WIP Diverse StardewValley - Hiatus / I'm dead.

So I just installed all of the portraits you have made so far and I am so happy about them! I'm so glad that you are working on this mod!

I remember I first found out about this game while watching my black friend live stream it and we were both complaining about the lack of diversity during the introduction where you go around and meet everyone. I almost didn't buy the game for that reason either.

So, um, can I make a request? Can you make one of the young characters disabled? Like using a hearing aid? I know there's George, and I was so happy to see him in the game but... IDK. Maybe I'll learn how to mod one of these days and make give one of the characters a service dog that acts independently and is a seperate character. That sounds like it would be a lot of work but... wow, it would make my life.

I don't think I've seen a service dog in any media... Anyway, the art is incredible! I love it! And, again, I'm so, so happy you made this!

 

These look amazing, and I love the idea of adding a little more diversity to... well, any game, really. Choice in gaming is good.

I'm looking forward to seeing more in this mod going forward. I also wanted to second FaeFaerFen's request for disabled options. A hearing aid, a prosthesis... I loved the idea of a service animal, but that would be well out of the scope of this mod, I would think.

You know what would be neat? Disabled options for the player... Hmmm... I should learn pixel art...

SDIT: Sorry, I forgot one of the reasons I wanted to comment - I was wondering if a DL All option could be made available? That's all

 

Ah maybe Shane with the hearing aid?

 

A service dog that is their own NPC would probably be very difficult even if we could add NPCs, but you might be able to "cheese" one by making one of the characters have a service dog as part of their sprite. It'd make them almost literally attached at the hip, and you'd need to mod the dialogue as well to have anyone even acknowledge the dog's existence.

Something like a prosthetic limb would be easier. On the player character, it would obviously be purely aesthetic. (You'd have to play something like Dwarf Fortress's Adventure Mode for actual disabilities.) You pretty much just need to alter the farmer base sprite.

A hearing aid as nothing but a thing in their ear in their portrait is also easy, but having any actual relevance to dialogue or gameplay, again, takes rewriting things. If you want to disable one of the kids, for example, Jas takes trips out into the woods on her own to jump rope and talks about learning to write cursive, which don't comport with a prosthetic leg or being blind and needing a seeing eye dog.

 

You could have a service dog that is small and lives in a handbag. Small dogs are trained to smell for high blood sugar or sense of their master is about to have a seizure. They're good because if you don't need the dog for a physical task they can easily tuck themselves out of the way and barely be noticed while doing their jobs. The tiny dog would just be part of the sprite that way.

 

I thought that as well! (The part about how if you just changed appearances quite a few characters dialogue and behavior would no longer match up.) Which is why a hearing aid seemed like one that would be easy enough to add as well as not really bother who it's added to very much... I suggested Shane since the requester wanted a younger person and didn't think of the kids aha.

That's true. I know a few people who need service dogs for high anxiety as well.

 

...now I kind of want to see mute!Jas. How hard would it be to make her sprite look like she's carrying a notebook around to write in? It just came to mind because she's so quiet when she first met you, and she has some issues relating to her parents' deaths. I could see it as either mechanical- injury from whatever killed her parents- psychosomatic and permanent, or selective mutism, with her starting to verbally speak to the Farmer at around 6-8 hearts. (As someone who was functionally mute for three months out of the last nine and still speech impaired, this would be nice in my opinion; having been completely mute until I was six, almost seven, endears this idea to me on a personal level. Mutism doesn't get a whole lot of screen time anywhere, I suppose because it is so hard to portray in a dynamic manner..?) That said, there's only one scene that Jas talks in, to my knowledge, and it's the sewer grate scene. Which, if you go with selective mutism, her talking to Vincent could be argued as being due to her not knowing the Farmer is in view. Her 'ah-ha!' sprite could also be used to signal the start of a string of sign language. She could even just be wearing a portable whiteboard around her neck- it's what I had to do when I couldn't talk. Obviously, it's up to you if you even want to alter Jas, let alone make her mute, this is just something that came to mind as a possibility. I'd personally use that part of this mod in a heartbeat, if it was made, but I won't hold it against you for not wanting to use such a niche difference.

