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You are giving Disney way too much credit. And probably too much attention as well. Disney does not have the bravery to create trends, they follow them once they are deemed profitable enough. If you ever see Disney doing something progressive it is not because they genuinely support it, it is because it has become a better way to make money. Thus it means that trend is already established by other people who were more brave and less greedy than them. These should receive praise and attention, not Disney.

I don't know much about Disney's agenda (I just keep hearing they're evil, mostly from youtube critics), but you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. However power-hungry they may be, they still employ some genuinely talented, creative people. I loved The Lion King as a kid and I think they took some risks with that one, the death scene especially. I still have a soft spot for it, it's one of the things that got me into animation. Also Aladdin by the way, especially the platformer based on it - I would constantly pause it to see each animation frame .

That's a great point, though I also think the need of many animators to make all main female characters pretty plays a role too, similar to how an animated guy supposed to be an "everyman" will be drawn to look different than a typical Disney prince, but animated girls and women meant to be regular people still look like typical Disney princesses, to the point even female animals will share the same facial shape as the princesses.

Yeah, I try to vary the types of women I draw and steer clear of blatant stereotypes, but it's true that I also have the tendency to make men more goofy and heavily caricatured, while women are more often at least *somewhat* pretty. It's something I'm happy to avoid though (note to self: make more ugly, silly-looking women ). I wonder if female artists also do this - it seems to me that they do.

What you're talking about is particularly noticeable in The Animator's Survival Kit. If anyone hasn't got it, it's a marvellous and incredibly useful guide to character animation by Richard Williams (the animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit).

Thanks for the tip, might check out the book - I think I've used some online images taken from it as a reference for walkcycles.

As a contrast, too many animated comedies has female characters that are nothing but crude fanservice, but tries to pretend it's parody, pretty much Poe's Law in action.

This is just an irrelevant nitpick, but isn't Poe's Law supposed to be about misunderstanding genuine parody?

Is there an image missing in your reply?

I see all of them... it's supposed to be Rescue Rangers, Spaceship Sagittarius, Ninja Turtles, Smurfs.

Plus I've noted a visual theme of when it's anthropomorphic animals, the girl will often look way more like a pretty human than her male compatriots, human hair, more of a white human skin tone, and a more human-shaped face in general.

I suppose that's because the man being the default, it's somewhat asexual. When you then want to build on that default to make it more feminine, there are no "masculine" features to remove... you just add "feminine" ones, making it look more like a human woman.

I didn't respond to this some time back, and maybe it could bring it back to the original topic:

I think many people have a blind spot on this because society treats men as the default in lots of situations, for example, an all-female cast with only one token guy in a film or book is exceptionally rare,
but stories with an all-male cast and just one woman are a dime a dozen and not treated as weird.

Well, yeah :/. These are some shows I liked as a kid:



And of course this :


The unfortunate consequence of this is that when you make a male character, he's just that: an individual character. But a female character is seen as a representation of women in general.

At the risk of kindling an inflammatory subject -

Sorry, everyone.

I quite agree. For instance, outside rare forms of cases involving violent crime, I see no situation where a man could, for example, will their partner to terminate an unborn child against the mothers wishes. However, for the sake of equality in the eyes of the law, I think there are some cases where that right to terminate, if the father opposes it and there was no crime involved, should be restricted until there is a mutual agreement or there is a natural solution to the matter.

Wait a minute, are we talking about effectively forcing a woman to carry a child to term against her will? Because that's pretty much what I meant by "inhumane consequences".

How are equal rights between parents incompatible with egalitarianism? As there is a continued and increasing push to turn the process of raising children into an equal effort in order to free women from that particular burden and give them a fully equal footing in life, it seems to me that this should extend to all parts of a child's life.

At the risk of kindling an inflammatory subject - I can't think of any real-life situation where a man's claim to an unborn child overruling a woman's wouldn't lead to inhumane consequences. It's true that some men can develop an emotional connection to an unborn child and suffer from the loss, and women should be aware of this when making a decision. But it must be their decision.

Congrats, looks (and sounds) amazing!

This discussion reminds me of this article, citing a study showing that if there are 17 percent women in a crowd, the men in the audience think it’s 50 â€" 50, and if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.

