Noblesse Oblige Two Year Retrospective

Once again, posting this for Baron+ tier, like the One-Year Retrospective from last year if you weren't here for that one.

Time is weird. It’s honestly very strange to me that it’s been two years since I did the first big public release of Noblesse. On some level, it feels like less than that, but on another level it feels like it’s been forever that I’ve been working on this. These days, it’s more the latter, but the past year has been kind of a timewarp for me. As I’ve implied at times in my updates, it’s honestly been kind of an awful year for me in terms of IRL stuff. I’m not going to dwell on that because I don’t really like talking about such things (and I admit, I don’t have a lot of respect for people who lean on their problems as an excuse for missing their obligations).

I will say that having the game to work on has been helpful in dealing with it, and having a sense of obligation to keep going for the sake of those who have supported my vision has also made it possible for me to keep going creatively though a period that isn’t so unlike the six years where I got nothing done in some ways. So, I want to thank everyone here for their support and joining me on this journey. It’s one that I have every intention of seeing through to its ending and beyond.

Anyway, onto the game itself. It remains hard, as ever, to estimate exactly how far along on it we are, but we hit the milestone of over a million words as of Chapter 16. That puts us over halfway to reaching the milestone of The Last Sovereign’s wordcount, which was my original inspiration. XD You can also see how it stacks up against a lot of other games here. I would say we’re past the 30% mark for sure now, but it’s hard to be entirely sure. In the end, the only real answer I can give is that “the game will be as long as it needs to be.”

That said, I am cognizant of the problems that can arise with very long games, so let me say now that I don’t, for example, plan to have a ridiculously fanned out final segment; no, ideally as we get closer to the finale, the narrative should pick up speed. That’s a long way off, but long-term planning is something I value a lot. I’ve said this before, but I’m someone who is always writing toward an ending, and I do think that’s one of my strengths. It keeps things coherent and focused. In the more immediate term, there’s a need to be sure we don’t have too much snowballing, which I also have plans to avoid.

For example, I’ve considered, if you have a catastrophic failure on certain checks, that rather than let a doomed save limp on, I’ll likely give some kind of narrative costs to continue but, in exchange for that, give it some boosts so that it’s not hitting a failure cascade. In this way, a failure is still a failure with an unavoidable cost, but the game doesn’t become a series of repeated failures that can’t be escaped from. As a very minor spoiler, while I’d be surprised if anyone here got it, I do think the first potential failure of that magnitude will be coming up pretty soon, so will be interesting to see people’s thoughts on how it plays out.

Anyway, those are just musings; more than anything, the thing I want to express there is that I have a plan for the game in more ways than one, and I’m always thinking about these kinds of issues. There are sort of two kinds of work involved in making something for me. The first is the “actualization work,” which involves actually making the game, writing dialog, designing cutscenes, etc. But the other half is the “thinking work,” which is at least as important.

While actualization work is something that I can just sit down and work on as needed, the thinking work is much more something I have to do in its own time. While I can think through specific problems or issues more deliberately, for the bigger issues, things just come to me as they will. I’ve always been a very inspiration-driven creator, and this is somewhere that thinking ahead as much as I do is very important. Because the thinking work can’t be forced on demand, I really need to be thinking about some things well before we actually get to them.

In that sense, it’s always an interesting experience to actually get to something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. We got to one of the bits that I’ve been waiting for the longest this update, and it was very fulfilling to actually see that realized after eight years. You can probably guess which moment it was if I say that that I’ve had that music waiting in the wings since 2017. XD A lot of the details of the scene have changed over time, as well as the specifics of what it meant, but the essence is something that’s been with me since a certain character wrote her way into the narrative long, long ago.

I do think adjusting plans as they need to be changed is important, on a related note. For all the things I have planned, there are plenty that were emergent and, in some cases, that overwrote my original plans. It’s a careful balancing act when dealing with stuff like that, being sure that the new thing doesn’t screw up everything that I already have planned. Thankfully, I have a very strong innate ability to see how things fit together (or don’t). Honestly, like so much of my writing ability, this isn’t something I could teach someone or even explain—I just do it. In that sense, I’ve always been lucky to have talent, and I know I haven’t always applied that talent as well as I might have in life. My creative works are one of the few places where I have the drive necessary to bring that to bear in full, and it makes me very happy that so many people enjoy the results.

In that sense, looking back from this far along the path, I think the thing that surprises me most is just how diverse an audience the game has. When I set out to make it, my target audience was myself foremost, and I expected it would most strongly attract players who were a lot like me (I say “like me” in terms of how I think, as this is my main measure of what makes people similar or different). In practice, that hasn’t really been the case. I’ve met people with a fascinating array of perspectives on both the game and the world, and I’m very proud of how many different kinds of people have found something worthwhile to them in Noblesse. I’ve also met people and made friends from all across the world, and worked with artists from astoundingly far-flung places. In this sense, it’s been a truly fascinating experience that’s well beyond anything that came before it in my life.

Speaking of art, having the art for the game slowly come into fruition has been very satisfying. Things were a bit slow this year, but we still added some pieces that I’m very fond of. There are also some coming next update that I’m very eager to show everyone. =P When I started Noblesse, all I had was some VXA-generated faces with no expressions and a very crappy title screen I had made myself. By the 2023 release, I had at least some custom art, but it wasn’t anything close to as much as I wanted. So, reaching the point where we have as much as we do now is just very enjoyable for me, and I hope for everyone else. My partnership with Mimo for art has been great for the game and also very enjoyable in terms of how fun it is to work with someone who’s so good at bringing my ideas to life. One day, perhaps, we’ll finish the character art and we can consider making CGs for important moments instead.

Overall, watching this project grow has been very satisfying. I’ve been frustrated at times that it hasn’t grown a little faster but, as in the beginning, this remains something I’m making because I think it’s good. It’s also something that I think sort of stands on its own as new and different, blazing new trails in ways I’m very proud of. So, on the whole, I’m very happy with where Noblesse has gone these past two years, and I have every intention of pressing forward, relentlessly, until we’ve finished it.

Once more, my thanks to everyone for supporting me and walking alongside me on this journey.

PS: I've been told this isn't really a retrospective by traditional standards, and... well, that's not wrong. But mine is not the world that has been, it is the world yet to come. =P