Ultimate Hatstall Adventure
Play the game here!
This visual novel was solely developed by myself. While I’ve done smaller projects like game jams on my own before, with this polished project I wanted to see how well I do on a larger scale project. It took me over a year to produce the game and I learned a lot along the way.
Story
My main motivation was to create a game my friends would enjoy. Since a lot of them like Harry Potter and so do I, I decided to make a fan game. While there are already a lot of “Hogwarts House Tests” available on the internet, most of them are uninteresting, as they focus on the four Houses’ cliché traits. So I started by turning the whole “getting sorted by your best character trait” upside down, making this quiz centred around one’s worst character traits. Since I found a simple quiz rather dull, I embedded the “questions” in a story. Instead of answering one inquiry about one’s self perception after another, the players can immerse in the story and make impactful decisions along the way, ultimately determining the result of the test.
Characters
Matching the focus on bad character traits, I designed four Hogwarts students as the embodiment of the bad traits of their Houses. Throughout the story the player is supposed to dislike every single one of them, making them aware that they will not get sorted into the House they would perform best in, but into the House they would be the worst version of themselves. Besides those original characters I designed, I chose the Sorting Hat as a central character, as it’s the hat’s duty to sort the students into their Houses. While in the Harry Potter story the Sorting Hat barely shows any traits of character, I gave it more depth by turning it into a charismatic, sarcastic narrator. Sitting on the main character’s head, it can read their mind and therefore function as an authorial narrator, even able to break the 4th wall.
Music
Musically I wanted to catch that mystical, yet cheerful and powerful magic feeling John Williams created with his compositions for the first Harry Potter movies. Also the dreamy soundtracks of the EA Harry Potter games by Jeremy Soule were a big inspiration. I composed an orchestral title theme with a main motif repeating in different variations with different instruments. Besides, each Hogwarts House got its own theme. For those I reorchestrated four short pieces of classical music. I added a lot of glockenspiel to all the soundtracks to give them the certain Harry Potter vibe. While I used little to no brass, I used a lot of different strings instead. Each soundtrack got its own flavour by adding a particular woodwind to it: A flute for Hufflepuff, a clarinet for Slytherin, an oboe for Ravenclaw and a bassoon for Gryffindor. Since the game should have a chipper feeling, I chose the classical pieces by how well they fit to the Houses’ best traits, not their worst.
Listen to the Soundtrack here!Programming & Art
As this was a solo project, I also had to programme everything on my own this time. I used the Ren’Py engine, which spared me a lot of trouble as a lot of functions like preparing menus and basic visual novel mechanics are already built into it. So overall programming was easy. Creating the art however gave me a hard time. I started with what I enjoy the most: designing the UI. Testplaying early versions of the game with already fancy textboxes and buttons felt very satisfying. The longest time I spent creating this game I probably used for drawing the sprites and backgrounds, though. While drawing the different sprites was at least giving me some variety and therefore was enjoyable, spending too many hours on a single background image was not. One of the lessons I’ve learned from this project is that I am not a background artist. I had fun doing the video for the background in the main and pause menus though, as that was a collage of different pieces of media I through together to create a fully unique art style. I regret not having pursued this style any further.