The Making of A Noble Pursuit: A Postmortem
A Noble Pursuit is a visual novel about a noble girl named Carolina, and her dream of becoming a merchant.
The game was developed over the course of two months for the Winter Visual Novel Jam 2022. I usually tackle game jams with my friends, but this time I wanted to improve my skills, particularly writing.
A month before the jam started, I had already participated in Spooky 2D Jam '22 so I was rather reluctant to join yet another game jam right after.
But thanks to my friend crissNb, who is a brilliant Unity developer, encouraged me to join it nonetheless. And so I did!
Pre-Production
On the 6th of November, I began the pre-production phase of the game, which consisted of writing the draft, and drawing the characters that were going to take place.
Since I am quite new to the world of writing I began to experiment by writing my draft in a screenplay fashion. My initial writing goal was to have around 2.5k words (~15 Minutes of Playtime), but in the middle of November, I had already written 6000 words and had only reached the climax of the game. Props to crissNb for helping me come up with ideas throughout the drafting phase.
Anyways, the writing was going surprisingly well, drawing on the other hand... well let's say I had to redraw certain all characters a few times. More on that in the upcoming part.
Production
A few days before the game jam officially started, I had completed my draft and base character sprites. Things were going terrifyingly well, and spoilers, everything went super well afterward.
Before starting to edit the story I took a week-long break from writing. Meanwhile, I focused on ahem redrawing every character. You might ask "But why?", here's the thing, I managed to improve my art style considerably during the pre-production phase, which led me into hating my previous works. And so, I redrew; Carolina 20 times (I redrew her base 4 times, and had to redraw her 4 unique outfits once more.), Hulderic 3 times, and recolor Alexandra, Ubel, and Benjamin to fit the new art style. Weirdly enough, I did enjoy redrawing, mainly because I had improved so much within a short time frame.
When I finally finished, a week had already passed, which implied it was time for me to take a look at the... awful draft. How in the world does one write such a terrible story? I was discouraged by this, to the point of almost rewriting the draft. But luckily I stumbled upon various posts about how " the first draft sucks" and so on.
With a glimmer of hope I put my trust into the editing process and created a new document. This time I decided to write it Ren'Py format, in order to make the transition into the game script as simple as 'Ctrl+C' and 'Ctrl+V'. And WOW editing really did make the story more interesting and fun to read! But I still needed an extra pair of eyes, and by that I mean the help of Avellox. She helped me by pointing out the mistakes, the areas I could improve, and some additional content.
The editing process took around 2 weeks, and during that time I started redrawing the CG for 'Act 4'. Yes "Redrawing". Before I had redrawn Carolina in a way where her design had changed, I had the CG completed. So I needed to redraw it with her new design. I thought I could get away by drawing over her old design but it didn't look right. So I redrew it completely once more, which had an awful lineart. Remember how I said redrawing characters was fun, this wasn't... I felt frustrated once more feeling inferior about my art. I had to learn more about lineart, and began the search for youtube tutorials. After spending roughly a day learning about lineart, I managed to draw lineart like I never did before, thank you Marc Brunet!
I would explain the process of transitioning my edited script into Ren'Py but like I mentioned before it was easy as copying and pasting.
And so came an end... Wait no, not yet, I still had to draw an extra sketch for the people who buy the 'Art Pack'. The same process happened as the characters, I redrew it a good 6 times. Thankfully it was only the poses I had drawn, so it didn't take a toll on me.
Conclusion
Overall, I am very happy with how the game turned out. While it was a challenge to tackle the game by myself, I am astonished by the improvements in my writing and drawing.
Thank you much for reading my lengthy rambling, and I hope you enjoyed playing this game!