Hello everyone!
Now that NaNoRenO has officially ended, I figured it'd be the best time to write up a little post mortem about all the work that went into my entry: Madame Ro's Curiosity Quiz!

Inspirations and Ideas

It should come as no surprise that one of the main inspirations for my personality-quiz game is the other main personality-quiz game, Refind Self: The Personality Test Game. The way the game is presented, and how it tracks your stats to give your final results was super fascinating, and I even got direct inspiration for what possible stats I could track for Madame Ro from it.

I also wouldn't have had the idea to make this game for NaNoRenO if it wasn't for Stella creating her Make Visual Novel Quizes Kit, which was a huge help in figuring out the backend and debugging a lot of issues early on.

As for Madame Ro herself, her design overall was the result of a random idea of a "mysterious entity who wants to quiz the player". I decided to take this idea and try making up a concept, and thus Madame Ro was born!

My original mockup sketch before I started NaNoRenO.

The final big inspiration, and the reason for one particular question in the game, is actually Ekkoberry's past few O2A2 games, Hollow Victory and Holonomy! I got really inspired seeing them use the pydraw functions available in Ren'Py for their games, and I decided to start playing around with them. After some noodling to see how it works, I then thought "how hard would it be to randomly generate a shape?", which then spiralled into the thought of "what if I made a Rorschach Test in Ren'Py?"

The Process of Making Madame Ro

Madame Ro is the first game where I made the entire outline and rough script in Obsidian! I've slowly been getting more use out of this program and I'll definitely be using it more in the future!

As I was working on the initial outline, I did some design brainstorming for Ro herself and the setting the game will take place in.

My original brainstorming canvas for Ro's design

The rough script and rough sketches overall took me about 5 days, which was faster than I'm used to, with the thing that took the longest being thinking up the questions. I didn't want all of them to be too similar to what you'd see in other personality quizes ‒ or just be outright copies of them ‒ so I spent a long time thinking them through carefully.

Madame Ro's personality really started to shine through when I started to think up the demon-aligned questions, and it helped me solidify the direction I wanted to do in with the overall "plot" of the game.

When I was thinking up the stats and results I suddenly had the idea to make the images for the results screens my OCs! It was a super self indulgent idea, and it made that part of the process extra fun.

Some of you may have recognized a certain someone from the Daring result (and you can check out her game here:)

As for everyone else, not all of them will have games made for their stories. It'd be nice to, but for now this quaint little cameo in this project is where the most of the attention they'll be getting comes from.

Madame Ro was also the first time I used music and sound effects from Itchio! I'd been neglecting to use the vast amount of resources available on the website, and made it a point to try and use at least a few things for this game. Because of that I found music and sounds that fit really well with the overall vibe of the game, and I'll definitely be using more things from Itchio in future projects!

How I Made the Rorschach Test

Now let me ramble for a bit about the other main feature of Madame Ro: the Rorschach Test.

As I mentioned earlier, I was inspired by how Ekkoberry used the pydraw tools to add in new "assets" for their O2A2 entries without going against the rules of the jam (for reference, the acronym stands for One Of Any Asset). The way they used it for the second game especially caught my eye, and I immediately wanted to noodle with it.

I have a sandbox project in Ren'Py that I use to practice ideas I might want to use in a future project (something I highly recommend everyone do tbh), and in there I was able to learn exactly how this feature worked and just how far I could push it.

Screenshot from my sandbox game, showing the testing grounds for what would become the Madame Ro Rorschach test.

When I took this into Madame Ro I wasn't really happy with how it looked, and I didn't know why. It wasn't until a sudden brainwave when I realized that it wasn't a symetrical image, and decided to tweak the output a bit so that I could make it more like I envisioned.

The result is as you see in the final game, the Rorschach test which the player will always get as the fourth question.

The "apron" that one of my playtesters Glueblade got on their first playthrough.

I'm super happy with how it turned out, and I'm honestly excited to figure out more ways I can play around with the pydraw tools in future games.

Final Thoughts

This was the first NaNoRenO game I completely finished for the jam (my other attemps being in 2017, the sketch demo of what became Battle Live, and my 2024 NaNoRenO game which got cannibalised by the school version of Locked Room on Rails because they were in dev at the same time haha).

I'm really really happy that I finally managed to get one game out for a NaNoRenO, and this makes me confident I can make even more games not just for it, but for other jams as well!

Along with that, my workflow this month was super good! I used a lot of the new project management skills I've learned to really keep myself organized and on schedule, and because of that I even released the game a whole week earlier than expected!

Whether I join NaNoRenO 2026 remains to be seen, but if I do I look forward to what sort of game I'll end up making.

Thank you to everyone who's checked out and shared Madame Ro so far, and I'll see you in the next game!

See ya~!

Sol