Rem Diary 11/2/2025

Hello everyone. Oof. It’s been over a month since the last Rem Diary and welp, things have happened.

Let’s just dive right into it. Basically, AO had been under tremendous troubled development, as shown by the extremely long periods between the Rem Diaries. Around 3-ish weeks ago, I made the decision to cancel AO and reset it to zero.

There were many reasons why it was so hard to work on. I don’t even want to list them or order them by first, second, third, etc because there were many issues together that cascaded and made it impossible to work on.

Issue One: The sexual aspect of the game was tacked on, and was unsatisfactory. While I didn’t want to make a sequel to KP, it was just too different in that the erotic element of the game was not integrated into the gameplay part from the start.

Issue Two: The NTR aspect made it hard to build a gameplay system around it. In a game with NTR, the NTR should be important. Trying to mesh and warp things to get some sort of gameplay to the NTR element was rough.

Issue Three: The card battle part of it was unnecessarily complicated. I tried to accommodate Sachinama’s original version of outfits broken into many different parts by trying to make it have an gameplay effect, as well as the original version of some sort of gathering/crafting by trying to add it via a complicated Atelier game series style recipes and a different card battle type, which all made it into something that was both difficult to design and to play from my point of view.

Issue Four: Outfit broken into many different pieces and then combined and mixed with parts from other outfits did not look good. It looked weird in practice when each outfit is very different. The coding to deal with the many potential edge cases of the layering of the CG of each outfit mixed with each outfit would’ve been exponential, with the work increasing non-linearly for each outfit.

Issue Five: The story wasn’t good, and this was my fault with meddling with it. I just don’t have the talent to be a story writer.

So after three months, I made the call to end it. Basically for the OG fans of ours, this became a Pina 2.0. The short version of Pina for those who don’t know, was that it was the project that I worked with Sachinama a year after Meltys Quest. It was originally supposed to be a RPGMaker MV remake of the Akemi RPG that Sachinama made years before Meltys Quest. Then it became its own game with a change in protagonist from Akemi to Pina. Then I added my own gameplay and character ideas. Then new characters got drawn. And around two~three months later, with a heavy heart I told Sachinama that I see no potential and future with the project, and right after that I proposed my idea of Karryn’s Prison and the rest is history.

Well. Basically I saw similar issues with what I dub “Old AO” for now. Then I proposed “New AO” that reset everything back to zero and go from there. I still want a roguelike battler, but I had different ideas on how to build it this time. Instead of how in ‘Old AO’ only the main character takes part in the battles, in ‘New AO’ there will be a party of up to three members consisting of the MC and up to 2 more members.

Another aspect for wanting to reset development to zero was that ‘Old AO’ was originally built on the idea of ARPG when Sachinama worked on it alone, and there were a lot of lingering code, plugins, and RPGMaker events and variables from that time period that I had no idea what they did. The card battle plugin that I brought was also very barebones for what I had wanted, and I would’ve needed to basically gut most of the code and add a lot of my own. So if that was the case, instead of dealing with spaghetti code made by other people, I would rather just make my own spaghetti code. At least I know what it would do.

And since I wasn’t married to the concept of it HAVING to be physically ingame cards. There were aspects of how a deck of cards worked that I liked, but it really didn’t have to actually be cards. So in ‘New AO’, it won’t be cards but just skills like you would have in KP and other RPGs.

Except… you don’t have access to all your skills every turn. Instead, you draw from your skills every turn as if you would draw cards from a deck. But unlike cards and card decks, I’m making two big differences. One: Each skill has limited Uses in a run. Two: It’s not a deck of cards with a draw pile and discard pile, the skills drawn each turn is from the whole skill list each time, so you can get a situation where you have access to a certain skill five turns in a row, or don’t have access to a certain skill five turns in a row.

There’s some cool changes in how to process and think when playing with this concept that’s very different from Slay the Spire-like battlers that I’m very excited to explore that I will talk more about later on.

Another change from ‘Old AO’ is something that I first experienced in Uma Musume and Ashes Echoes, which I’ve been told is also present in older games such as Monster Rancher, Powerful Pro Baseball, and Idolmaster. Basically, there is this raising roguelike mode where you build a character up. And then at the end, that character’s record is saved, and you can use it in other game modes.