In my field and social bubble, it's genuinely about 60 - 70% women. Most of my teachers have been women, most of my bosses have been women, some of the smartest people and worst sociopathic assholes - all women. The majority of anti-feminist rhetoric I've heard has come from women. So I hope you'll understand if I don't exactly see oppression on every corner in my day to day life.

I don't understand the issue, unless we believe that men have written better books than women, and that equal representation would mean replacing good books with worse books. Which, I think, is what people are actually afraid of.

My issue was choosing books based on anything else than their actual content. I can't fully speak for my biased subconscious, but I like to think I would be saying the same if the imbalance was reversed. I'd find it weird if I was given a book to read because it was written by a man, or denied a book because it was written by a woman - as if having a Y chromosome was some unique quality with intrinsic worth.

But I realize that's not the full picture. The imbalance seems to be bigger than I imagined, I'll be the first to agree that seeing the world through many different sets of eyes is important, and it's true that there are other arbitrary criteria which I take for granted (nationality). A quick google search gave me this: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/206631137.pdf, I'll probably check it out sooner or later. I'm in a place where I could easily be swayed to your side.

Well, the problem is that people already are favoring men because of their gender, not consciously, but if somebody is setting up a school curriculum meant to represent a wide selection of perspectives, and all of them are male authors,
that is a bias in favour of men. And it's not like I'm suggesting we should replace great male authors with any female hack writing harlequin novels, you'd still have to choose female authors based on their talent in writing, having gender equality
in the school curriculum would merely mean replacing an proabably unintended bias with awareness and actively working to give students a chance to read a fair amount from both halves of the population instead of just one.

This looks like a whole new can of worms I'm not sure I want to get into (mostly because I haven't made up my mind - I can see your perspective but I'm not as convinced of it), but at least it seems we can agree on the core concern. You're not saying books should be picked based on the author's gender (maybe with some exceptions where it's directly relevant to the content), you believe that it's already happening and want to correct that. Do I get it?

[roughly 129 million books]

I feel like we're re-treading the argument Blondbraid linked to about "banning" books, but I honestly find this baffling. Curriculums are limited by necessity, so anyone advocating for any book is calling for that book to be studied at the expense of roughly 129 million books. It's bizarre and wrong to compare it to banning books. The standard conservative stance seems to be that a highly selective reading list is perfectly acceptable - unless someone suggests an addition - at which point a selective reading list becomes an unconscionable Orwellian nightmare.

This wasn't about anyone suggesting a book, it was about (hypothetically) judging and selecting all books based on the gender of their author, and I tried to explain why I think that's a bad idea. Let's not dwell on the hyperbole - I already conceded nobody is banning books and I'm not "outraged".

How is it that? I don't get it.
Putting one book on the school curriculum instead of another book is not the same thing as banning a book and actively preventing people from reading it. It's already been discussed in this thread.

Well, I may have overstated that a little bit . You are not suggesting banning books, you are just actively discouraging children from reading some of them.

There are many different perspectives books offer. Historical, cultural, political, philosophical, psychological. Authors have unique, individual personalities and insights, and only fragments of those may be, sometimes, influenced by gender. Maybe I was a bit harsh and fast to judge, but it sounded to me as if you wanted to lump all of that into male books and female books. Why would you elevate the gender of the author above other qualities and categories? Above the actual content of the books?

Sure, gendered perspective is one of the aspects people should consider when composing curriculums - reading is very likely one of the ways we learn empathy after all, and seeing the world through the eyes of the opposite gender is definitely useful for children. As are countless other outlooks and ideas and stories that have nothing to do with the gender of the protagonist(s), let alone the author.

[Critique isn't censorship.]

I personally think culture would benefit from ... school curriculums requiring students to read books of an equal number of male and female authors...

Also: Critique isn't censorship. Stop treating people criticizing bad writing as equal to a book ban.

Your suggestion is, in effect, pretty much equal to a book ban.

I think this paragraph should be required reading for every man trying to write a female love interest

Funnily enough I watched Gone Girl very recently (great movie), and this scene / passage from the book just confused me.

What is its purpose? I understand that the monologue has become iconic for some feminists (see here and here).

But to my mind it is just the words of a character in a novel (an extraordinarily evil and vengeful character). This interview with Flynn in The Guardian suggests to me the evilness of Amy was the primary feminist motivation of the book. Flynn says that feminism is 'also the ability to have women who are bad characters… the one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing'.

