Rem Diary 7/20/2025

Oh man it's already been a week! This feeling, I kinda miss it and also don't miss it hah.

So first, not yet a Progress Report yet, more on that in a bit!

Second, if you checked out my Twitter or Discord twitter channel, the MouseUnit Karryn's Prison figurine arrived this week!!!! I finally have a KP merchandise 🥹

Just a heads up for anyone whose figurine is arriving, as you may or may not know, there is a sticker sheet of pubes that you can stick onto the figurine. However these are not neatly cut out stickers that you might remember from your youth. It's not cut very well in that you can't just peel it off with your finger. I recommend cutting out the area of the sticker sheet with a scissor for the pubes that you want to stick on, and try peeling it from there. If it doesn't work, cut a little closer. You might want to practice first on one the pubes that you don't care for.

With that out of the way, Amelya stuff! I've read all y'all comments and stuff. I would like to address just a few concerns.

First is the how perfect Happy Ending thing I mentioned last week that caused a lot of confusion. Happy Ending in this context, is the same type of Happy End that is in Meltys Quest and Karryn's Prison, aka slutting up the whole place with everyone. That is what I meant by not being able to hit the Happy End aka the slut ending without cheating.

Another concern is whether or not Amelya's boyfriend will have the cuck trope of having a small dick and such. No, I expressly said that I do not want it to be that type of ntr/cuck fantasy, and while I'm leaving most of the details of the sex and characters to Sachinama, Sachinama also agreed with me on this point and said that he didn't want to use that trope in the first place.

The finally concern I want to address is the time limit system, and here is where the rest of the Rem Diary is gonna get a bit rambling? and unstructured.

So Sachinama wanted a time system similar to Persona because he really liked Persona, which he played and binged all of 3, 4, 5, AND Metaphor earlier this year. Since it is Sachinama's wishes, there will be a time system in this game. However, I disliked the Persona/Metaphor time system and don't think that it is a very well thought out system. Yet I also intend to make my time system a much harsher one than Persona's.

The reason why I don't think Persona's time system is very good, is because the experiences of someone good at the game and someone bad at the game is too extreme. And being good or bad just means being able to beat the chapter dungeon is one or two days so that you have the rest of the chapter to do all your bonds and stuff. But if someone took like let's say an average of five days or more to clear each chapter, they won't come close to being able to finish and see all the bond and content.

Yet, the process of clearing a chapter in one or two day is extremely tedious resource management where you have to be super conservative and either use a guide to find enemy weaknesses or just reloading when you try checking every element and end up finding the right one to cast after manually going through all the other elements and wasting a ton of resources.

In Metaphor they made it a lot more lenient in that you can still easily see all the content if you take four days to clear a chapter.

But then what's the whole fucking point of the time system. Sachinama says the time system helps create tension and decisions. I agree, which is why mine is going to be harsher.

A flaw of the Persona system is that if you spent seven days on the chapter dungeon instead of two days, that's five days wasted not progressing on your bonds and side content. For our game, it doesn't matter because whether or not you took two days or seven days to get the ingredients needed to complete the recipe for the chapter, those days that you spent not finding the ingredients to complete the chapter recipe, are ingredients that can be used to complete bonds and self upgrades and everything else. There are no wasted days in the sense of five extra days spent in chapter dungeon is five days not progressing on anything else at the same time.

Now, onto the harsher part that I intend. I have done a bit of debate within myself about whether or not this is a good choice. The choice being that the player will need multiple playthroughs to experience everything because there is not enough time in a single playthrough to finish everything.

On one hand, someone who plans to or is going to do only one playthrough and move on, may be upset that they couldn't finish everything.

On the other fucking hand, they weren't going to do more than one playthrough anyway. If I cater to them, everyone else's experience suffer for it. Either a single playthrough will take a ton of time, or the system and content is shallow enough to experience everything in a timely manner in one and just one playthrough.

I think it's okay if you don't see everything in one playthrough. Like let's take Hades. Putting aside that it's a roguelike (or roguelite or whatever the word is) and is meant to be played multiple times. You can't see all the combos and synergy and NPC events in a single playthrough. Or even in more than a few playthroughs. But you don't need to see everything to have a good time even though you know you haven't seen everything. Sachinama certainly didn't before he put the game down although he enjoyed what he saw. I got further than Sachinama but I also didn't see everything the game had to offer and I had a good time.

My favorite favorite eroge of all time, Rance X, is a game that you can NOT see everything in the first playthrough. It's just impossible. In fact most people would naturally reach a bad ending on their first playthrough which would give them a reason to try again. But even if you hit a time consuming good-ish ending on your first playthrough and stop playing there, I think it would've been a good time.

And because it's harsh, and because there are different options and choices and decisions that could've been made that without having chose them yet, you can tell it would've provided a different experience.

THAT is the tension I want. It will be a different tension compared to Karryn's Prison because in KP there is no explicit time limit, just an implicit time limit that the player didn't realize or sign up for that changes depending on their actions. Which makes it harder to intuit what's going on compared to an explicit time limit.

Anyway, that is my stance on the time limit stuff. As for this week, I made very little technical progress. Sorry, it's super boring coding up a Settings menu!!!! I sure wished there was a MZ version of Yanfly plugins!! But I did finally manage to get it displaying after working on it very infrequently throughout the week and then for another hour right before I started typing out this Rem Diary. For the remainder of what I had been up to for Project Amelya this week, it's mostly has been on and off brainstorming as ideas and sparks come to my head.

But I do feel the brainstorming is progressing. It's like a statue carver working on an unpolished slab of marble or log of wood, slowly cutting it up. That's the image in my head right now as the ideas keep honing down the concepts and systems in my head by expanding on them.

Last night there was a ton of progress, unfortunately it came at my sleep because I went to bed and started thinking and then ideas came to my head. So before I lose them, I quickly got out of bed and jotted them down onto my notes. And when I went back to bed and try to sleep, more ideas came and I quickly got up to write them down before I lose them. This kept happening last night for over an hour until I was like, okay, this is fucked. I'm just going to eat some cereal and stay up and keep brainstorming until I tire out. I didn't climb back into my bed until the sky started brightening.

So one of the thing that I already decided to change, is how the flow of the card play would've been. Originally, I planned for something like very small decks and around 3 card draw per turn for the Combat and Resource (formerly known as Gathering Deck last week but I like a suggestion made in Discord to call it Resource instead so for now that's what I'm calling it) Decks and 2 card draw per turn for the Trap Deck.

But then I worry about a couple of things.

One, it's super on the mercy of RNG (which is why I planned for small decks in the first place and why I would be hoping the player intuits to keep the deck small by carefully choosing which clothing piece to wear).

Two, by having such a system where unlike the Slay the Spire-like games, the player can add or remove cards just changing their gear so what I fear with a focus on small decks is that playthroughs end up samey.