My idea was that unlike Uma Musume, you would raise the party up in a roguelike Slay the Spire style mode, battling enemies, getting new cards, upgrading cards, etc. Then that record is saved at the end of what I would just call ‘Preparation’ mode. With data from Preparation mode, you can use it in ‘Story’ or ‘Hunt’ modes. Story mode advances the story, unlocking new levels. Hunt mode gives you resources and equipment. Basically the loop is to go into Preparation to build a team. Use that team to Hunt for resources to strengthen your runs. And when you think you’re ready, do the Story battle. If you win, it’s time to go into Preparation in the new harder levels to build a better team and so on.

Then a few days after proposing this idea and brainstorming aspects of it, I checked some gaming news and discovered a shock. In the next few days, a gacha game called Stella Sora would come out with a similar roguelike system to Uma Musume where you go to a Hades-like mode to save a record and use that record in other game modes. And then in another few days, ANOTHER gacha game with a similar roguelike system would come out called Chaos Zero Nightmare, and this time it was, I couldn’t fucking believe it, using a Slay the Spire-like system.

Holy moly. The game I was imagining didn’t exist, and then I heard about it for the first time right after I independently came up with a similar idea. There were two sides to finding out about this news. First was disappointment that someone else beat me to the punch to what I thought was a really neat idea. Second was anticipation on how it would look like in practice. Thankfully, it was coming out in a week, I didn’t have to bite my nails for months on end anxiously waiting to see how someone else would do it. If it was super good, I was more than willing to give up on the idea.

Finally the day came, and I played Chaos Zero Nightmare. It was pretty neat, all things told. They did some things I didn’t even come up with, and I’m not talking about the Darkest Dungeon or Romancing Saga inspired aspects. So then the time of anguish came back heavily again.

At the time, I even proposed to Sachinama that I want to give up on ‘New AO’, and Sachinama suggested that I try searching for a different angle, in a different genre or game type. So I brainstormed. For years now, when I talked about it every now and then, there were two genres that I would talk about for the next game after KP. One was Grand Strategy, the other was Chikan/Train Molester. Grand Strategy is out of the question for me right now. ‘Old AO’ was a mess of too high ambitions of trying to create an ‘epic game’, I wanted to go back to earth with a simpler game, so I brainstormed about a roguelike molester game. When I discussed it with Sachinama about it, he hit me with a warning and a dose of reality. I looked it up and sure enough, the Molester 300% game series was removed from Steam. And even just yesterday while writing this up, there was breaking news that another train molester game has been removed from Steam. In today’s climate, it’s just too risky a venture.

So I abandoned the roguelike molester game I was thinking about. It is what it is. While I’m not driven by the desire to make a game for money, after all if I was, I would bite my lips until all the blood is drained out of my body and make KP 2. But making a game with little to no chance of even being sold on Steam would affect both of our families and livelihoods which would be irresponsible.

Back to ‘New AO’ then, initially a bit bitterly and begrudgingly to be honest. But Sachinama offered some concessions to help me truly reset to zero from ‘Old AO’, such as not having NTR in the game because he believes having NTR makes a mess of both the gameplay and story.

As for the aspect of Chaos Zero Nightmare having already done what I was trying to do, in CZN, when you use the saved records of the team from Slay the Spire-like roguelike mode for the other game modes, you just use them for battles with no more progression. In my original idea before I even heard of CZN, I envisioned using the saved record in the other modes, Hunt and Story which in my case, are on a shorter mini roguelike mode with fewer chances to upgrade your build.

Playing CZN solidified that my idea could work because otherwise you’re just using the same saved record over and over again with no difference. Yeah the enemy is different but it doesn’t change how you pilot the deck. My original vision was based on the feeling of reaching the top of the mountain at the end of the run in games like Slay the Spire and that you really only get to experience piloting your completed deck in one or two more fights before you start over again. If you can save that deck, and then use it again in challenge modes with maybe a little bit more chances to improve the deck, how cool would that concept be? If you’re familiar with Slay the Spire, my pitch was imagine after playing the first three Acts in a run, you save that record, and then you can load that record to play a fourth, shorter and harder Act. And if you want, you can load it again for another try at the fourth Act.

‘But Rem? Wouldn’t it get stagnant? Let’s use KP as an example since everyone is infinitely more familiar with it. It would be like loading into a Strength build Karryn and playing Level 5 again and again. It’s just really the same thing over and over again isn't it?’

