The Ruby Court
In an underworld where the only thing more important than REPUTATION is BLOOD, you are a vampire with a distaste for it. Make connections, kill victims, hide where your tastes don't lie, and perhaps lie to yourself, as you climb your way up THE RUBY COURT.
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The Ruby Court is an interactive fiction game that takes inspiration from 90s and 2000s vampire fiction, with themes about conformity/the queer experience. And blood. Lots of blood.
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FEATURES
- Word count: 12.5K
- 1 hour of gameplay per playthrough
- Build Reputation with the Court, and gain traits in Delusion and Savagery
- Make difficult choices that shape your story
- 6 main different endings
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If you experience any issues or bugs, please contact me.
Note for Mac users: you may need to launch this game through the itch.io app or enable admin permissions to play.
Thank you for your support!
originally made for the QUEER VAMPIRE JAM
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $3.50 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Development log
- Ruby Court v1.1.2 Changes90 days ago
- Ruby Court v1.1.1 BugfixJun 10, 2024
- Extended Demo + Game UpdatesMay 25, 2024
- THE RUBY COURT IS NOW OUT!Apr 12, 2024
- WEEKLY UPDATE #5 + RELEASE DATEMar 22, 2024
- Weekly Update #4Mar 15, 2024
- Weekly Update #3Mar 07, 2024
- Weekly Update #2Feb 29, 2024
Comments
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great. which framework or engine template did you use in Unity for this? was this a precoded framework or you built it from the ground in Unity?
It uses the Fungus plugin for Unity to handle the branching dialogue system (link to the github). Really good open source plugin, however I've noticed the forums have gone down recently.
Saw a tumblr post featuring the title graphic, immediately looked it up, played the demo, bought the full game on the spot. Just finished a first run and loved it.
Quickly pointing out a couple <i>tiny</i> mechanical issues I noticed in the windows version):
-There are a couple times where lines skip automatically, too fast to fully read them, usually shortly after a choice (so i'm guessing it's an issue in the code right after branched variations). In the ending where I got denied entry to the court, the lines about Florence seeing and ignoring me did this.
-Despite the warning about deleting a previous save, i... can't save at all? Not too much of a problem thanks to the short length though.
-Would appreciate an option to read the log, or to scroll back previous messages (esp bc of the skipped lines).
-Is this made in Ren'Py? If so I know it should be possible to do the above and also to quickly skip previously-seen dialogue, which is always appreciated for replayable IF VNs with variations!
That aside: love the game, love the visual style, love the writing style, love the lore, love the hotness and queerness of everything attained without encountering any actually sexual content, loooove the huuugely Felt metaphor and symbolism. My jaw dropped and my heart jumped at the first drink scene.💜🖤🤍💚 This is a small brilliant gem and I'm so happy and off to replay and try to find all the other endings. Thank you so much for making this!!!
Thank you so much! I'm happy that you enjoyed the game <3
The game has an auto-save at the beginning of each chapter, so it's not something you can manually do as the player.
Also, RC was made in Unity using the Fungus plugin which sadly doesn't have a log/an easy way to implement one. I've played some Ren'Py games since, and ooh boy does it have some good in-built features.
If I need to update the game again, I'll make sure to look into that line-skip issue.
Again, thank you for playing and for taking the time to write such a lovely comment!
Hi dev, hope you're having a good day!
I just purchased this game and I own a mac computer, is it possible to play on a mac? I feel a bit silly for not checking before I purchased it, but when I looked up macOS games this came up, but I've downloaded the .exe and it's not starting. I've tried to find the computer requirements and it just keeps saying 'HTML5'. Hope you get back to me soon, I really hope I can play it!
Hello!
I've attempted to make a macOS build of the game (if you re-download the game, there should now be a file called TheRubyCourt_v1.1.1_MacOS available.
Since I don't own a Mac, I have no way of testing it on my end, so please let me know if it works! You may have to enable permissions/admin rights in order to open the game.
Let me know how it goes!
