October Q&A Post

Good morning all!

Here's your link to the anonymous exclusive Q&A form! I will answer about spoilers, NSFW stuff if it's not super graphic, lore, character stuff, and mostly anything you want to know.

I'll answer comments too, and will answer questions asked through the form in this post so keep an eye out!

What kind of royal hierarchy for royalty is there: like Medieval, European, Arabic, South East Asian, religiously based?

For Westerlin and Zaledo, it's based on the family, with the eldest child traditionally inheriting the throne. There will have been succession struggles between families for the throne in earlier years, but that would be in the distant past. For Jezhan, it is again hereditary (and again there will have been disputes and wars over it many centuries ago) but the monarch's right to be in charge is seen to be awarded by the gods. While not everyone believes this absolutely literally, the monarch is also the head of the Church of Jezhan; this was part of why the Teranese Revolution took place.

Will you explore historical periods of the Creme de la Creme world in future projects, as in having the story set in the past?

It's something I've considered! I haven't got any concrete plans at the moment but I've occasionally considered ideas for a game set the generation before Creme de la Creme, possibly involving some of the Creme or Archambault teachers, or the Creme/Archambault parents, at younger ages. There's also doing something set in the more distant past which I like the idea of too. It's just a case of coming up with the right idea... at the moment I have a lot of concepts that I could do so there's a lot to choose from!

In Creme De La Creme, our MC's family is described as having fallen on  some harder times, and that they live in the Hass District. How bad is their situation, exactly? Obviously there's a fair bit of pressure on MC  to "do well for themselves and family", but are they still considered  upper class before CDLC?

They're upper-class, but not titled aristocrats, so there was a significant gap between them and the families of the Archambault students. They had a very large, nice house in Fenburg similar to the one Blaise used to live in, and would have been landlords of property elsewhere too. Where the PC grew up is a little nebulous because it can vary by player choice, but they likely had a small country estate as well (though not as big as the ones other wealthier characters have, such as the Hartmanns). I see them as similar to the Dashwood family in Sense and Sensibility, though they aren't in as tough a spot as the S&S protagonists. When they sink in their fortunes, they still have enough cash on hand for a decently sized apartment, albeit in a less nice part of town, a servant (though only one!!), and the cost of sending their child to Gallatin, so they're by no means destitute and they're well-to-do compared to Freddie's family, and very much richer than Karson's and the Noblesse Oblige PC's family. Part of the "you need to do well" is to marry well and get more money, but the huge other element is recovering the reputation so they can move in the social circles they used to once more.

Also, how rich is the average Westerlin citizen? What jobs do most of the populace do?

This is a bit of a vague one for me. Very broadly, Westerlin's class structure is similar to that in 1920s/1930s England, but there was no World War I to have made sweeping societal changes. The social circles in Creme de la Creme and Royal Affairs are very small compared to the wider population.

There has been something analogous to the Industrial Revolution some decades before Creme de la Creme so there are factories, steam trains, buses and cars, and associated workers. Farming has shifted towards more machine use so some agricultural jobs have changed and been lost, and there have been moves from rural to metropolitan. There are a lot of retail and service workers, white-collar workers, and teachers in non-fee-paying schools as well as the lavish private schools. Wealth-wise, there are very sharp divides in Westerlin; although there is a governmental safety-net for people in need, it's not huge or particularly well-run and there is a cultural sense that people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps/have a stiff upper lip, etc.

This bears some contrasts with Zaledo, which has much more of a social safety net and class divisions are less marked (though still existent), Jezhan, which is slowly moving away from aristocrats holding the majority of power thanks to an explosion of wealth in the middle classes, and there is greater mismatching of wealth and class lines, and Teran, which has a very robust government-run safety net and considers itself highly meritocratic... except when it isn't.

What made you decide on setting your games in a less technologically advanced world, as opposed to something more "modern day technology"? I do love this choice though! It just seems to fit the narrative well.

For Blood Money I considered setting it in a cyberpunk-ish world at first, but decided I wanted to go for something more fantasy-flavoured with less tech development. It helped that i'd been watching The Borgias series at the time! For the Creme de la Creme series, the inspiration I drew from initially was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which is set in the 1930s, and Malory Towers, which was published in the 1940s. I wanted a setting that felt recognisable with that sort of technology/atmosphere but which deviates in a bunch of ways such as being friendlier to queer people than the real world. I also enjoy the feeling of being "in-between" technological revolutions, with things like horse-drawn cabs being very common along with trams and trains. In further years, the horses and carriages will likely become less common.

Have you ever thought about writing non interactive fiction (like a book or short stories for example) professionally?

I used to write novels with the eventual aim of sending them to agents, but I never quite got them in good enough shape to want to publish them - I needed more writing experience. Making short games, and then long ones, really helped me better understand structure in particular. In general I prefer writing games at the moment, and most of my creative ideas are game-related as I'm quite deeply in that mindset... but there are, I admit, a couple of game ideas I had when I was coming up with Honor Bound where I went "actually, that would work better as a novel". It's a very different skillset, though, and it feels a little intimidating!

When you first start writing, do you usually program/write the variables like pronouns as you go? Or do you write it one way, then go back and add in the pronoun variable (I noticed in your sneak peeks that you have the pronouns typed as a choicescript variable or something).

I include all the variables as I write - it's much easier that way. A lot of the pronoun typos that folks kindly spot are because of me inadvertently writing "they" rather than ${mat_they}  or "says" rather than "@{javi_singular says|say} and it would be a lot of effort - and there would be more mistakes if I went back to put all the variables in. This is similar code to the way I did it in Creme de la Creme, Noblesse Oblige, and Royal Affairs. The details of it are different and more streamlined for Honor Bound - I plan to put up another version for people to use if they want, because I find it better.