For me, the 'Cool Girl' monologue is owned entirely by Amy's character, and it certainly does not reveal any real-life wisdom on how 'men' actually think, or how 'women' perceive they should be. Flynn's 'lurid plots make no claim to social realism: to interpret her evil female characters as somehow representative of their real-life gender, you must willfully overlook hundreds of pages of other people and events that you'd almost certainly never encounter in reality, either.'

My thoughts exactly! I was lazy to look up if the monologue was Flynn using the character to channel her own thoughts or if it was her writing in-character as a cynical sociopath. Probably a bit of both. In any case, I really like her view that challenging stereotypes means writing atypical female characters all across the personality spectrum.

I'm also confused by how the "cool girl" trope can be interpreted as sexist. I can read it uncharitably as a self-serving fantasy of guys who expect a woman to cater to their selfish needs without having needs of her own. I can also read it charitably as wanting a partner who shares your hobbies and interests. I can even read it as a statement that a woman acting masculine (eating chili hot dogs, playing videogames) is cool. I don't think any of this is gendered - women have shallow and selfish fantasies too, and they also create tropes which frame partners as service-providers rather than real human beings. It's a general human tendency that's hardly exclusive to relationships and gender. It's dumb, but I'm failing to see the sexism in it.

Don't beat yourself up too much, I haven't done a non-Mags game since 2018, and I still haven't found the energy to restart something more ambitious yet. I think the most important thing to try to do is to find a small sub-task to start with to get back to contributing to the bigger stuff, though I'm not exactly following my own advice right now... 

Thanks! The dilemma is, continue working on the thing I've already spent three years on for potentially many more years and lose all that time in which I could be actually publishing smaller games, or start something new and risk I'll never return to the big thing and those three years (and the story I want to see told) will be wasted. My brain's solution: do nothing .

I think the problem you have here is the reluctance to delegate

The desire for the final product to be my baby is definitely a big part of it, but delegating also takes time and a different kind of effort. The ability to sketch an animation, immediately test it in the game, adjust it 10 times and get 10 new ideas in the process is priceless, and doing all that over e-mail takes a lot of time (and makes you look like a horrible control freak). But yeah, sooner or later, I will have to get more people on board - I just have to finish a significant chunk of the game first to have some sort of template for the rest of it.

One thing that changed me were game jams. I had a bit of spare time in 2020 and took part to two 14-day game jams, and I found out that my main problem was that I was too focused on making something "perfect". With the time limitation of a game jam, I had to make compromises with myself and accept that what I was doing was "good enough", and in the end, I'm pretty proud of the games I published.

I second that, AdvXJam helped me finally push a game out and it felt really good at first... but in a weird way, it's backfiring now. Seeing how forgiving low-res can be and how it's actually possible to finish a game if you set reasonable goals, I've been having trouble returning to the endless, impossible, stupid overreach my bigger game seems to be compared to that. I still have plenty of extra time on my hands thanks to covid, but I haven't really touched Truth be Trolled since Christmas, and the procrastination guilt is piling up :/.

I nominated you for that because I saw a few interesting things, like the zoom out, or the shading of the character fading nicely when he goes up and down the elevator (it might just be a semi-transparent black overlay, but nevermind, the illusion worked).

Thanks! Glad people notice things like that. The elevator shading was just a bunch of regions with progressively lighter light levels, but yeah, come to think of it, the camera effects were a bit of a pain .

Wow, thanks for downloading the game!

Spoiler

You can enter the three passages by using the hand/interact icon on them. I've been a bit inconsistent with the doors in the game, because sometimes you have use the hand icon and other times you can just walk through them. Definitely gonna avoid that in the future.  Hope this solves the problem!

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Ah, got it, thanks!

Congrats on releasing your first AGS game! I like the surreal atmosphere, imaginative art and ambience. I got stuck quite early on though and I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or it's a bug:

Spoiler

I went all the way to the right and didn't have oars to use the boat. When I tried to go back, in the room with the fountain, I couldn't enter the passage I came through. I restarted the game and tried leaving the first screen to the left, but there also seems to be no exit. Am I missing some hidden exits or are the exit hotspots not working properly?

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