the same letter as the originals...

For example, you'd be allowed to change Agent E's name to Evan, Elliot, Emilio, etc. if you so wished.

Obviously I'd have to still disallow renaming certain characters just for story/anti-spoilers purposes, but for the main guys this should work fine.

[Lamby777]

Obviously I'd have to still disallow renaming certain characters just for story/anti-spoilers purposes, but for the main guys this should work fine.

Then again, this could be turned off through an "are you sure you want to spoil yourself?" menu so people who played the whole game before can rename whoever the hell they want.