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The 2005 P&P is not remotely my favorite P&P adaptation, and is IMO more of an adaptation of pop culture-P&P in dialogue with other adaptations and films than directly one of the novel. But it's been 2 0 y e a r s and somehow every conversation about the costuming seems to devolve into scolding Joe Wright for presuming not to like 1810s fashion or want it in the adaptation.

Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in 1796-1797. Her father tried to submit it for publication but was ignored. She revised it in the earlier 1800s, though we don't know what this consisted of beyond cutting out what sounds like pretty significant swaths of material (likely the reason for its especially smooth, balanced, tightly-paced structure—not that I wouldn't ritually sacrifice a puppy to get my hands on the passages she removed and undoubtedly destroyed). The manuscript was finally accepted, and published in January of 1813.

The sense of a cultural/atmospheric split between the revised early manuscripts (Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and the jewel of this set, Pride and Prejudice) and the late Austen works that completely originated in the 1810s (Emma, Persuasion, Sanditon; MP is more ambiguous) is not unusual nor broadly controversial. The Chapman 1811-1812 calendar for P&P is possible (though no real year can be fully reconciled to the novel's internal calendar), but not the only possibility, nor necessarily even the most probable. Certainly no director or costume designer or anyone else is in any way obligated to replicate "the Regency" of popular consciousness—the Regency of Regency romances, of so many period Austen adaptations, the frozen eternal moment of the concept.

It's not that the costume choices are beyond criticism (I do think some choices are very 2005 beyond the necessity of speaking to a contemporary audience) but "Joe Wright didn't like 1810s fashion and yet made a period adaptation of a novel written in 1797, how dare" seems endlessly recycled and yet incredibly inane.

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🍬 The Queer Halloween Stories Bundle 2024 is LIVE! 🍬

Get the decorations ready and the costumes out of the closet, 'cuz the Queer Halloween Stories Bundle is back for 2024! This year we're treating you to 140+ projects from over 100 creators and teams located all over the world, who are sharing their spooky and spoopy stories with you! In this bundle, you will find...

🕸 92 Digital Games 🎃 19 Physical Games 👻 16 Books 🧛‍ 12 Comics 😈 4 Zines ⚰️ 1 DLC

The Queer Halloween Stories Bundle directly benefits queer indie creators and teams, with all sales split evenly among participants who have opted in to receive funds for their work. For the price of one AAA title, you can help fund the future of queer art by supporting these creators and discovering titles you won't find anywhere else.

Pick up the $60 Fright Edition here!

Tight on cash? Pick up the $10+ Treat Edition here!

Learn more about the bundle on our press kit website~

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The Games Behind Your Government's Next War

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VNs which reverse the usual gender power dynamic in one way or another. Includes a nice rec for Northanger Abbey :)

Video Games, VNs

(Last updated: 13 March 2023)

(VN: visual novel)

Keep reading

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This tutorial is aimed at people with no experience with Unreal Engine who just want to render an existing model made by someone else. It's the technique I used to create these Anime Style Factory Backgrounds.

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A new little browser game: Ali Bababa Solitaire. Very bare bones, since I mostly just wanted a version I could play myself without having to shuffle actual real life cards. Adds an extra slot, which isn't cheating when I made the game myself ;)

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A Hungry Heart is a non-binary/non-binary romance Visual Novel, about a twenty something burn-out returning to their childhood home and trying to make something new from the ashes of their life. There is currently only one love interest, the player character's childhood friend Ro.

The current demo covers the prologue and start of the Ro route. 

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A related question I’ve thought about: how to make farming sims that aren’t specifically Jewish, but feel more inclusive of Judaism, and other religions and cultures. This is in no way criticising the idea of making a specifically Jewish game, it's just not something I would make myself. I'm a culturally Christian quasi-Jewish atheist, so would want my game to be secular but inclusive, drawing on my personal experiences without erasing anyone else's.

Hello! I am making a game and I want to make sure I'm portraying my characters well. I want my characters to celebrate Jewish holidays, particularly the high holy days, but would that work if my world works on a 4 month year, like stardew valley? I dont want to get something wrong if I'm smushing these days together. Sorry if this isnt much to go on. Thanks for this blog :)

Celebrating Jewish holidays (fantasy) in 4 month calendar world

Fun! As a big fan of games like Stardew, I can’t tell you how tired I got of the obvious Christian holiday analogues being presented as just Fun for Everyone. I love the idea of something actually for me, actively.

Obviously, on a four-month (one month per season, for those who may not be aware) system, there isn’t enough space to cover every holiday. I’m not even sure how well something like Tisha B'Av, a day of mourning, would work in a game with anything but a fairly serious tone. I think you could certainly have multiple holidays per month, where appropriate, without crowding too much in. As an extremely invested Jewish gamer I’ll say: you don’t have to fit everything in, doing it at all is huge, and doing it well is most important. I don’t think it’s an issue to have to smush the timeline a bit, since the rest of the game-world is also following that timeline.