As for prosthetics and activity level- while it's true that not all prosthetics allow for high mobility, some of them are actually better, mechanics wise, than biological human legs. There was actually a fairly decent size and length arguement before one of the Olympics about someone who was... In the sprint, I think, who had dual prosthetics, and people were arguing over whether the mechanical advantage granted by his prosthetics should disqualify him from being able to compete. I think they actually did a huge study on it to see what the answer was, and I know that there was a relative improvement that couldn't be attributed solely to differences in training level, and thus was attributed to the prosthetics. I don't remember how they ruled on his ability to compete, unfortunately. So leg prosthetics, athletic ones at least, wouldn't impair someone's ability to be active too badly. I mean, I wouldn't have someone that plays contact sports wear one. Unless you want to make Alex's dream of being a professional grid ball player even more tragic.

As for hearing aid, maybe Vincent? Both him and Jas knowing sign language could be an interesting dynamic. It also wouldn't clash too badly, in my opinion- I've met small children with hearing aids, and many of them have been... Loud. They also would turn off their hearing aids when they were bored with what people were talking about, like in classes they didn't like. *points at his report card* It could also explain why he never seems allowed to be off on his own, if Jodi were worried about something happening to him because he couldn't hear it.

Just some ideas that hit me, if you read them, thank you taking the time to do so.

 

Honestly, if you say "mute", I think of the player character, and presume they're carrying around flash cards to write on, or are given cards to choose from by the NPCs... But then again, in my head cannon, farmers like to run around by holding their hands straight above their heads holding up strawberries the size of their torsos...

The thing about those Olympic runner "blade" prosthetics is that they're ludicrously expensive cutting-edge technology (in this exact day and age - technology is a little fuzzy in Stardew Valley) that wouldn't be available in the countriside, and would be basically impossible to custom-fit to a growing child. Since I don't think having Maru creating cyborg limbs and turning this into Deus Ex would be the purpose of representation, then the more loose-fitting prosthetics wouldn't be good for jumping rope, as there is really only a limited amount of time in the day you can stand on a prosthetic before you rub the interface of skin and prosthetic raw, and jumping makes it much, much shorter.

Deaf Jas would be more of an issue of having everyone recognize it, which would mean a lot of rewrites of language to make the concept make sense contextually. You'd have to include people who express that they understand sign language, for one. Even if she has a signboard, it'd probably make more sense to have the player learn sign language if they wanted to be 10-heart friends with her, and that would probably take some explanation more than just automatically learning it when you go up in hearts. (Although learning the dwarven language was ridiculously easy...)

 

Well, the farmer learning dwarven instantly can be explained away. It just falls under the farmer skill set like being able to see Junimos does. Farmer is special, and does special things, because videogame.

Though what you're talking about will become an issue for just about any disability. It's only natural that people will talk about it in some way, even if it's purely a cosmetic change to the sprite. Heck, being in a wheelchair is George's entire character arc as it's his only definitive personality trait that CA decided to explore in scenes. For a portrait mod I think the player will need to just suspend their disbelief to have another disabled looking character in game. d:

I still think our best disability candidates might be Pam or Kent. You can drive a bus with only one arm, which could be a prosthetic or even just missing. It wouldn't have to be a nice prosthetic if she has one, and we could even add it to the trailer as she could reasonably have more than one. Kent came back from a war where he could easily have ended up with a prosthetic limb or two. Heck, even a cane or hearing aid. An added benefit to Kent is it would make sense no one would talk about it if he came back disabled.

 

Nonsense! George has another character trait besides being in a wheelchair! He's also a grumpy old scrooge who goes to every festival just to complain about having to go to every festival!

I think loading down Kent with a disability along with PTSD would be making an already less than graceful portrayal a little too ham-handed, and besides, part of the request was someone young.

