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