Yes you’re right, and you’re also a bit wrong. After all, a lot of RPGs like the Diablo-likes have a post game where you’re just piloting the same endgame build over and over again too.

To deal with potential stagnancy, I came up with something. After all, StS-like games are fun to reach that top of a completed build because the journey is fun and you don’t get to play around with the completed build for too long. Therefore, the saved records of the Preparation runs have limited uses before they are deleted. Currently, I’m thinking each record will be deleted after one successful Story run, or after going on two Hunts.

How records are saved was a decision I was able to make thanks to experiencing both Stella Sora and CZN. Initially before even discovering either game, I was thinking that each member in the party should be recorded individually. So you can technically mix and mesh different versions of characters from different runs into the same party in Hunt or Story, which gives you a completely different experience. In Stella Sora, they save the record of the whole party at the end of the run, and you load the exact same party again for other modes. After playing both, I was glad to see the differences between individual vs party records. It could get stagnant if you just use the exact same party so I’m going to go for individual records.

There was also something else I was thankful to CZN for, besides proving the idea of using StS to create a build and then use that build again is a cool one. In ‘Old AO’, I talked about how I designed each card to have three different upgraded versions, unlike most StS-like games where there is only one upgraded version. This was inspired by Across the Obelisk, where each card also had three different upgraded versions, but their upgrades were relatively simple. My idea in ‘Old AO’ was that each version is more different compared to upgrades found in StS-likes and Across the Obelisk, but it was an unproven idea. In CZN, each card can have FIVE different upgraded versions, and these versions can be vastly different. And I thought that was super neat, and now that I have personally experienced it in a game, I can say that it works in practice and not just in theory.

So I’m fucking doubling down on it for ‘New AO’!!!! Each card can be upgraded into 7, SEVEN, 七, different hecking versions. Not only that, I’m taking it one step further. Some of the cards that can be upgraded, can also upgrade AGAIN into one of the other six versions!!! If my math isn’t wrong, that means when double upgraded, a card can have 28 different combinations.

Slay the Spire was balanced to the milligram. The developers used tens of thousands of data just in beta to balance the cards. Then there’s games like Monster Train where balance is punted through a window. I enjoyed the Monster Trains of StS more personally.

So to the heck with balance. Just have fun. When you see the chance to take a ridiculous build defining card upgrade, take it, run with it, and enjoy it. That’s how I want ‘New AO’ to operate.

Next, I want to talk about the difference in outfit and their pieces compared to ‘Old AO’. In ‘New AO’, there are Neutral skills and Class skills. Party members other than the MC have a set class. These classes have two Starter skills, two Advanced skills, and one Ultimate skill. As the skills are called, each party member starts with their two Starter skills at the start of the run. If they are a Unique character, they also start with their Signature skill that can’t be obtained anywhere else. If they are a randomly generated generic, then they start with a neutral skill based on their randomly generated trait.

For our main character, she doesn’t have a defined class. Instead, it is based on her outfit, which is separated into four pieces: Main, Headwear, Bra, and Panties. The Main and Headwear are a set and each will give access to cards from that class, which likewise consists of two Starter, two Advanced, and one Ultimate. The Main part of the outfit is what decides the two Starters skills she starts with. Meanwhile, the Headwear part gives a class related buff. The bra and panties simply each decide a neutral card that the MC starts with. So a total of two starter skills from the Main outfit, and two neutral skills from her undergarments. What this system also means is that the MC can MULTI CLASS, YAY! Depending on your needs, you might want to stick with one class for a run because their skills have good synergy with the party, or you might multi-class for a chance for a synergy with skills from the two different classes.

Neutral skills can not be upgraded, but they can come pre-upgraded when obtained.

Starter, Advanced and Signature skills can be upgraded twice. Ultimate skills can only be upgraded once but an upgraded Ultimate alone can be build defining, that’s how strong they are.

Thematically, the seven different upgrades are based on the seven sins: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, Sloth. This both provides a consistent theme for designing the upgraded versions and a way to discuss the game by saying Oh, I have an Inferno - Pride this run and it was so much more useful than the Inferno - Envy from my last run. Or, Wow, the Field of Life - Greed basically made me invincible. And it also allows someone to go, Yo, Class A with Wrath upgrades and Class B with Pride upgrades is fucked, it destroys everything. Nah friend, you gotta try Class A with Envy and Class B with Sloth. And so on.