Having to rewrite dialogue is doable (I just did it...) but it's also something rather limited. Again, there doesn't seem to be the capacity to make a large pool of lines for characters outside of events, and events being added takes SMAPI. Maybe there's some function that could be added through SMAPI/Farmhand that allows for a pool of lines that the game draws from based upon criteria outside of just heart level, day of the week, and season, and that could expand things greatly. (Or maybe when CA adds the next patch with all those new lines, he rewrites the dialogue code...)

 

Yeah, it does look like a lot of lines are just hardcoded into the game so changing them or adding more is pretty unweildy.

That's a good point. I wasn't really taking his PTSD into account when I made the previous statement.


Let's see. Well Sandy could work. She's young, plus she's secluded in the desert. Only Emily ever mentions her (from what I've seen) so we wouldn't have to worry too much with dialog changes unless we made her fully deaf (rather than just needing a hearing aid). We also could reasonably assume she'd be able to afford really nice prosthetics if she is missing limbs. I think having her missing an arm, and needing the prosthetic for that, which she decorates to match her clothes and shows off without reservation would work nicely. Plus if it's her arm she can use it to be expressive in portraits letting there be lots of nice details on it.

Now, as far as it being a villager, Sebastian could be a good candidate, and Maru could also be cool as we could assume she made her own prosthetic, hearing aid, cane, etc, but both of those require a port rework and NS isn't keen on doing those until totally done with the other portraits.

Shane hasn't been done yet, and this could work for him, since major retail chains will often hire on people with disabilities. It also would explain why he doesn't just help out at Marnie's ranch if Joja-mart is so miserable. The biggest issue of doing Shane though is that he's going to have more portraits in the next patch, which could make drawing him soon a waste of time. But if NS wants a lot of planning time to work out exactly how disabled Shane could be, it can work.

 

I second this, a bundled download would be a godsend.

 

Wow.
I didn't realize how many people would comment while I was away, it was just an idea I was throwing out.

How hard is learning to mod? Is it something I could do in three months or less?

So, is it that modding dialogue and new NPC is difficult, or is it impossible?

I love the idea how mute Jas.

 

Not incredibly depending on what you want to do. You just need the right tools, mostly. Though CA is a very disorganized person so the difficulty falls into where the heck he put what line of dialog and if it's hardcoded (meaning you'd need smapi, storm, or maybe the upcoming farmhand to actually change it). You'll also have to test frequently to make sure a copy of a file you edited is the copy the game actually uses, or if the file you needed (often even having the same name) is just tucked away into another folder.

It's not impossible, but it's incredibly limited right now as we're only able to crack open the xnbs safely and not every action, event, and line of dialog is in those xnbs either. CA did not, I think, expect this game to get modded. That or he didn't especially care if modders had an easy go of it. d:

 

Hello notsnuffie! I just had to make an account to say THANK YOU SO MUCH for this incredible mod! I love the game so much more now, and as a person of color, I feel so much more included! Thank you, thank you!

 

I have a few characters with disabilities planned, and redos I might do. I'm trying to keep up with suggestions, but my note taking is not so good. If any of you want to shoot me a PM with something you'd like to see feel free. It's much easier for me to keep track of.

And yes! I'll be putting up a download all again! I took the last one down cause I needed to add people... then never got around to it. My bad. I'll try to get that up tonight.

Also anyone in here happen to know Photoshop cs6 backwards and forwards? My photoshop did something weird and I can't seem to figure out how to fix it.

 

I just upgraded to that myself. I was pretty familiar with CS5 tho, and CS6 hasn't given me much trouble. What did your thing do?

 

It's been a couple months since I've used it (my laptop doesn't seem to agree with it, not sure why but the programme keeps shutting down with no warning and I've been tired of losing my work), but I might be able to help as well.

 

If all else fails, you can just try using GIMP. The interface takes a little more getting used to, but it has all the features of Photoshop, and is free.

I've been using it since when the only option for Photoshop was to pay $500 or pirate it, and have grown used enough to it that I wouldn't want Photoshop, anyway.

 

These are soooo amazing. Penny! Seb! ALEX!!! Alex and Harvey are especially mind-blowing.

I cannot wait to see your Wizard, or your PoC Penny & Pam!