And so I end up re-learning and realizing why bigger decks with bad cards to start out with are better for gameplay after stimulating in my head how my original idea would've played out. I think still sticking with 3 card draw for Resource Deck and 2 card draw for Trap Deck is good for what I plan to do with them, but I'm definitely thinking 5 card draw for the Combat Deck. Trap encounters are basically a coin flip except you can manipulate the faces of the coin to be more in your favor with hopefully both sides being heads so to speak. And I want Combat encounters and Resource encounters to feel different with different puzzles to work out.

And then there are a bunch of other ideas that I've been using to shape that slab of marble in my head. One of such is that originally, I did not intend for the health type resource (The resource where if it goes to zero you fail the encounter) and the mana type resource (The resource you use to play most cards) to regen between turns or encounters. Now health not regening is standard for Slay the Spire-likes, but mana has always been something you can spend to your limit every turn. But because that is the case, it's also very small initially. I thought about it, but especially now that I'm changing the Combat deck to be draw 5 cards each turn, I don't want the mana pool to be completely no regen. That would be similar to the Persona situation where it just becomes a tedious game of resource preservation and trying to get by while spending as little as possible. While that also can be fun in a way, it's maybe not what I'm trying to stress too hard here. You drew a bunch of card but only play one. That's not very exciting.

So I want to try something else. What I decided is that there is both a mana pool that doesn't regen between turns, AND a very very small mana pool that does refill every turn. I'm thinking of calling it 'Free Mana', specifically 2 Free Mana per turn to spend as you wish, and then once your Free Mana is spent, you start dipping into your reserve mana pool that doesn't regen.

The thing is in Slay the Spire-likes, health really is a resource in that as long as you have more than zero, it's okay to sacrifice some. But Slay the Spire-likes tend to have anyhere from 12 to 18ish encounters as one whole playthrough, so you it's more of a last resort to spend your health. But for Project Amelya there is going to be like a set of six-ish encounters per Field Trip, so it's more of a game of chicken of sacrificing some health resource to preserve your mana resource. There's tension there of deciding turn by turn how much damage to let through and to either save those Reserve Mana or spend it to end the encounter faster.

Another idea I'm planning to implement is the concept of an Ultimate. An ability that doesn't cost your usual resources but instead is charged up during the encounter and can be played for free anytime once it's charged. The Touhou Slay the Spire game that I played I think either earlier this year or late last year had it and I thought it was a wonderful iteration on the genre. I don't really remember when because the whole AI porn addiction period warped my sense of time pretty badly. Speaking of which, still getting those urges every day but I've managed to be two weeks clean now.

There's still a ton of ideas and systems and concepts that I haven't gone over yet, as well as some brainstorming struggle and current walls for certain systems that I haven't fully figured out yet, but I think this week's post has been plenty meaty enough and I've been typing away long enough too. So everyone, stay safe and stay hydrated out there and I'll see you all next week!

Rem Diary 7/13/2025

Hi everyone, I debated whether to title this as a Rem Diary or Progress Report but I think that is just semantics. I'm gonna go with Rem Diary for this week and as technical progress starts, switch over to Progress Reports.

So firstly, just a short physical/mental update on my side. You can skip this paragraph if you wish. Physically, oh boy, but basically the food poisoning from last week cleared up. It took quite a while and loads of trips to the toilet, way too much but thankfully no accidents. Mentally, I still feel the urge yo. Always calling me being like, "Reeemm, just a little, you never did generated AI porn of that character yet! Oh, and there's this character too, c'mon. Just a lil, no one will notice, you've been clean for X days, why not treat yourself." Scary, but being busy has helped out a lot.

So for game talk stuff. I am announcing the third installment of the Remtairy Heroine Series! First it was Meltys, then Karryn. And now, I'm announcing Amelya!! For now, I will call this Project Amelya. That will NOT be the actual game title, but just something to call temporary for now.

So for the past week-ish I have been spending it mostly brainstorming (uh oh, I can hear sirens going off in some readers' head). I was initially working on coding and learning RPGMaker MZ. Like I mentioned last time, I figured out that the code was only reading the English localization file, and the solution to that involved coding in a way to change the game language. And to do that, I needed a custom Options menu. For Karryn's Prison, I did this using a heavily modified Yanfly plugin, so I went back to trusty ol' Yanfly just to find out,

Yanfly no longer exists. Instead of Yanfly, it's a different suite of plugins for RPGMaker MZ and all their code are obfuscated, as in it's not possible to read or edit, and more importantly for me, to learn from. I could somehow find a way to decode it but that would be breaking their terms of service and stuff and I just don't want anything to deal with this stuff anymore. Luckily, a plugin Sachinama had already been using had a simple menu system similar to how I want the ingame settings menu to look like (basically the same or similar to Karryn's Prison's setting menu) so now I have a path forward by learning that plugin so I can make my own menus.

However before I was about to get started on that, discussion between Sachinama and I started getting deep and even philosophical at points. And they were regarding what Sachinama wants, and what gameplay systems to have for Project Amelya. Sachinama originally planned to have a 2D ARPG system similar to 2D Zelda and that one section in Meltys Quest. So that was the direction I was going to go with, until through discussion, discovered that Sachinama only planned to go with Zelda style was because that was his technical know-how limit. And upon realizing that it doesn't have to be a 2D ARPG system (which I would've struggled with a bit on how to make it deep, probably do this or that but it no longer matters now), I started coming up with different ideas.

The core of Project Amelya, as Sachinama wants, is that the heroine can dress up into different outfits and the clothing pieces are divides into many different parts, unlike in games like Meltys Quest where the outfit is just one item such as 'Princess Dress'.

And I thought and thought about how to best utilize this given system, to bring it to its maximum potential as I saw it.

Strangely enough, I ended up using one of the core ideas from the main game idea that I brainstormed last year before the KP's P-Cup DLC. Since I'm not planning to use that game idea anymore, a quick summary is that it would've been a turn-based combat RPG with a party system. But the scope of the party system depended on the 'Mission', such as diving into a dungeon which requires a few members, or escorting a caravan which requires a squad, or defending/invading a torn which requires an army. There's a lot more going on but basically the formation of your party was very important. Do you build up someone who is great 1v1 or someone who isn't very useful 1v1 but has potential to be a great commander.

For Project Amelya, it is also going to be turn-based. But like Meltys Quest and Karryn's Prison, there are no other party members in battle with you and stuff.

INSTEAD. The customization that would have been similar to how I was planning for in last year's game idea, would all come from the OUTFIT PIECES. Sachinama plans for double digit amount of outfits. Maybe it could even reach 20, but we'll have to see. And each outfit has multiple pieces.

Each outfit piece will have your typical RPG stats such as Stylish, Cute, Elegant, and Sexy.