The sexual aspect is simple. At rest points during a run, the MC can entertain certain requests from party members to restore their morale or replenish their skill uses and what not. There is a KP-like Passives system where the MC gains Passives after a certain amount of sexual experience in a category. However, there are fewer Passives compared to KP, and Passives in ‘New AO’ function similar to a roguelite system of metaprogression which buffs the MC. So you’re always progressing even if you fail the run.

Oh, and right, there won’t be NTR, the MC doesn’t start the game in a relationship. Though the party members do have like a relationship or Bond level which when increased, also provides bonus so both the MC’s Passives and party member bond level act as a form of metaprogression. And bond level increases from the MC fulfilling those requests at rest points, or from just being in the party for a run. It does mean that you can be such a god gamer that you can beat the whole game without the MC getting much passives but that was the case in KP too for pure runs.

This has been a super long post but forgive me, alright? It’s been over a month and I’m excited about ‘New AO’. I’m sure I’m missing something else, but I want to wrap things up fulfilling my earlier promise to talk about the differences to a standard StS card battler. Namely, the fact that each card or ‘skill’ has limited uses in a run, and that you draw from the whole deck or ‘skill list’ every single turn.

In a card game, and in StS-like games, when you draw your hand for the turn, you have certain information. The cards you just drew, assuming you only have one copy of them, at the earliest you can expect to see it again is in two turns or whenever your deck runs out of cards and you re-shuffle your discards into the deck. Likewise, the cards that you didn’t draw yet, you can expect to draw them in the remaining next two turns. So you can make some set up and plans in your head. You won’t see these cards again for a while. The next turn you have some expectations of what you might get next. There is randomness to the whole system, but it’s not true randomness, it’s a randomness that you can predict.

However, the culture of all StS-likes is to thin your deck as much as possible. All for the sake of consistency, the enemy of randomness. Because randomness is bad, so you want to control it as much as possible. The end result though? Your completed build is almost always auto-piloted. Sure, some hard bosses might have you playing your hand a little bit differently than intended, but for the most part, you don’t even need to look at what the enemy is doing and just play your hand like a robot. In StS-likes, except for certain unique mechanics, I really no longer care what the enemy does with a completed build, because what I play with a hand is basically pre-decided.

So how would true randomness work? In terms of cards, you can imagine it as shuffling all your discards into your deck every single turn and drawing from the whole deck again. Just true randomness by itself like that would suck just imagining it. You have a build naturally, with combos and synergies. When you lose from failing to draw that key card over and over again, you just feel frustration because you lost to randomness out of your control.

So why do it here for ‘New AO’? Are you crazy Rem?

Yes. But before I answer that, let’s talk first about the second aspect. Which is that each skill has limited uses.

In StS-likes, when you have two cards in your hand, one which does 4 damage and one which does 7 damage. Assuming all other factors being equal, such as both costing the same, the enemy doesn’t have a buff that allows them to avoid the next hit or something, and nothing special would happen if you do too much damage. Then you would always 100% play the card that does 7 damage. It’s just an obvious no brainer. And then when you get a chance to thin your deck, you’ll want to get rid of the card that only does 4 damage.

But what if you are limited? You can only play that card that does 7 damage 3 more times before it disappears, and that useless card that only does 4 damage? You can play it 8 more times. Hmmmm. Hmm. The choice is not as clear cut is it now?

Oh shoot! I also forgot something critical about the ‘New AO’ skills system. In card games, you play a card and it goes into discard or into the void or into your butt hole (also known colloquially as the void) or whatever. But these are not cards, but skills, and unless it has a keyword saying it can’t, you can use the same skill multiple times in a turn. And also there is no mana or mana cost. In StS-likes, cards can cost 1 mana, or 2 mana, or even 3 or 0. Here, there are Action Points or AP, and most skills cost one action point, or none at all. In StS-likes, high cost cards are balanced in that they are way better than 1 cost cards at the expense of you not being able to otherwise use the extra cost on something else for utility.

But here, powerful skills still cost the same 1 AP as weaker skills. The balancing factor is then that they have way less Uses before you can’t use them anymore.

These four factors: True random draw, limited uses, can use the same skill multiple times, they cost the same. All combine into something quite different in my opinion.

First of all, the design space is very different from StS. I can design the skills to all be useful. It might not be what you need RIGHT NOW, but they have their purpose or edge cases. Even still, some skills will inevitably be more useful than others, since I’m not even trying to aim for perfect balance and as an extreme example, inherently, an upgraded ultimate skill is more useful than an unupgraded starter skill.