Fall Month - Rosh HaShanah could be the new year, and could start at the beginning of your Fall month. You could have Yom Kippur mid-month, but this one I think you will have to be very careful with. It’s the holiest day of the year, and very solemn, so difficult to gameify comfortably. You may want to warn your gamers ahead of time that work will be suspended that day, or simply suspend all deadlines that day. A big feast at the end is highly recommended, you’re supposed to eat light after a fast, but most of us don’t!

Winter Month - Chanukah isn’t a major holiday religiously, but is a cool, and iconic one, with an anti-assimilation message, which is particularly powerful when you are making a game with Jewish holidays. Perhaps that could go mid-Winter month.

Spring Month - Purim might be a good candidate for the beginning of Spring month, with costumes, gift baskets going to other people in the village (if it’s that much like Stardew). Pesach could take place mid-Spring month. With a holiday like this, that’s so long in real life, decisions will have to be made about how to portray it. You could truncate it of course, but even in real life the first two days (in most of the world) are the big days with seders and gatherings. You could have two nights where people end up gathering in cutscenes, and the next six you might just have in-game restrictions.

Summer Month - You might be able to push Shavuot to summer, as it’s usually very late spring in the northern hemisphere when it occurs. Normally we have Tisha B'Av at this time, but I feel like, unless you are prepared to make a very serious game, you might now want to get all the way into what that holiday means to us.

As other small notes: you might consider having the day counter tick over at sundown, instead of sunrise, and the weeks start after shabbat (so Saturday night, rather than Monday morning), or if you are using the common 1-7 day counting/naming system, make sure to show somehow that Saturdays/Day7 are shabbat.

There is an enormous amount of debate, and conversation about things vaguely like this in the real world too. For instance, if you live in the Arctic Circle, in summer, when does it stop being day? The sun never sets in some places, and that’s what we use to determine when a new day begins. Is it never shabbat? Does shabbat never end? Looking into some of those issues might give you some other ideas on practical solutions in-game to truncated time.

–Dierdra

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Some might consider you an unlikely protagonist for a dating sim. You have no mysterious childhood friends, no vanished memories, and not one dead parent to your name. But at seventeen you have finally been invited to your first season in Bath, and thus stand at the cusp of a great - and highly interactive - adventure.

What happiness lies before you! The happiness of a progress through a long suite of lofty rooms, exhibiting the remains of magnificent furniture, though now for many years deserted. The happiness of being stopped in your way along narrow, winding vaults, by a low, grated door.

Perhaps, even...love?

Will you follow the plot of the novel and be a woman charmed by the snarky priest Henry Tilney? Or would you rather you dance with him as a cross dressing man? Has the melancholy artist Eleanor caught your eye? Perhaps you would prefer Eleanor to be Edmund and for you to have no gender at all- The choice is yours!

Dance, love, and discover the secrets of the Abbey!

Download Northanger Abbey for Mac or Windows at itchio

Features:

Two love interests: Henry/Helen Tilney, and Eleanor/Edmund Tilney

A friendship path and various bad endings

Other characters to befriend- or alienate!

Choose your gender and presentation

Flip everyone's gender for a Regency England where women rule over men

Orchestral soundtrack featuring classical composers, including Bach and Vivaldi

Screenreader support, descriptions of music and images, customisable font and text size

Walkthrough and guide to Visual Novels

Image descriptions under the cut:

Everything is wearing regency fashion and drawn in a style vaguely reminiscent of 19th century cartoons, and the backgrounds are painted. The protagonist is medium height and slight with long dark hair and blue clothing. Henry/Helen and Eleanor/Edmund have medium brown skin, dark curly hair and pink and white clothing, and Henry/Helen is on a wheelchair. John is tall, stout, and blonde, and dressed in yellows and browns.

Against a walled city, Eleanor frowns at a laughing Henry while the masculine presenting protagonist blushes. Eleanor says “Henry, you are too impertinent. Our game will never sell if you are seen being rude to poor Mr Morland in screenshots“.

In a fancy candlelit room, Edmund and Helen smile with a feminine presenting proatonist. These choices are offered: Smile at Helen, Smile and Edmund, or Laugh awkwardly.

An androgynously dressed protagonist sits in a carriage with John, who says in an especially large font "What do you think of my font, M Morland? A neat one, is not it? Sans serif; large size; I had the text box custom built to fit!"

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Since tumblr is so chancy these days, I got around to making myself a nicer blog! I’m still poking at it but have ported over all my tutorials and panel writeups.

I can also be found at twitter and mastodon.

nb I very much do NOT recommend github as an alternative to tumblr. Making this blog has been QUITE FIDDLY.

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trans, non binary, gender queer, gender nonconforming inclusivity in video game avatar creation

what would you like to see wrt gender inclusivity in avatar design? Gender inclusivity as it relates to body type? what do game designers have right? What can be improved upon? I want to hear all of it!

Please re-post, comment, etc. many thanks!