And then they will also do typical RPG stuff such as provide CARDS for your DECKS.

It's a card battler?!?!?!?!

No. Well, yes. But you missed something before that. Project Amelya will have multiple deckS, plural. Specifically, FOUR types of decks: Field, Combat, Gathering, (Not too hot about calling this one a Gathering deck, trying to find a better word) and Trap.

Field Decks consists of cards like Combat, Gathering, Trap, Event, and Rest. When Amelya is on the Field, you'll draw a few cards from the Field deck and choose one of them, and that is what will happen next. Pick the Combat card and it will be a combat encounter using the Combat deck, similar to something out of a game like Slay the Spire. Pick Gathering (again, not super satisfied with the name yet) and it will be a gathering encounter using the Gathering Deck where Amelya tries to gather/harvest/find a useful ingredient. Pick Trap and Amelya will try to evade or disarm or do something to some sort of obstacle in her way using the Trap deck.

But it's not a deckbuilder like Slay the Spire and its derivatives (OGs will know that it's actually Dream Quest and its derivatives) where you add new cards to your deck as you go on while trimming your weaker cards. For Project Amelya, you remove or add cards by changing the outfit pieces.

Your typical RPG stats like Stylish, Cute, Elegant, and Sexy also determine the strength of some of the cards, as well as act as a requirement for events and stuff. And why do you need ingredients from Combat and Gathering? Because there will be recipes for potions and outfit pieces. The outfit piece part is obvious, fulfill the recipe to get new outfit pieces.

But the potions are for what the game is about, which is curing the mysterious disease the inhabitants of the town Amelya and co are staying at.

And there is a time limit. Project Amelya has a time limit. Time is of an essence, and you can NOT do everything in a single playthrough (unless it's on easy mode which doubles the time limit for everything). There are choices on who to save this playthrough. This person's quests give this outfit, but that person unlocks a helpful functionality. The necessary ingredients aren't coming quick enough, but maybe if Amelya agrees to this person's... request... her boyfriend doesn't have to find out and it's for a good purpose...

Yes, Project Amelya has NTR elements.

Can Amelya achieved the perfect Happy Ending (Happy End as in the slut ending like KP) without cheating? No.

Completing the main quest on normal difficulty without new game plus bonus and without cheating on her boyfriend will be my barometer for balance of a difficult playthrough.

By the way, unlike most NTR games, Amelya will be in a healthy, sexual relationship with her boyfriend right from the start! And can and should have sex with him especially while aiming for the no cheating playthrough.

If Karryn's Prison is a game with lots of plates to juggle at the same time, I would describe Project Amelya as a game where there are a few plates to juggle, while running in many hamster wheels. It's both much more complicated than Karryn's Prison, and also much simpler than Karryn's Prison in certain aspects.

It's going to be a delicate balance where in easy mode I want the player to just dress up Amelya in whatever silly outfit they like, and still be able to reach the ending with a little bit of thinking and gaming. But a complicated system like this would naturally lend itself to some extremely hardcore min-maxing. The skill ceiling is higher than Karryn's Prison, but the skill floor is also lower than Karryn's Prison.

And I think this time, I am just not going to pay attention to the skill ceiling at all, only ever balancing if there is just an outrageous OP combo that invalids the challenge too much. My balancing philosophy for Project Amelya will be let the player have fun and break the game or play pretty dress up doll.

And I think I will keep it here today for the game concept and stuff! As for my next plans, I am going to restarting studying the MZ code and learn how to make the ingame settings menu. I also google'd and found a card battler/deckbuilder paid plugin for MZ. After I finish the ingame settings menu, and also use that knowledge to modify the equip menu, I plan to buy that plugin and then study it. Basically, I would be paying money to access to code for drawing and displaying card on the screen and stuff like that. The card abilities and deck building part of the plugin I won't use since outside of the card drawing animation and card display stuff which I by myself would have a hard time coding, would all be custom code to suit my own needs.

So that's the plan for the coming weeks, just diligently burying my nose in programming while ignoring the siren call to tempt me back to being an addict. I am creating a new Discord channel in our Remtairy discord server for you all to talk about Project Amelya stuff! There's not much to talk about yet, and an alpha build is going to be waaaayyys away, but I think a channel is fine for now.

See you all next time!

Rem Diary 7/5/2025

Hello hello, while I don't know if it's worth it to do daily updates, I felt the need to do it today as a follow-up for yesterday's Rem Diary.

First, thank you everyone for your comments and support!

Second, I want to quickly update on Sachinama's health. He told me that the doctor yesterday actually kinda had a 'Are you serious brah' look on their face when he came in for the check-up because the doctor explained that it's very minor. The drug that Sachinama got from the doctor also seems to be working fairly well so there's that!

And now here is where my thoughts will get a bit disorganized for the rest of post. I actually started to get really sick after I finished posting yesterday's Rem Diary. Like I lost all my appetite, felt extremely nauseous and couldn't really put food down my throat. I think it really didn't help that for lunch I had a messy hamburger with french fries hoping for some 'comfort food'. I googled later on that day that fatty and fried food can worsen nausea. Whoops.

It was probably the mental toll of exposing myself that hard as well as the added pressure of proclaiming I still got one more eroge in me. I said it to put pressure on myself, but I didn't have any lead with my brain still fried from the AI porn addiction.

I want to sidetrack for a moment here to clarify my position on AI. It wasn't that I felt the threat of AI creating personalized eroge in the very soon future that paralyzed me. Remember that I created Karryn's Prison based on what REM (just gonna capitalize it as REM when I referring to a version of me in different timeline/universe) would find enjoyable. My guidepost throughout KP's development and then for the DLC were all based on what REM would agree with and like. After all, I can read and try to understand other people's perspectives, but I only have one first person perspective and that was my own. The games and their systems that I like, or don't like, or enjoy, or didn't enjoy, or wished were expended more.

However, especially once I felt into the AI porn addiction, my mind blanked out. I thought generating my own AI images to jerk to would get boring after a while just like it did for the chatbot AI stuff. But it didn't. The only reason I played other games were to just wait until my body recovered enough to spend like 8 more hours just generating my own porn. Nothing compared to the brain chemicals that AI porn were giving me. And if I think about REM out there, my fingers and hands freeze. I can't do anything for him. What can I make that would even come close to satisfying REM when all he needed was just AI on his computer?

And within the 8 months time period that I spent and wasted with image AI, the quality had gotten much better. Getting a new PC with a 5090 also helped make it a lot more quicker to generate images in bigger resolution and more details. My fear was that not too far in the future, both consumer level GPUs will get so good and the gen AI will improve so much that people would just generate their own stuff to fry their pleasure centers.

