My Crème de la Crème retrospective was three years in the making, so I wanted to do a retrospective for Noblesse Oblige sooner! Noblesse Oblige wasn’t part of my original plan, but it turned out to be the best creative decision I could have made.

Starting off

In 2021 – having made less progress than I’d hoped thanks to an intense day job, the pandemic, and life issues – I was about halfway through writing Royal Affairs, the sequel to Crème de la Crème. I tried to keep a level head and be proud of what I’d made so far but it had been an uphill struggle and often involved stops and starts, and after some major overhauling of the plot since the outline, it was hard to see the wood for the trees. I harboured a lot of self-criticism about Royal Affairs and how it hung together, but I kept chipping away at it, hoping that it would be finished soon.

Then in summer 2021 I and most of the others at my day job were laid off. Suddenly I had a lot more time on my hands to work on my projects. In theory. In practice, I spent several months in a horrible mental space, burning out on job applications. (There is a happy ending to this part of the story – I spent 13 months working on King of the Castle, which I loved – it’s out March 2!)

In the middle of all that, my editor at Choice of Games (also the author of Heroes of Myth and Stars Arisen) reached out having seen that I was looking for work and asked if I’d be interested in making a shorter companion game set in the Crème de la Crème universe. This piqued my interest! Royal Affairs felt sprawling and out of my control, and the idea of writing something smaller and self-contained appealed to me a great deal. So I happily said yes.

The other pitches I put forward were more action-orientated, and I think it was the right decision to go for this one which is set in a very restricted environment – it would have been even harder to keep it shorter when accounting for desert adventures or icy voyaging, which were the other ideas I had.

Themes and Mood

I wanted to depart from the lighter tone of Crème de la Crème and Royal Affairs while keeping some thematic threads. It was a chance to explore what a gothic story might look like in this setting. Crème de la Crème and Royal Affairs both have very dark elements but here I wanted to twiddle the “foreboding” and “glamorous” dials and turn the sinister undertones into overtones. Before making Crème de la Crème I wrote Blood Money, a gloriously violent game, and a lot of gloomy interactive fiction. This represented a return to my roots that I didn’t realise I needed, and it felt very natural to do so when Crème de la Crème in particular has a lot of darkness lurking beneath the surface.

I spent some time watching and reading a variety of media when preparing to write. The Jane Eyre connection is clear and deliberate – I briefly considered making the Iravan character romanceable before realising that four love romances was too many – and I watched a couple of different adaptations. Among other things I reread Rebecca and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and watched the Picnic at Hanging Rock series, Stoker, the We Have Always Lived in the Castle movie (I… very much recommend the book rather than that adaptation) and Crimson Peak. The influence of The Secret History shadows the game (as it does, less directly, in a lot of the Crème de la Crème series). I used elements of gothic fiction liberally and was inspired by Stoker’s almost-but-not-quite-supernatural menace.

I knew I wanted the MC to feel adrift in life, that the MC achieved something impressive but then lost it, and for Teteriuk to be both a new horizon and a constraint. The MC is not only a fish out of water, they have also been a fish out of water for years. I loved the contrast between the glamour of Crème de la Crème and Royal Affairs to the faded grandeur of Teteriuk. Also, after having spent a couple of years writing about people in swimwear in hot weather, it was a literal breath of fresh air to write loving descriptions of people in knitwear.

Stats

In Noblesse Oblige the stats are less of a concern than in my other games; rather than an array of secondary stats, the focus is more on the relationship scores. The standard in Choice of Games is to have a percentage bar showing how well you’re getting along with a character, but because I needed more detail, I included more information about the characters’ feelings on the stat page. This also meant more granular accounting for possibilities in which the player may have completely alienated someone. The player characters’s stats are very broad; I used World of Darkness’s Power/Finesse/Resistance structure as a starting point, and started with a selection of personality traits based broadly on the Big 5. I didn’t bother with anything related to language skill or teaching: the character is always skilled enough to have landed the job. Unlike in other games, I didn’t use personality traits in challenges, but instead used them to inform MC’s dialogue lines and behaviour.

I enjoyed the way I used the opposed stats for flavouring the text, and I felt that I had more of a handle on the MC’s personality – while also giving players the opportunity to roleplay and shift their character’s personality without penalising them. I did find that having four unidirectional stats (Drive, Resilience, Insight, and Finesse) were a little broad and it wasn’t always easy to make it clear to players what they were used for in practice. So for my next game, I’m going for a less broad approach with more granularity.

Plot Structure

Because the game was shorter, I was keen to make replays illuminate more aspects of the plot. I did this by having fairly discrete routes for each character, inspired by some visual novel structures where getting close with one character provides a very different experience. I really liked showing different elements from other angles, and I got a lot of feedback saying that players enjoyed the process of discovery. The flipside of this was making sure that a single playthrough would still feel complete and satisfying. It meant a lot of additions later in the writing process – and also relies on players wanting to replay. If they didn’t feel something was complete, why would they go back and try again? Still, it was a different structure than I’d done before, and I liked giving players pretty different sets of information depending on who they’d connected with.