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Free Background Music

http://www.rengoku-teien.com/index.html

http://musmus.main.jp/bgm.html

https://maoudamashii.jokersounds.com/music_bgm.html

http://audioatelier.sakura.ne.jp/BGM.html

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Trans Gal Jam 2 is an upcoming game jam for trans women starting this Sunday, June 24th! Here’s some information from the itch.io page:

“Bored of not seeing yourself in media/games? Me too. Well there is one way to fix it. Do it our damn selves.  Let’s create and share stories about people like us, our lives and our identities. The stories need to be heard! Never done a game before but feel like you would like to try? Welcome to the jam, we will help you out!

This jam is born from the combination of us needing representation in media, but also from me finding my passion in making games, and now I really want to show others that, yes, you too can make games if you want! Making a game might feel like a daunting task at first, but just making a tiny short game might be simpler than you though.

The previous jam and the entries can be found here, if you’re curious; https://itch.io/jam/trans-gal-jam

Rules:

If you wish to do a solo project, be a trans woman, transfeminine person, amab non-man or basically any other amab trans/nonbinary person who feels close enough to the trans woman experience and wish to be part of this. If you’re intersex and feel like you can relate to the trans woman identity you’re free to join too!

Projects can be either solo or a team project.

You can’t join alone if you’re afab or cis, if you still want to be part of the jam you need to be in a team with someone who is trans, preferably a friend or a partner or something like that.  Although women and afab nonbinary voices in gamedev are valid and need to be heard, this jam is for the trans girls.

Because gender is a fucking mess and these things aren’t always so simple, in case of you not knowing if you’re eligible to join the jam solo or team, just pop in the discord and ask or optionally message me directly on discord and we can sort it out, but most likely you’re fine to join anyway. :> add me ‘a nadia#6949’ Links directly to the discord server can be found below all this text.

Absolute priority on keeping the jam and the community around it safe and respectful, so everyone can be comfortable. Be mindful of others in the jam and in case of conflicts contact me instead of fighting it out. More specific rules for the discord can be found in the #rules_and_info channel in the discord.

As an optional theme; Make a game with one or more trans women in the game. It could be just the main character or maybe everyone in the game is trans, it’s up to you! It would be good if you have someone, but depending on the game type it isn’t always easy to show a character as trans.

Games are allowed to have heavy themes, but only with appropriate content warnings, so people know what to expect. No blatantly bigoted content with the sole purpose of upsetting people. If a submitted game is making people uncomfortable it may be removed from the jam depending on the circumstances.”

If you’d like to participate, you can find out more here!

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This is a really fun and clever take on Picross/nonograms, I enjoyed all the puzzles.

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Promotion: If you make games and love pastel, have we got a thing for you to take a look at!

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I’m a sighted game dev who’s done a little research into making accessible games. Blind players aren’t my primary audience, but I try to make my games as generally accessible as possible.

Audio Games has a lot of resources, including a forum of blind players who I found happy to check out my game. Unfortunately for me they’re very focussed on fast paced flying/shooting games, so their response to my visual novel was “it seems accessible but also too boring to play for long”, but they didn’t seem to mind me asking.

I used the visual novel making software Renpy, which is screen reader compatible by default. It takes cares of menus etc, so all you have to do is add little extra visual descriptions for any important information not covered in the main text. Here’s a visual novel I made with those added descriptions.

But from the point of view of a blind player, an accessible visual novel is basically just a text adventure, and if you want to make one of those you can just use Twine or Inform7 etc, bearing in mind any specific issues with screenreaders.

For other engines like Unity or Gamemaker as far as I can tell the approach is to output text to the clipboard, which screenreaders can then read. Apparently Skullgirls does this and is pretty audiogamer friendly for a fighting game. I haven’t done this myself but it’s a simple command in Gamemaker, I think you might need to download an accessibility add-on for Unity. You also need to think carefully about sound choice.

Ian Hamilton is an accessibility specialist who tweets a lot about game accessibility in general.

Lost and Hound is an attempt at a commercial audio based RPG specifically designed to be audio player friendly.

hi! do you know any good videogames or games that can be played by yourself while being visually impaired? i’m interested in trying to make a videogame for the visually impaired and blind, but can’t seem to find any good ones to use as a reference.

oof, gaming is one thing I really don’t know very much about, because mainstream games are almost never accessible, and games for the blind are such a small market that they don’t seem to be as fun, so I don’t play much.

The only mainstream game I hear a lot of blind friends talk about playing is Dice World, which I think is part of the iPhone game store thing. Supposedly most of it is pretty accessible, and I think I’ve heard Trivia Crack mentioned a few times, as well.

I know lots of board and card games have accessible versions that can be used by both blind and sighted players, like chess and checkers and Apples to Apples and such. I’m not an expert though.

As for anything else though, I’m afraid I’m coming up dry. I don’t know of any other mainstream games that are universally accessible no matter how much vision you have, from setup to completion, and I don’t know the names of any of the groups that make games specifically for blind people.

Anybody who knows more about blind gaming (again, universally accessible no matter how little vision you have) want to chime in here?