Pride and Prejudice: THE GAME

Tags: posts, from dreamwidth, northanger abbey, pride and prejudice, my games,

I've been pondering the idea of a Pride and Prejudice visual novel for ages but this morning felt especially inspired, so here's my current thoughts. Feedback welcome! To give some idea of what this would look like, here's the visual novel I made of Northanger Abbey. I'd use similar art, music, and backgrounds.

One thing I learned while making Northanger Abbey is that while I enjoy tweaking other people's stories to make them interactive with variations and short alternate endings, I have less enthusiasm for writing entirely original fully plotted paths.

So this wouldn't be a dating sim with multiple LIs. Instead it would mostly follow the plot of the book and always be Elizabeth/Darcy or Elizabeth/Noone. The interactive aspect would mostly be superficial changes like appearance, name(*), and slight variations in dialogue, with a few AUs and Bad Ends etc.

The Bennet/Gardiner and Darcy/de Bourgh/Fitzwilliam families would change to match Elizabeth and Darcy's colouring, which could be anything from "typical pale brunette" to "dark skinned with natural hair" to "purple hair and red eyes" because why not let people have fun. I already have code for a character creator so the only extra effort would be the art.

Darcy and Elizabeth could be fat or wheelchair users, even though this is kinda contradictory of canon, because it's my game and it would make me happy. I'd also try and include some general background diversity where it makes a moderate amount of sense. Maybe Mrs Gardiner is a POC? Colonel Fitzwilliam is missing an arm?

There'd be a note on the character creator explaining all this, and also that, as necessary, all the characters are Suprisingly Woke About POC and Wheelchair Users (especially since self-propelled wheelchairs hadn't been invented yet >.>)

I'd have a choice about whether sexism and homophobia exist. Saying no would let you give Elizabeth and Darcy a variety of genders/pronouns/presentations etc, remove gendered plot elements, genderswap a few minor characters to create background queerness etc. Not sure how I'd handle the entail in this case, probably just have Mr Collins set to inherit for vague Reasons.

I probably wouldn't bother doing a matriarchy version like with Northanger Abbey, it was a fun experiment but a lot of work and I'm not sure many players were into it.

SO. This is the base game. But I would ALSO incorporate other people's canon-compliant AU fic as alternate endings, assuming I could find anyone willing to let me do so. This could include genderswaps, alternate romances etc. The plot of P&P is too affected by heterosexism for me to want to try and write around, say, Elizabeth being a man without either a no-sexism AU or having a fully fleshed out AU story.

I'd like to have a draft of the base game before asking anyone to use their fic, that way they can see what they're getting into and I have a guaranteed playable end product even if nobody agrees. But if you know of anyone who's written P&P fic with an open adaptation policy, or have P&P fic of your own you'd be cool with me using this way, let me know! The only P&P author I could find in Remix Redux Madness 2020 only has one medium-long fic, which is Bingley POV on him and Jane being con artists. Which...could be interesting, actually, but would be odd as the only significant plot variation haha.

(And if you have P&P fic you're not cool with me using this way that is totally understandable. I would be cutting up your baby into weird little pieces!)

The game would be free and creative commons, so people people could create their own alternate versions if they wanted. This would also let me use some of the many creative commons share and share alike classical music pieces out there.

The one thing stopping me from just jumping in is that I'm not sure if it should be in first, second, or third person. Third would require the least editing but first or second is more typical for a visual novel. This would just be for sections that make sense being from Elizabeth's POV, anything where she's not present would be third person.

Northanger Abbey was in second person, but it was playing with the nature of stories in a very meta way, since that's what Austen did. There was a humourous contrast between "you" the main character, "you" the player, and "me" the narrator. Pride and Prejudice doesn't suit that approach so much, though the narration is still fun and worth keeping in some form.

Anyway! I can't guarantee I'll finish this thing but I do think I'm going to start it. Thoughts welcome!

(*)I can see some of you wincing at the thought of changing Elizabeth and Darcy's names but it would be very little effort and some people would LOVE it.