Now of course, I read everyone's comments and thoughts about my Rem Diary, and even Sachinama and friends chimed in with their perspectives. It was enlightening to hear other people's perspectives on the matter. But at the same time like I said before, I had trusted on my and REM's perspective to guide me for KP's development. And I think it means I have to discard REM from my head now. An AI porn addict can no longer give me any guidance in what to do. I just have to create for myself now and what feels right. And maybe hopefully whatever I make is enough for REM to one day check it out and say Hey, this ain't too bad.

And one final comment on the subject of AI. Sachinama had told me that the witch hunting for AI has gotten really bad recently. Now I have the perspective of AI from the perspective of a AI porn addict (or former hopefully). But Sachinama has the perspective of AI from the perspective of a creator, an artist. The more he cleaned up his art and drew it better, the more people questioned and accused him of using AI. I thought, uh, wait, so people are accusing Sachinama of using gen AI... to steal work from artists... so if he did use AI, he stole from himself???? Sachinama also commented that people also don't realize that he can draw the art he wants much faster himself then to use AI to do it for him in the first place.

So yeah, I mean, it's not new that Internet is getting increasingly polarized and AI is one of those topics. Sachinama told me that for his game, he is going make art in such a way that people can't accuse of him using AI (I personally think people will still accuse no matter because they don't understand it in the first place). Which is to make his next game have CG that has a shit ton of variations, something that AI can not currently do.

And so I want to go back to my nausea situation yesterday. I tried to go to bed early, but failed to fall asleep because every 20 minutes or so I had sit up because I felt the urge to vomit but it never happened. At around 3AM or so, I decided I might as well actually try to vomit and get it out of my system. After five minutes or so of dry heaving where my whole body got covered in sweat and my head started feeling light and failing to vomit, I stopped and took some Tylenol. I lied back down in my bed, wondering how I am going to sleep if at all, and turned on my phone to look at the messages Sachinama left me while I was in bed.

At first, Sachinama encouraged me and told me not to put so much pressure on myself, both to produce something for everyone or to decide I only have one more game left in me. Then he started talking about AI, covering the points I covered earlier in this post such as how it's not big of a threat as I make it out to be and also his personal experience of being accused of using AI.

Then the rest of the messages Sachinama started talking about the game he was making by himself. And as I read it, I felt a stillness in my chest. The urge to vomit disappeared completely.

He explained that he understands I'm the type of creator who could only make something that he wants and is interested in and no one can change my mind and he understood that. He talked about how he has been struggling real hard lately coding for his game, and even tried following my suggestion from last year that he should just hire someone to code for him. And how outraged his family and friends were when they found out about it and called me an ungrateful piece of shit for not volunteering to help Sachinama out instead.

I... I didn't know. I didn't know that Sachinama was struggling, or that he asked for my help. We reviewed the chat logs later and funny enough, it was actually November of last year, right at the start of my journey with AI and addiction that it happened. I was telling Sachinama how crazy and scary gen AI were in that I can make an image using my favorite artist's artstyle and doing stuff that fits my fetishes in less than 30 seconds. In the middle of the conversation, Sachinama casually asks if I would help him out with this game idea he had and I told him I wasn't interested and we casually went back to talking about AI. However, for Sachinama he took this as a hard rejection and never brought it up again.

The need to throw up completely disappeared. I started typing on my phone and started asking questions. Can you give me more details on what you are working on? What is the concept? And so on and so forth. I also explained that I didn't realize or know that he had asked for or wanted my help. So Sachinama asked for my help with a gif of the crying One Piece Nami and I said of fucking course I will. It was past 4:30am and I put my phone down and slipped in and out as I fell asleep, the nausea having vanished like magic. Maybe it was the Tylenol kicking in five minutes after I had taken it.

Or maybe it was because I finally felt like I had a purpose again.

And so today, I officially started working with Sachinama to create the next eroge. According to him, it is currently sitting around 2% completed, with the majority of the time up until now mostly spent of his CG variation code. You see, Sachinama's idea for the next game is to have a costume system similar to the one in Meltys Quest. Except this time, each costume would be separated into multiple pieces, and the player can mix and match any of those pieces. In addition, your custom costume would be reflected in all the sex CGs too. Oh, and there's different hair color, hair styles, boob size and skin tones.

The mad lad. Fucking wow.

I asked him will he be okay, knowing how much time and work it took to produce the CG variations for Karryn's Prison. He told me it will be fine (Slightly suspect since historically Sachinama's 'It will be fine' is literally the meme of the dog surrounded by fire) because when he first started drawing for KP, he didn't understand or realize that I would ask for so much CG variations, so he used an art style that was very time consuming for each piece. This time, he will draw using a simpler art style.

So I'm all in. I don't have good ideas of my own right now for my own game anyway since I wasted everything doing AI porn. Of fucking course I would help Sachinama if he needed my help, any time any where.

Today I have been working on importing the localization system from KP to Sachinama's new game. It actually took most of the day to figure out why the game refused to display the localization string for the character name text box. I thought it was specifically something strange going on with the name text box related code. Then as a hail mary, I tried to display that same localization string in a different location that I KNEW was working, and it also didn't work. That's when I realized that the code was only reading from the English localization files, which didn't have the string I wanted to display.

Oh boy. The joy of programming. It also didn't help that although I was not nauseous for most of today, I still had no appetite and I was literally going to the toilet every 20 minutes for most of the day. Hopefully this is just a bodily reaction to yesterday's issue and I will get progressively better soon especially once I can put solid food inside myself.

So boys and girls, the weekly Progress Report will soon start returning!!! If you think about it, it took me a year after Meltys Quest to start working on Karryn's Prison. And it has only been ten months since the KP P-Cup DLC. Well, if you start calculating from when I finished KP then it has been a couple of ye-, actually no let's not do that to ourselves.

Thank you everyone for your warm comments, this time it is my turn to do my best to put Sachinama's vision into reality!

Rem Diary 7/4/2025

Hello everyone for another installment of Rem's Diary. Today is... gonna be a special one, maybe, probably even longer than the last diary (Post edit: It is). Today we are going to touch some very heavy topics, including personal, work, and industry stuff.

But if you want to tl;dr to know whether or not to call me a fraud like a commenter in the last Rem's Diary: Yes I guess I'm de-frauding you of your time and hope because I am cancelling the DLC idea from the last diary. I'm really sorry. Everyone else still reading, find a quiet place and some nice iced drink.

((Post edit: WARNING: Extremely sensitive and potentially triggering heavy topics inside including suic*de. Please be safe and if you are not ready right now, do not proceed. If you need help, please talk to local providers or https://www.iasp.info/suicidalthoughts/))

So like always, there's no real structure to what I'm about to write coming out of my head. I have some broad points I want to touch upon and reveal.

I suppose before anything else, in order for people to know what I was even 'doing' the whole time post KP and therefore decide whether if it's even worth reading any further, now or in the future.