But, we have to also discuss the purposes for the skills. They can broadly be separated into two categories I think. 1. Bossing purposes 2. Mobbing purposes, or dealing with the chaff. You want to save your stronger skills with low use limits for the boss fights and harder enemies, and use your weaker skills to deal with numerous pawns designed to cause attrition on the way to the boss.

So this creates an obvious objective in your mind. ‘Save the good stuff for hard fights!’ Simple right? So when you draw your overpowered skill against some grunts, obviously someone hits your hand with a ruler and go ‘Bad Rem! No touchy!’ right?

Welllll, let’s talk about true randomness again. You know you might not get that key skill when you need it, right? What if you use that key skill right now against these weaklings, and end the fight with just the use of one skill. Even if you draw the weaker cards, you might need to use them four times, and you only get 3 AP each turn. You might not even draw them twice for an unknown number of turns.

‘So true random is shit, go to hell Rem and eat shit.’

Wait, put down that fork and spoon!! True random with your whole skill list is a crapshoot, yeah, no argument there. But each skill has limited Uses, remember? And what that means naturally is that when a skill has no more Uses, you can not draw it anymore! So you have an option now. Here is a skill that could be useful in certain situations, but isn’t super useful for you right now. But there are other better skills you will need. So what if you just use it this turn? The sooner you use it up, the smaller your skill list will become, creating consistency.

The objective is no longer a simple, obvious ‘Save the good stuff for hard fights!’ Each turn, each battle, you have to pick based on what you are given. Do you cull the weaker skills here, and thin your skill list at the risk of not having its utilization for later fights in the run? Do you use the stronger skill here even if it’s overkill but it will save you a lot of resources? In fact, using up a strong skill will still thin the list and help consistency in the end.

There is also something else to my system. When you upgrade a card, you fully replenish all its usage. That amazing strong card you’ve been saving the whole run? You just got the opportunity to upgrade it, replenishing all its usage! You struggled for nothing, haw-haw! …Is what the devil in your head says. In hindsight, you could’ve used it more, and saved your other skills that are now depleted in the process of saving your stronger skill. But that’s the monster of hindsight, because if you don’t get a chance to upgrade the stronger skill and you HAD used it up earlier, you would come into the final fight without it at all. So that’s another factor into the fun, fun decision making when choosing which skill to use. I COULD use this strong skill to quickly finish this fight, and maybe I could get a chance later to upgrade it so I can get it back……

What isn’t this just randomness piled on top of randomness? What skills you draw you random, and then what skill you can upgrade is also random. ARGH! I give up! You can’t plan for this without going into the future!!! Hehe, yeah, it is a bit random, but there is still an expression of player skill and knowledge in how to build a strategy based on what choices you are given and expected upcoming fights, and how to pilot your build.

My prediction is that the overwhelming strategy under such a system is that once a player has an idea of how much skill uses they need to conserve for a given run, is to immediately use the first two or even the first battle to stall the battle as long as possible to cull the starter skills they don’t need by using them. After all, if an upgraded version comes along, it gets fully replenished. I think if there’s a major flaw, it’s the fact that a skill gets fully replenished once upgraded currently, so I will be watching out for that during playtesting and alpha test. My gut feeling is that it is too much but until the game is coded I won’t be able to see for sure.

(Edit: My gut feeling is usually correct so I’m going to be operating for now on upgrades not replenishing skill uses. Or maybe it only gets fully replenished on easy mode. Balance the game around replenishing only available via fulfilling sexual requests at resting points, and then allow easy mode to also replenish on upgrade. Yup, let’s go with that.)

Speaking of which, since ‘New AO’ is newly reset, there’s no code. Well, I can re-use the code I made in ‘Old AO’ for the settings menu but that is about it otherwise. However, unlike in ‘Old AO’ where the code needed was a headache to wrap my mind around, and likewise where the card design was out of control. In ‘New AO’ however it’s both technically simpler to get started on code and to design skills. I already fully designed the skills for two of the MC’s classes, with a third in work, and three classes for the party members with a fourth in work. However, I don’t think I will finish the MC’s third and the party’s fourth class right away. With just the two MC classes and three party classes, it’s more than enough for an actual game.