Oh my gosh! Thank you so much you're amazing, I'll give it a go right now. :))
nice
When I start the game (v1.1.1) on Windows 10, clicking the [>] button on the first screen doesn't do anything. From playing the demo above I can see that it's meant to fade to black but I've tried clicking the button and all over the screen without any success. Do you know what the problem might be?
Hello! Thanks for letting me know you've encountered an issue.
Sadly I haven't been able to reproduce it on my end. If you paid for the full version of the game, please send me an email through my website's contact page: https://www.danamckaydesign.com/contact-1
I can either set you up with a special build of the game, or issue you a refund.
I purchased this, but am unable to play because of an error message that reads: "Unable to parse Build/TheRubyCourtWebDemo_v1.1.framework.js.br! This can happen if build compression was enabled but web server hosting the content was misconfigured to not serve the file with HTTP Response Header "Content-Encoding: br" present. Check browser Console and Devtools Network tab to debug."
Any ideas?
Hi there! Sorry to hear you've had an issue.
The build of the game referenced in that error is the web-browser demo, not actually the full game (so the file 'TheRubyCourtWebDemo_v1.1' shouldn't be part of your purchased download).
Below I've posted an image of how the installation process should happen (if it doesn't appear like this for you, please let me know):
If there's still an issue, we can look into it further :)
Thank you for your help. I was able to run the game successfully, however, I continue to run into a bug that makes the game unable to proceed from the point after the vampire is let out of the box at the rave...it starts to overlap text and present options for different choices simultaneously and then goes blank and has nothing to click on...this is very frustrating. I'm on Windows 11 and this bug has happened several times, even after starting the game over from the beginning. Any ideas?
Thank you for pointing this out! I've gone through and found the error. If you re-download the newest version of the game (v1.1.1 available on the itch page) the issue should no longer be present.
This was an absolute blast to play through. Felt more like a sexy queer vampire comic book, I see what you were going for ;)
I enjoyed the game so much I wrote a review on it! Check it out here: https://open.substack.com/pub/beanstalkorigins/p/game-review-the-ruby-court?r=1i...
:,) Thank you so much! It was such a lovely read and it's so gratifying to hear that you really engaged with the story. It's always so hard to tell when you're writing something if you're giving too much away/too little, etc. That you put so much effort and thought not only in playing the game but writing about it, it's very heartening.
And the critique! All very fair points. Sound was something I struggled to implement, so it may be worth it for me to review it if I go back for any bug fixing. Same goes for the ending: it was a hard balance for me to figure out how much to show vs. what the player wants to fill in for themself, but it's good to know that you wanted more rather than less.
Again, ty so much for the review! An absolute pleasure to read.
this is such a great demo! It's short and sweet and hits all the right points <3
Very interesting, and beautiful! It's already been mentioned, but this had that 'seductive but empty' VtM vibe. With the difference being our protagonist's little plot twist~
I'll be honest and say that part of the intrigue for me is that you've listed this as a queer vampire story. I feel like most of the vampire stories I've encountered are predominantly hetero. Which is kind of odd, because vampires have always read to me as having homosexual undertones.
Bringing me to my next question: is the sire's name (Marvella) a reference to Carmilla/ Mircalla, or is it just a coincidence?
I have even more questions, because this short demo has really caught my interest! But I'll leave it at that (for now). Good work/ be proud of your demo. It's very intriguing.
<3
Thank you so much for your comment!
I have.... a confession.. to make. I haven't ever actually played VtM. It's on my list, I swear!
Yeah I'm really excited about the rest of the game getting done, since that's where the queer themes come in stronger. It's not a romance story or really a particularly hopeful one... but I do hope it comes across.
As for Marvella's name, a coincidence in the fact I thought it sounded suitably vampire-y (so probably!)
Again, thank you <3
insanely gorgeous, fills the VtM shaped hole in my heart, short but sweet, art is amazing!
I'm not sure if this is a bug, but when i play in browser everything is fine, but when i download and run it the text seems to be not aligned/overflowing the dialogue box?
incredible work, so stoked to see more!
thank you so much for playing!
and thanks for bringing up the text issue -- I'll take a look at it over the weekend :)
I love this taste (haha) of the game--looking forward to the full version!
Short demo, but certainly gets one's attention!