With that in mind, because it was a shorter game I needed to entwine the plot more tightly with the characters rather than having an external plot on top of them. That meant making the major characters more of a direct problem for the MC than in other games I made; Pascha and Rys are directly antagonistic on the other’s route, and their actions can cause a lot of trouble for players on Danelak’s route. Following that, it meant that I wanted to set up characters who had the capability to be antagonistic for various reasons and under some circumstances. That was where I gambled a little: combining characters with some hefty flaws and secrets with a short playthrough time could make players feel rushed or that they just didn’t like the characters at all.

That gamble paid off sometimes, but in other cases not so much. I had wildly differing feedback, from “Pascha/Rys is an awful person and I don’t know why anyone would want to spend time with them” to “I love Pascha/Rys and I don’t want to play the game on another route”. Which is great! I love when characters provide intense feelings for players – but sometimes players were turned off altogether. The lesson I took was not to hold back from making flawed characters, but to give them more room to breathe and for players to get to know them before the characters dive into such intense conversations (I maintain that the Noblesse Oblige characters have good reason to be so intense; but it’s a lot to ask players to buy into).

Gender and Sexuality

This was the first time I released a game where you could input your own pronouns. I was pleased to have done it and I recommend that other ChoiceScript authors give it a go.

As with my other CoG games, Jezhan is a queernormative society without gender or sexuality-based discrimination. People do all manner of other horrible things but not that. The society in Jezhan has legal marriages for more than two people, and I did some thinking behind the scenes about how that affects culture; not a lot of that ended up onscreen, but I liked showing a few families outside the nuclear-family structure.

Relationship-wise, I went into a bit more depth with MCs talking about asexuality and aromanticism with characters. I also allowed more flexibility for MCs to express that they want a connection with less physical and/or romantic intensity – I mostly implemented it for grey-ace and/or grey-aro MCs, but allosexual and alloromantic MCs can use it too – and I enjoyed showing different nuances in how characters behave based on what the MC has said on that subject.

The cutting room and additions

As with Crème de la Crème, there wasn’t much fully-written text that got cut. I did plan some large branching scenes in Chapter 5 during the storm section, but they would have bulked things out far too much. I also originally planned more interactions on the beach in Chapter 6, but it slowed down the pace and I wanted to keep tension high. Something I would also have liked to do but couldn’t quite work out where to put it was more discussion about the MC’s university situation.

Mostly, though, I made additions, especially in the final chapter. There was also a lot of adding to earlier chapters to get to know characters before asking players whether they want to start romances, and expanding the MC’s earlier life and connections with their family. The other major thing was adding different ways to navigate the later-game plot, allowing players more chances to betray people, change their mind, shift plans, and so on. Because of the short length of the game, it was extra important for the final chapter to round things off, and to allow flexibility in handling the game events.

Discussion and reception

The game attracted some discussion during writing, though not as much as Crème de la Crème and Royal Affairs. It was lovely to hear people’s thoughts on it and see how excited they were about exploring a different part of the world!

During beta I was really fascinated at how many testers hadn’t played Crème de la Crème and weren’t sure about the setting. It was great because when drafting, I’d assumed that most people would have played it so I didn’t go into a lot of detail on some things – so it really pushed me to describe Westerlin and the MC’s place in it in more depth, which made the game a lot richer. The descriptions of the MC’s parents’ home, and their life situation, came out of that. I remain interested in whether people playing Noblesse Oblige have played Crème de la Crème, and vice versa.

Noblesse Oblige sometimes gets compared unfavourably to CdlC thanks to its smaller scope. That doesn’t alarm me too much: if players want more time in a game that’s a good thing, Noblesse Oblige was always framed as a novella to CdlC’s novel, and it would be a very different game if it was longer. That said, the process of making it and seeing its reception helped me develop my pacing skills and I understand better how elements other than wordcount make a game feel longer or shorter for players.

I wasn’t sure what to expect in the first few months after Noblesse Oblige was released. It’s a shorter game, even though it’s a similar length to a lot of popular older CoG games; it departs from the school setting that was so popular in CdlC; the themes and mood are very different, and in some ways have more in common with Blood Money; the characters are more heavily flawed. It’s also free to play, and by the time the release date came around, I pretty much convinced myself that everyone would play for free or not play at all.

Delightfully, that didn’t turn out to be true. Although it hasn’t been as commercially successful as Creme de la Creme – which, realistically, would have been silly to expect – it’s sold far better than I hoped, and I’m immensely grateful for that. The feedback I had during beta testing helped me improve it hugely, and I’m certain that without it, it wouldn’t have sold as well as it has.

But at the same time, it mattered less to me how it sold. In a very real way it helped me fall back in love with writing and this setting. Royal Affairs wouldn’t be as good as it is, and also wouldn’t have come out any earlier, if I hadn’t taken time to make Noblesse Oblige. I’d lost touch with what I wanted to write about – and digging into that for this project, making something smaller and more manageable, completing a first draft in nine months rather than years, was exactly what I needed. It helped me recover creative joy amid tumultuous world and personal events and burnout, and for that reason Noblesse Oblige will always be close to my heart.