I touched on this in an earlier Twitch stream this year around January? February? Probably January. But I never put it down into written form and therefore written out my thoughts. As a preface, it still doesn't really excuse my lack of performance between Karryn's Prison completion and this time period, but nevertheless.

So around December of last year 2024, while I was looking for ideas and inspirations for what to do next, I decided to try out generative AI. To see what is going on, what the technology is, and so on. You know, research. I started first with chatbot AI. You know the stuff where when it first appeared especially during Covid where it is all 'Now you can get an AI girlfriend!!'

So I tried it out. It was novel to me and interesting but I lost interest after two days by limitations of the web chat AI. A little while later, I google'd around and discovered about LLM, where you can download the AI to your computer and run it locally to get around censorship and other limitations. That was novel for me as I play around with this new technology but I also got bored again after about five days or so.

Then I remember how the web girlfriend chatbot AI stuff had image generation too, and I looked up on how to generate my own images locally. This was the beginning of the downfall within a downfall.

I wanted to title today's Rem Diary as "Death of An Artist" but I didn't want to clickbait anyone into thinking something happened to me or Sachinama. Also today, or should I say, the next two days, holds extreme special significance to me to clickbait about death. And Sachinama actually is also a bit unwell (specifically, "itchy") at the moment. He suspects that he might have overworked himself while working on his independent Happy Life solo game and not take as much breaks or fluids as he needed to. He visited the doctor today but they couldn't figure anything out and just gave him normal drugs. He already went to bed but since I worry about him more than anyone else outside of his immediate family, I left a message imploring him to also do some MRI and X-Rays just in case. Please send your well wishes to Sachinama because unlike me, he is extremely hardworking.

Anyway, why title this post as "Death of An Artist"?

Initially, the locally generating images with AI was very very novel, more so as I learn more and more about how to use prompts, add-ons and LoRa and stuff. This shit is amazing! I love this and that person's artwork, but I always wished that they had done [my specific fetish A] or [my specific fetish B]!! But now I can do that all within my fingertips!

Then January came, and I did my Twitch stream. I told myself, and I even told Sachinama. Alright, that was fun and interesting but it's time to stop.

Except I didn't. Whenever I was bored and/or horny, at my fingertips, I could have my PC create specifically curated content for my specific tastes with developments adjusted exactly to my taste and liking and fancy at the moment.

I told myself I can stop anytime, but I'm just doing research. Eventually I will get bored just like I got bored of the chatbot AI stuff, I told myself.

Except it didn't. I always knew about porn addiction. It's crazy for an eroge developer to even talk about the subject of porn addiction, it's like a heroin dealer posting a public bulletin message reminding people about the dangers of heroin. But this was worse than porn addiction.

It was AI porn addiction.

Sachinama was even surprised and laughed when I confessed today that I didn't actually stop in January and has been pulling the monkey, jerking the chicken so to speak, the whole time since January non-stop to AI. He laughed and was surprised because he saw me as someone who needed context, story and lots of foreplay to get off. I do. The thing is I just used my own brain to provide all the context. I would start with the beginning images, the setup of a scene. Then start generating the beginning of a story and the female character. Then the male subjects heading into some sort of foreplay. Then action. More action, different action, escalating action. Into climax but unlike a normal erotic manga or live action porn, I didn't need to stop there. More development, more action, more climax. I can go on and on and on. The same brain filled with imagination and eroge experience that helped bring Karryn's Prison into this world, also trapped me in a cage of hedonistic AI hell.

I had a recent event on Tuesday three days ago. Ya know, I actually was going to avoid talking about what it actually was but given the subjects being covered and about to be covered today, I might as well say it. It was a first date with someone off of a dating app. It went good? I thought it went good? It wasn't good. And it wrecked me for days up until this morning as I continue to talk to Sachinama and friends and family and I realized that I HAVE to make changes to my life.

No, ladies and gentlemen, I wasn't a creep or anything like that. I would get fucking cancel if I ever touched a hair out of place. I've been on dates before, and I can tell when one is going nowhere and one of us or both of us want to leave and end it. The thing was this one went to four hours long and we only check the time and left the restaurant when the waitress came to pour more water for us and strongly hinted that perhaps we should either order more food or leave. I've had poor dates where despite it being not good and we weren't a good match for each other, the lady would still send me a text message post-date letting me know that they got home safely especially after I had requested one. And in this case, it was extra late into the night so I was extra worried.

I never got that text.

And then I was unmatched the next day without a word.

Something must've went well during the date right? But at the same time obviously it wasn't as good as I initially thought. And on reflection, I could've done much better on multiple areas. I realized on reflection, I had a bit of a inferiority complex during the date. Not overly, but it caused a jarring comment here or there, and I had put myself down multiple times for no reason. And it was a wake up call. I could've prepared much better for the date. I would have better confidence if I wasn't in a work slump. If I wasn't wasting time generating my own fucking porn to jerk off to all day all week.

It was a wake up call and I deleted all that AI stuff off my PC and I'm done with it and I promised to Sachinama and myself that I will do better. Beat back this addiction, and focus on work and improving myself.

The thing is, porn addiction and AI porn addiction is similar but also different in devious ways. Normal porn addiction you are still at the mercy of what is available to you. With AI porn, you can have whateeeeevvvvvvvva you want. And even worse, it's even more time consuming as you wait for the next image to finish generating and then maybe correct.

It is so so fucking bad. During that January Twitch stream, I explained that I wanted to dive into gen AI for the same reason I play other people's games and eroges. To see what people are playing and enjoying. To see what's going on out there. What is the current scene.

Currently people say the threat with AI for games is that they will take jobs away. Coders, writers, translators, voice actors, artists, musicians and so on. In the past and even still a bit nowdays in imagined futuristic Sci-Fi settings, people figured that the threat of AI is that they will take over and subjugate mankind. Put us under their thumbs like cattle and either provide for our every needs or kill us all because we are an eyesore and highly destructive to the environment.

No. The biggest threat from my perspective isn't the lost of jobs, or the content you are consuming being replaced by AI, or being at the mercy of our future AI overlords. It's that one day, whether through a mobile device or their computer, everyone has access to their own personalized AI that can provide exactly the content they desire with a simple one sentence prompt.

Worried about your game not being liked by audience type A or audience type B?

Well member #425 of audience type A actually really wants an eroge with their favorite femboy male vtuber as the protagonist in a reverse harem where all the ladies is member #425 and different aspects of her personality.

Member #426 of audience type A actually really wants an eroge where it's an open world rpg where they choke random beautiful women. No sex, no deaths, just choking until passing out and that's it.

Member #58 of audience type B wants an eroge where they control an avatar that watches couples in the park and ejaculates onto their cups while they are distracted.

