Bildungsroman: Murders in the Sanatorium [NaNoRenO 2022][Mystery][Horror][Historical][Free]

[Improb]

Hey all! I guess I'm always a bit late when it comes to marketing.

I recently released my first Renpy game Demo on itch.io, for NaNoRenO 2022: Bildungsroman: Murders in the Sanatorium.

It is a murder mystery and horror visual novel set in the early 20th century in the Alps. It was inspired by And Then There Were None-styled murder mysteries and the setting of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Basically, characters from a philosophical novel gets slowly killed off one by one.

As of now, the demo includes about 27% of one particular character route story. For the long-term plan, after I finish writing this character’s route, I will go back and write the prologue and then write the two other character routes.


The Story:

The Kingdom of Vheissu. Spring 1906.

Jean-Augustin Amrouche is a 21-year-old French-Algerian consumptive who journeys up to the Alps for a short visit at a sanatorium.

Here, he meets a group of diverse characters, each patient luring him into intoxicating world views atypical of the prewar era.

Amongst the assortment of fellow patients, one respectable German philosopher holds a unique distinction: he has been found dead with a dagger in his back.

Soon, the dream-like atmosphere of the facility will collapse into a nightmare, and one by one, each inhabitant of the sanatorium will decline into a permanent rest. And none of the deaths will be from illness…


The fully planned game will include three character routes for the three main female patients:

Princess Anastasia Konstantina von Lembke: A seemingly delicate Russian noblewoman. If it were not for her tragic illness, she would have continued being a spoiled brat.

Celine Ribeyrolles: A French-Romanian sensationalist journalist. An adventurer, gossiper, tomboy, and overall, very aggravating for a consumptive.

Emilia Balsamo: A stoic, Maltese-Indian statistician. Has a strong, rational, amateur detective’s intuition, but not strong enough for her to see the most obvious of all solutions.


The current demo features:

• 16,000+ words

• First 3 murders

• 9 characters with unique sprites and expressions

• Character Notes and Descriptions

• Blueprints of the Sanatorium

• OpenDyslexic Font option

The Team

Original Logo by Christofer Rademacher

Original Character Sprites by dhk117 and shiroyanya

Written, Developed and Produced by Improb

Special thanks to NEETs Initiative for extra assistance




I will try to continue to post my updates here, on twitter and the devlog page on itch.

If you are interested and you have one hour to spare, come play the demo and let me know your experience with it!


-Improb

[Improb]

A short announcement and a Thank You for 100+ downloads!



Copypasted from the devlog

Hello all, Improb here!

Thank you guys for having me reach 100+ downloads after a little over two weeks! This has been my first visual novel, so it has already been somewhat of an experience.

Within the first week, I have gotten 75 downloads; the majority of which were from those interested in NaNoRenO. However, the numbers began to stagnate when it reached around 90. I didn't realize that the best way to get my game known is to market it before I even start it, and that was a mistake I made. Of course, I had the outline, but I thought that since I didn't have any assets, I wouldn't be able to market it as well. Now that I have done more research, I realized that was my mistake. So after the game jam, I started marketing more, and realized just how tough it was for me to spread awareness of my game. Fortunately, I had many assets finished, so I was able to share them around twitter and garner interest. It was then when my game had finally exceeded 100 downloads on April 16th, 17 days after I first released the game demo, so a little over two weeks. Even then, the fact that I was able to upload a demo and many people have played despite it being my first game makes me genuinely happy.

I have also been promoting my game and/or posting concept art and art assets through gaming and non-gaming discords, twitter, lemmasoft.com and instagram. The most support and responses were from the discords, and even my undergraduate college discord was very interested in my project. I'm still trying to learn to market, since I'm not big on social media to begin with.

As for current and future plans, I am still working on the game. Due to the overwhelming feedback I received, however, I realize there is a lot of work that has yet to be done on my end, and I might have to prioritize fixing up and adding more scenes to the current demo rather than to further the story. Hopefully all of you guys are patient, but I wish to let you know that despite approaching nearly one month, I am still working on the game. There is a lot that is also going on with my life now and the upcoming weeks in addition to marketing and coding the game, such as moving and starting a new job and finishing up my graduate education, but hopefully and eventually these events will balance themselves out and I can continue working on this game as a major hobby.

The 100+ Downloads art is by dhk117. You can check his other art here.

-Improb.

[Improb]

Bildungsroman: Murders in the Sanatorium DEMO 1.1 - Major Update



Copypasted from the devlog

Thank you for supporting the game! Because of the feedback, I updated the demo with new scenes and more choices up to the cliffhanger where we last left off in the morning of the second day in the story, or May 2nd. I have yet to add scenes past that point in the demo, but I am pleased with completing the first draft of all the second day, thus bringing the total word count of the story so far to 43,000+ words in the document and 27,000+ words in the game. The next major update will be adding all scenes up to the end of the second day. The next minor update may be updating and adding new sprites, especially for Cecil and Joseph, who deserve to have more expressions.

What’s new?

• An additional 11,000 words over the nanoreno version, totaling 27,000+ words

• Trial scene in Day 1 or May 1st discussing Professor Leon’s Kaufmann’s murder

• More scenes involving between Cecil and Anastasia

• The alternative scene after choosing the tarot card on the right

• A scene where the protagonist gives his opinion on Leon’s murder

• A lunch scene in Day 1 focusing on Joseph

• The snow-shoveling scene where the protagonist confronts Doctor Adenauer and asks him about the murder

• A dinner scene in Day 1 focusing on Cecil and Anastasia

• A branching route after the protagonist tells Emilia an important clue in Day 2 which ends on a cliffhanger in this demo, and which eventually may or may not lead to a dead end

Fixes

• Corrected grammar and misspellings

• Rewrote scenes with pacing issues

• Cut back on needless prose

• Corrected passages where dialogue was displayed as prose

• Added and redid animations and transitions for the characters and backgrounds

• Increased font size for all fonts

• Changed color of the character name title from red to blue to make it more distinct

• Replaced the music salon background due to the colors meshing poorly with the character sprites

• Created a map menu which shows where the current scene takes place. Used a renpy framework by KigyoDev which can be found here

• Added scrollbar for character profile descriptions to allow player to read the text in any font and to accommodate the new font size

• Added new sprites to the character profile descriptions which changes depending on if the character is alive or dead

• Added placeholder sprites for Joseph to show anger

• Expanded notes section to include murder descriptions which are added after certain scenes

• Replaced several songs which felt unsuitable and added more royalty free music and sound effects

Detailed citations can be found in the readme.txt or credits.txt file.

Thank you so much for playing and thank you so much for the overwhelming feedback!

-Improb