Ashbourne Hall (WIP)

This is the first thing I’ve ever written, so feel free to give me any feedback or suggestions you might have on the writing, the story, or the characters.

Your older brother is only a year and a half years older than you. He was almost done with his second to last year of school at Ashbourne Hall when your mother suddenly died. Having no idea how to educate a proper young Lady, your father sends you to Ashbourne, who has added a girl’s school in recent years. When there’s an attack in the school, you are unable to save the life of your new favorite teacher. Will you be able to uncover the killer while also dealing with the drama that comes from attending a boarding school? And will you find yourself falling in love? (Book 1 of 4. Probably.)

Demo: https://dashingdon.com/play/anna-b/ashbourne-hall/mygame/

Features
  • Gender-locked Female. I wasn’t going to lock in gender, but I think there would be too many variables, given the fact that it’s a pretty realistic historical story

  • 3/4 RO’s with gender choice

  • You can avoid romance, but I don’t recommend it. Romance will be a big part of the story

Historically Accurate?

I want it to be realistic, but I also want people to be comfortable with the setting. And the fact is, not everything from history is great. So, here’s how I’m going to deal with some things

  • The traditional gender roles are still in effect, but there’s no outright sexism in the game

  • You can only marry the opposite sex, but you can have a same-sex romance (to the same extend you can have any romance in this time period)

  • Like Bridgerton, your race doesn’t really affect social or economic standing. Unlike Bridgerton, I don’t have a reason for this

Setting
  • Vaguely Mid-late 1840’s (early Victorian)

  • Start of school year-start of winter break

  • Ashbourne Hall. A country home turned boarding school. The boys learn history, math, science, and literature. The Girls learn history, literature, and the arts

ROs
  • Edmund James (M) Academic and reserved. Chocolate Brown hair and brown eyes. Glasses. Noble family. Kind but doesn’t speak much.
    Trope: Arranged Marriage

  • Oliver/Olive Price (M/F) Outgoing and Athletic. A year older than MC. Black hair and green eyes.
    Trope: Brothers Best Friend.

  • Charles/Charlotte Brown (M/F) Sweet and Shy. Poor family, father works at school. Deep brown hair and hazel eyes. Freckles.
    Trope: Forbidden Romance

  • Alexander/Alexandra White (M/F) Partier but Sincere. Protective. Blond hair and bright blue eyes.
    Trope: Rake in Love

Let me know what you think! I plan on updating whenever I finish a chapter

124 Likes

The first demo is out! Let me know what you think
Demo: https://dashingdon.com/play/anna-b/ashbourne-hall/mygame/

What’s in the update

The demo is basically just the first scene. It took me awhile to figure out the coding.

What’s next!

The rest of the chapter is meeting all the important characters (including the ROs). The plot stuff comes in chapter two

7 Likes

It is fairly short. But I love it already :star_struck:. The premise is interesting you had me at the year :joy: I live stories playing in that time period.

Also I liked the banter with the brother ( I love sibling dinamics. You might want to think about giving the reader more opportunities to react thought since there are always people who refuse to come to the bright side of good sibling relationships :pensive:)

Do we know an of the RO’s already? Or are we going to meet them all for the first time in school.

I will definitely keep an eye out!

3 Likes

Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate it. The next couple of scenes are really RO focused. I’ve given each one a scene to themselves so we can really see their personalities. The MC has met two of them, but I wouldn’t say she knows either of them, though

3 Likes

I’m really excited about the premise! I also am into all of the advertised tropes. :slight_smile: Arranged marriage especially! It’s my favorite.

Are you really attached to only using preset names? I think a lot of people will want to be able to set custom names.

4 Likes

I’m glad you like it! I’m excited about all those tropes too.
I tried using the insert text command, but it didn’t work for me. I’m going to try to figure it out though. I know I like putting in my own name

5 Likes

This sounds really interesting. I haven’t had time to read it yet, but I’m excited about the premise. Arranged marriage is one of my favorite tropes.

4 Likes

When you try and “push past your emotions” while first talking to your father this appears


I don’t know if the screen shot will work but we’ll see

I updated the demo to fix some bugs

https://dashingdon.com/play/anna-b/ashbourne-hall/mygame/

5 Likes

Love the RO tropes and I like what you have so far. First things I noticed though; on the first page of text where your brother asks if you’re alright ‘Quiet’ is capitalized when it should be lower case, and I would suggest on the coding to replace your line breaks with just blank lines. The line breaks aren’t spacing out the words so on mobile it’s a long wall of text, you can correct that by just doing the blank lines or adding an extra *line_break line to actually space them out.

3 Likes

Hey there! Really excited how this will turn out! I just wanted to point out that persuasion and awkward in the stats page are spelt wrong.

3 Likes

I’m not kidding, are you?

This is already fantastic, and I can’t wait for more updates!

The romance-related tropes that are available to us really excite me.

But…I can’t name my mc?! :frowning:

2 Likes

I’m going to try to figure that out for the next update on Saturday. It didn’t work when I first started the project

3 Likes

What issue did you have?

1 Like

For those wondering, I just figured out how to let you pick your own name! So that will be included in Saturday’s update.

12 Likes

I like it so far! The setup seems really cool.

For readability purposes, you may want to add some hard breaks after each paragraph. There are a few punctuation issues, too. If you want any help cleaning them up, I’d be happy to help you!

Can’t wait to see more of it!

5 Likes

you won me over in the “arranged marriage” :heart_eyes_cat:

3 Likes

Oh, no. Arranged marriage and brother’s best friend—I’m in danger. :')

This is always a very good concept. I can’t wait to see how it goes!

Some hard breaks would be appreciated! The closeness of each paragraph makes it hard to focus for most individuals, especially since there’s no indentation capability.

4 Likes

I’m glad you’re into it so far! I’ve added some spaces in the text, so it should be easier to read when I update

The premise sounds cool.

Obvsly there’s not much to judge by yet…

You do need to paragraph thought, it’s confusing when all the text is just bunched up together.