And all their specific needs and kinks can be done in 9 hours on their own Nvidia RTX 8080. Set it up and go to bed and they will wake up to their personalized content, just for them, made by themselves. How can you even plan or design content in such an environment?

I'm going to take a step back here and tell another, very personal story. Very, extremely personal. Frighteningly so but.

((Post edit: WARNING: Topic will deal with suic*de))

Most of the older supporters and fans might still remember the broad strokes of this story. Which was the origins so to speak of me and Remtairy. But I never told the details to the extent I'm about to today.

In 2017, the doctor told me after a checkup that I had 99% chance of having thyroid cancer and said I could look for a second opinion but they strongly recommended that I immediately go into surgery. I had shit all in my life before I had cancer. Growing up in New York City, as a 2nd generation immigrant, I suffered an identity crisis with the differences between my cultural roots, and the people around me in school. I turned to video games as an escape. When I got old enough to cum, I watched porn like all other boys in school with parents too busy to monitor their kids. Then I discovered eroges and it was like a mindblown explosion of marrying both video games and porn. I can satisfy both needs at the same time!!!

And until 2017, if I died that day, that's all my life amounted to. When I was told I had to go into surgery, I realized my life up until then had been wasteful. I feared my mortality, the disappointment I have been to myself and to my family. I vowed to do better and make something of myself if I live to do it.

But with no real skills so to speak of, what can someone like me, with no drive and ambition up until now, do something that might make the world a better place?

Well, I love eroge. It kept me from unaliving myself when I was in school and when I was out of school. Maybe there is something I can do for eroges? At this time in 2017, there was a company called Sakuragames. They were taking my beloved indie Japanese eroges, and then butchering them with machine translations and selling it for pennies on Steam. If this trend were to continue, the Japanese indie eroge scene would just be reduced to shovelware-tier to a normal Steam player, and the original hardworking Japanese developers would get pennies for their work while companies like Sakuragame and any potential imitators would get rich off of their work.

I had to stop this. I must stop this. I can stop this. And I knew what I had to do.

I will help translate these games to real native English, and sell them for their original prices on Steam and give the devs their proper share of it. I was mad, out of mind and drunk on post surgery recovery chemicals. Who would take a random nobody seriously?? But I didn't doubt myself, and sent messages out to Japanese developers.

Sachinama was the second person I sent to, and he responded positively to me. It was the most lucky thing to have ever happen to me, and to this day, I am still grateful and thankful to Sachinama for giving me a chance.

I worked day and night on translating Sachinama's Meltys Quest. I even wrote daily progress report on Patreon. I was full of unearned confidence. I even dared offer suggestions to Sachinama on how to improve the gameplay aspects of Meltys Quest. With his infinite benevolence, Sachinama allowed my suggestions, succeeding gameplay related elements to me.

I remember standing in my room with the TV connected to live update of the Steam's sales chart reporting on the release day of Meltys Quest with my mom, watching as the first sales roll in. It was a success. Meltys Quest broke Sakuragame's formula of cheap, buggy, garbage machine translations. I knew there would be people willing to pay the original price of the eroge to see them in actual English with no bugs. I say this but there was still a lot of bugs and typos, we're talking many many hotfix updates the following days and weeks but the difference being that I was actually fixing any issues as they pop up instead of moving onto machine translate the next game to butcher.

The funny side note to this, is that presently machine translations are much more accepted these days because AI has gotten better and will only get better. Oh well, at least the games aren't being priced with a 90% discount so the developers still get something.

But at the time and for a long while until ChatGPT, this was a real victory for eroges. But then I lost my drive that drove me like mad working on MQ all day all night. I don't care for the money earning aspect, I just wanted to make the world better by proving the concept of a fairly priced indie eroge with real, native English is better than the alternative. A year passes, and Sachinama approaches me in e-mail with an offer for me to translate one of his older games. Feeling lost, I said yes. Then later Sachinama told me he was thinking instead to remake the game into RPGMaker MV. So I scraped the translation I was listlessly working on with no motivation and worked with Sachinama on the remake.

This game, old time supporters might still remember, was Pina. It was a disaster. We threw wild ideas together, and it became a frankenstein monster of epic feature creep. It will never see the light of day. So with a heavy heart because I was worried about how Sachinama will take it, I told him I wanted to drop the project because I don't think it would work. But I enjoyed the experience of brainstorming with Sachinama so I offered a counter suggestion of 'How about we make a different game together, this time one where I will draw out and decide the various systems to avoid feature creep?' Sachinama said ok (that took a very long time for him to give out and has agonized him until KP was almost finished), and this game will soon be known as Karryn's Prison (formerly Karen's Prison for a brief moment).

When I designed Karryn's Prison, I had several thoughts. The main thought was: What kind of eroge would Rem want to play? The other thoughts mostly involved around using all the gaming experience I had to create an interconnected systems of gameplay that has never been attempted or done before.

What kind of eroge would Rem, of a different multiverse, or a different timeline, where he never got cancer. Where he is still basically forever either part-time or unemployed. Where he spends all his days playing games and eroge, on the brink of unaliving except for the fact that he has atleast one future game or eroge to look forward to coming out soon so he can not do that yet. What can I do, for that Rem, to give him the fuel to continue every day as something to look forward to, and then enjoy?

And so I came up with Karryn's Prison. It was my love letter to the eroge industry. To gaming. To myself of a different timeline and universe.

To you, me of pre-2017, I give you my heart, Karryn's Prison.

Time passes. Today, as of this moment, I don't have the drive or ambition I did before Meltys Quest, or Karryn's Prison. I even nearly forgot something important. Not only did I forget my previous drives, I also nearly forgot a very important date. Funny how this is after an anxiety filled mental breakdown over a rejection from someone I only knew for four hours. But thank you to that person for rejecting me, because it made me realize I needed to change.

You see everyone. 24 hours to this day, on 2017, in an Manhattan hospital with my mom holding my hands. I had my cancer surgery.

I never forgot for so long. It was what drove me to do better, to work hard, to provide for my family. Because the date of my surgery was also right before my birthday. I remember the doctor asking for the surgery being postponed to July 5 because the day before was July 4, a national American holiday, but my mom begged to change it further and not have it right before my birthday. But I told the doctor I was ready and I wanted to do it as soon as possible.

How did I get so lazy that I even forgot the exact date. Have I become like those crowdfunding eroge developers that get fat and lazy with their success and never finish their game, milking it until it's too late? Well, in my case mine is finished and I'm not asking for crowdfunding right now but still.

Self employment is different ain't it. You can both overwork yourself and burn out because there is no structured hours. At the same time, you can also end up not doing anything because there is no structured hours.

How can I get that drive and ambition back for a third time? The final third time most likely in my opinion.

Because you see, AI is here and will only get better and better. The results will be better, and consumers will have access to better consumer level products that work faster. While talking with Sachinama today, he said in his personal opinion and prediction it is only a matter of time before anyone with a simple one sentence prompt can tell the AI to make themselves an ero-manga or eroge. The eroge industry, both developers, publishers and storefronts will go out of business when that day comes. But until that moment arrives, he wants to leave at least one more product for everyone to enjoy before only AI porn remains. It's probably why he has been overworking himself to point of getting sick with an unknown something.

One more ride then. Until I die, to eroges that kept me alive. For an industry that will end like all other things, but sooner rather than later. For my dearly beloved. I will make one more eroge.

Call me a fraud, I don't care anymore. Blast me on the chans. Blast me on the zones. It's sad and pathetic, but today I finally remembered the why again, why it was worth waking up.

I would like to believe that my forte into AI was not completely wasted. Just like how I managed to squeeze a life of gaming and gooning into Meltys Quest and Karryn's Prison, I would like to squeeze the half of the year I spent endlessly trapped in my head and in AI for something better.

How can you make an eroge, knowing that eventually anyone can create their own personalized eroge curated to their own taste sooner rather than later?

I think, the hint is in the limitation of AI that every centimeter of my private parts knew very well in the last eight months. Which is the current concept of AI and the direction of their development, is limited by the fact the AI only knows what it knows. Its dataset is everything. An AI language model might perform very well on logical tests, but only if it has ever basically seen that logical test before. If you give it a logical test that any functioning adult can solve but is not in the AI's trained data, it will not solve it correctly 100 times out of 100.

In other words, until AI companies manages to break that wall, the answer is to create something that AI hasn't trained on before. Because it doesn't exist. Tell the AI to create Grand Theft Auto except you control your favorite female Vtuber and you can go around pegging fictional female characters and sure, AIs will eventually be able to do that. They just need to be trained on GTA code to make GTA, on 3d eroges that has open world sex, on models of the Vtubers and female characters that you want and bam.

Heck, while there is no such game right now, you can also make it so you can peg cars too. There are images of cars being fucked, so the AI can generate those. I want a Path of Exile style talent tree. My vtuber will get better and better at pegging those fucking slutty ass cars. 'Sure, the AI will train off of Path of Exiles and games that has similar talent trees and make it.'

I want the talent tree to affect the cars. With certain talents, the car will turn into a tank post sex. 'Err... o-okay... lemme just train the AI on transforming a 3D object to another object, have it reproduce the code and then make sure it's linked to the talent t-'

And based on the number of tanks in the world, I want the Vtuber to have bigger breasts. 'Err... I-'

And I want one of the talent tree to give me a skill where when I hijack a car, it will transform into a female character and marry me. 'Err-'

Now give the protagonist a clown nose that honks every time she cums and every time it honks, a portion of the talent tree gets locked off. And I want Dark Souls style stamina management for her semen meter but she also has an actual different stamina meter that gets smaller the bigger her breasts are. '..........'

'......'

'...'

One more eroge everybody. I think that's all I have left in me before the AI takes over, but until then. One last ride in the car.

Rem Diary 6/9/2025

Hello hello hello, it's been so long since I wrote that I don't know how this thing works anymore. I'm going to call this a Rem Diary as a callback to the original Patreon page's URL.

So, yeah. Been a while folks. And I was sitting, looking out the window and I thought, let's just write my thoughts out and maybe there might be some sort of breakthrough in my thoughts. Why not. It's June 9th after all.

Bit of a warning, this is an unstructured, stream of conscious post.

SO!! FIRST OF ALL!! I never did it but I should have, which was to celebrate the release of the P-Cup DLC!! WOOO!! We love cup sizes featuring letters of the 2nd half of the alphabet here!! Thank you all for your support!

Now, the meat of really why I wanted to write today, was to talk about the next game, and the process and thoughts that are currently going on.

So, I am still undecided on what to really do next. For anyone not following Sachinama's Ci-en/Twitter earlier this year before he also stopped doing regular posts, Sachinama being the workaholic he is, wanted to do something while I was figuring out the mysteries of life and all that. Before working on Karryn's Prison for 5+ years, Sachinama was already a creator in the creative field, and even before he worked for himself with the Happy Life circle doing adult CG/manga/games. So after working on KP with me, Sachinama wanted to messed around in RPGMaker again on his own stuff. So he has been doing that, as well as some stuff for DMM for Japan physical goods.

Speaking of which, fingers crossed that the MouseUnit figurines can come out this month! Originally they were slated for around Feb/March but there was an industry wide production delay at the factories and stuff that I don't understand that essentially delayed pretty much most Japanese figurines. But it's been a while since we had an update so realistically, maybe it will be delayed for another quarter? But who knows, the world, I heard, has gotten a bit more crazy since the last time I posted in this site.

Back to the original topic. That is what Sachinama has been up to. As for me, there has been this and that personal stuff. Most not important enough to comment or talk about, I'll write about a lil of it at the end of this post.

So new game stuff. I have, or had, a couple of big ideas. Canned and binned obviously now. One that I keep circling around, and is one of the original ideas that I had even 2 years ago while I was stuck on the Gym DLC, was something chikan related. Chikan being the japanese word for molester, and in the context of eroge genres/themes would be a lady being molested in some sort of public transit like a train. But I have a lot of worries and concerns about committing to the idea of making one, and that prevents me from fully trying to brainstorm about it. Most of ideas revolve around some sort of roguelike chikan.

I was made aware recently (recently as in beginning of the year but that is still recent to me...) about a DLsite indie eroge that is doing a chikan roguelike, when I tried the demo then, it said the planned release date is actually this month! I haven't been following the development blog for it so I don't know if it got delayed or not, but I'm just gonna be quietly looking forward to it and being pleasantly surprised if I see in the Recent Releases section!

My idea of a roguelike chikan is very different then the upcoming indie one though, both gameplay and setting. So one of the idea that I have been playing more recently with, is a male protagonist setting. I have stated a long time ago and I still feel the same way, that I do not want to make a sequel to games. I'm just not very interested in iterating on something that I already did, much less make a rehash of the exact same thing.

Most sane people would probably rightfully find it strange to not find a winning formula and just capitalize it and squeeze it until it runs dry, but I just can't do it. I just don't want to. It's why it was so hard to be motivated after the release of Meltys Quest to do localization work until Sachinama approached me with the idea of creating a game together instead.

So a female protagonist battlefuck eroge is kinda out of the picture. So when I was toying with the idea of a chikan game, besides other concerns and worries, I also had a silly stupid self imposed restriction of not wanting it to be too similar to KP if it's a female protagonist game. I toyed very little bit with male protagonist instead but I'm always dismissive of it almost right away. There was also some other non-chikan ideas but today I am not going to be talking about those.

Instead today I'm going to be talking about battlefuck again, but this time male protagonist. Now the standard male protagonist battlefuck eroge, is pretty formulaic at this point. Like 80% of them involves a Monster Girl Quest style situation where the male protagonist, usually lets just say, short of stature, is masochistically fucked by a variety of ladies in female domination style. The other 20%, which now considered rare and almost extinct species, is kind of like a pokemon style fuck'em all with a variety of ladies.

I'm not interested in making either.

Which is why I never considered making one.

Now recently, I say recently again, but this was like last month before some personal stuff happened (detailed later at the end, don't worry it's not like a bad thing or whatever.). Now recently, I had an idea.

I had this idea before, but I dismissed it then because well. It would be too damn similar to KP wouldn't it.

But recently I thought about it differently. The original idea that I dismissed long ago, was: What if it's like Karryn's Prison

wait for it

But instead playing from the male point of view?!

So I dismissed this crap because I didn't want to recreate KP. But the most recent idea was,

What if, instead of "it's like Karryn's Prison"

It literally IS Karryn's Prison but from the male point of view?!?!

🤔

So to backtrack a little bit first. When I did P Cup DLC, I said it would be the last DLC and I meant it, because I did not want to modify KP's core mechanics or gameplay any more. It's not just an issue of feature creep, but an issue of you can actively make something worse if you keep fidgeting with the darn thing. There's a point when something is done and you just leave it alone. I know a lot of fans want this or that, and some have been wanting it since the first alpha build cough certain side jobs cough. But I just don't want to mess with the core gameplay and if there is an unfortunate theme about Rem that you want to leave today with, that is when I don't want to do something, I just can't. It's a brain worm.

However, when this revolutionary idea came to me, where instead of 'like Karryn's Prison', it literally 'IS Karryn's Prison'. I thought about it. The brain worm in my head poked out of its nest, eyed me for a minute, and then crawled back inside my head to take a nap.

As in, that COULD work, I COULD make it. It would essentially be like adding a new game mode to the game, so it would be outside of the core gameplay loop that I do not want to touch with a five foot pole (or 3 meter pole for the metric system using crazies not using an English only imperial system). And it wouldn't be remaking KP since I would just be using KP to do it. Crazy how I need to find loopholes in my own self imposed fucking restrictions.

So we cleared the first hurdle of that I CAN make it. But now SHOULD I make it, which is the real question of the day and the real reason for writing my thoughts out today.

So to give a little pervy peephole into my head and see a little bit of what I'm seeing, in this hypothetical game mode, instead of controlling Karryn, you would be controlling a male inmate. You would, hehe, I'm not even gonna hide the inspiration, be selecting a class at the start like you would in Slay the Spire for the run. And the Captain would give you a bonus for the run ala the whale.

Great, awesome start. Literally copied from another game. But then here's where I start walking into mud because the idea gets murky.

What would be the goal? Form a ragtag crew, and maybe something like you gotta make Karryn reach Slut Level 100 or something by Day 60 or whatever.

So there's already a few issues. In the original male protagonist battlefuck ideas, they always had ya know, a few different female targets. For this idea, there would be one female target, the titular Karryn that we all know and love. In games like Slay the Spire and its derivatives, you don't fight the same enemy over and over again. One battle you're fighting shieldy boy and a healer. Next some annoying dodgey boys. Next some spikey boys. Then a boss that does poisons you and fills your deck with garbage cards. And so on and so forth. Of course in this idea, Karryn is going to be growing and getting stronger, and also getting weaker from new Passives. But will that be enough?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm......

And then there's another issue right away. In Slay the Spire and its derivatives, when you lose a battle you're fucked, figuratively in this case, and the run is over. Basically, you know that the build you were trying to aim for, was in fact, shat and doomed and you simply start over again and try again. But for my idea, obviously you will be losing every fights against Karryn. Does that mean your build is shit? Is your run doomed? Not really. Since technically a run is only doomed when you reach the Day 60 time limit and didn't make Karryn a Level 100 Slut or whatever. But realistically your run was probably already doomed by Day 45. In Slay the Spire and its derivatives, not being able to handle the escalating difficulties of each new chapter was a sign your run is doomed.

For my idea, there is no obvious way to discern that your run is doomed and you would be better off starting over. And when there is no obvious way to tell, would a player just choose the worst, most anti-fun way of playing which is restarting the game at the slightest perceptive drawback? Of course it would be nice if like the main Karryn's Prison game, players can just adopt a Dwarf Fortress style 'But losing is FUN!'. But I dunno, I worry that without an obvious way of dooming a run, players would get confused and give up earlier then they should have, or also don't give up when they probably should have and end up getting frustrated either way.

The first problem, the diversity of the battles, can be 'solved' with some tricks and new, different systems. Just because it is Karryn's Prison doesn't mean both Karryn and the inmates need to use the exact same skills from the main game. In this hypothetical game mode, Karryn's Passives would need an almost arcade style highly accelerated growth in the first place. Pressing the Pet Butt skill a hundred times for one slut level wouldn't make for very fun gameplay. So why not also play around with the combat skills too in a way that I don't want to in the main game.

The second problem I really worry about though. Or maybe it's not a big deal? In Slay the Spire, it's obvious because you are literally fighting battles the whole run and you die you lose. You lost to the act boss? Your build didn't cut it, Jack. But for this idea, how would you know?

Maybe I can have something like oh you need Karryn to be Slut Level 10 by Day 15, and Slut Level 30 by Day 30, and Slut Level 60 by Day 45, and so on.

BUT. Folks, BUT.

BUTT. 🍑

Here's the thing too. The cool thing with this idea, and the concept of inmate PoV version of KP, is that it's not freaking Slay the Spire, and more importantly, it's not linear. In Magic the Gathering/Hearthstone terms, maybe you're doing a reckless Rush style build this run, where you try to get Karryn slutty early on, way before Day 60. Then obviously for this build, you can easily pass those arbitrary 'Get Karryn Slut Level 10 by Day 15' or whatever.

But what if you're running a slower build? Instead of aiming for a high or die early build, you're working towards the long game of trying to get Karryn to Slut Level 100 around the 50ish days mark? If I make some sort of arbitrary You Must Be This Tall To Ride This Ride, people who are slow growers wouldn't be able to have fun and I would be restricting the game and disallowing builds that go all the way to Day 60.

I don't know. Maybe the 2nd problem really isn't that big of deal as I have it in my head. Or maybe there is already a different flaw that I'm not seeing with the concept and idea.

Phew, I think this post is long enough already so let's end this here today and I'll rummage my thoughts some more and maybe see what y'all have to say. I'm not even going to go into the personal stuff I mentioned at the beginning but basically tl;dr: Got a new PC and went to a multi-day board game thing. Maybe I'll write it about next time if there is a next time. Anyway, thank you for reading, my condolences for taking a peek at what's in my head!!!