So in order to have personal playtesting up as soon as possible, I’m going right away into designing the combat system. It’s not a card battle system, but it will still require first changing how skills work inside the code compared to the default RPGMaker system. Having battles working at a basic level is the first step, then it would be to implement the upgrade system. There’s a lot of work, but I’m really excited for it!

Rem Diary 9/15/2025

Oh boy, it's been a month since the last Rem Diary.

Tl;dr: Not as much progress as would be ideal since I ended up taking a break that lasted for two weeks.

So I'm just going to go in chronological order of the events to retell for the past month.

So. Literally the day right after the last Rem Diary. I got hard stuck in continuing on designing the cards for the rest of the Act 1 and Act 2 outfits. And I quickly identified and realized that my vision of what a 'Resource Encounter' is (as opposed to a 'Combat Encounter', which is a battle type that most people are familiar with since they are very similar to Slay the Spire style battles against enemies), was basically not fun or interesting. It's not interesting for a player to play, and not interesting design-wise to design around. So I decided to scrap the work then and there and redo it.

I had to identify what a Combat Encounter was, and what a Resource Encounter was. I had to decide what the differences between those two were, and as well as what makes each of them a fun puzzle to go through. Because at the end of the day, like 80% of the playtime for the game is going to realistically be in either playing out a Combat Encounter or a Resource Encounter, so they better be interesting to go through again and again and again.

Actually I lied a bit, within the first two-ish weeks of the last month, I actually redid the Resource Encounter design TWICE, but for the sake of the Rem Diary and making it not too confusing to understand, I'm just going to talk about the end result.

So first, Combat Encounters. This is your typical Slay the Spire style battle. There are one or more enemies. You draw cards, you play your cards to attack or defend. Then the enemies attack or defend and you repeat until one of you goes down.

My original vision for Combat Encounters is a bit more complicated than the one I decided to scrap last month. I wanted to throw in a twist for an idea I had that Amelya is more of a pacifist type character. So the enemies would have a Health bar and Stamina bar. And you can win by getting either their Health or Stamina bar low enough. But if you deplete the enemy's health bar fully, you won't get the full rewards.

In the last month when I started to really drill and hammer down what Combat Encounters and Resource Encounters needed to be, I decided to remove the part where knocking out the enemy is the 'bad' result. There were two reasons for it. One was that it's just funnier as a player to do your silly combos and stuff and just blow someone up for big damage without worrying about hitting too hard. Two was that I had already planned something similar for Resource Encounters.

My original vision for Resource Encounters is still similar to the current vision in their key points. In my original version, a Resource is something like let's just say for now, like a Plant or Ore Node. It would have three bars, Health, Toughness and something called Quantity (I don't really like the name but don't have a better idea for it right now). My original vision was very "simple" in that each bar had like a 'Sweet Spot' that you want to land under when doing damage to each bar. Depleting Health fully would obviously destroy the resource so you get zero reward for it. But otherwise, each sweet spot that you are in at the end of the battle, the reward for the encounter would increase.

I didn't like it during the second rework last month, so like the Combat Encounter, I changed it. Now there is only a Health and Quantity bar. The Health bar will have kinda like zones in them. Let's say for a particular encounter, from 0% to 25% HP, the zone is +1. From 25% to 50%, the zone is +3. From 50% to 75%, the zone is +2. And finally from 75% to 100%, the zone is +1.

Kinda like this:

+1 +1 +1 +3 +3 +3 +2 +2 +2 +1 +1 +1

The zone is that "Quality" of the result.

And then for Quantity bar, right now I'm thinking something like let's say you increase the Quantity by 50, then it becomes +1. If you can increase it by another 200 let's say, then it becomes +2. That's the "Quantity" of the result.

And at the end of the Resource Encounter, the Quality times the Quantity is the value of the loot. So let's say the health of the resource is at 66% so the Quality is '2'. And I raised the Quantity by 58 so the Quantity is '1'. 2 x 1 = 2, and 2 is the final calculation for the game to look at the loot table and see what you get.

Yeah I have no idea how to represent any of this stuff in terms of UI right now but this is the idea of Resource Encounters that I'm working with right now. The crux of it really is to get Quantity up to +1, because otherwise you won't get any reward at all, and try to get or maintain a high Quality value while spending as few turns as possible. Why? Because if you remember last month's Rem Diary, Amelya gets Corruption as Encounters drag on.

So far, this is only one part of the design for Resource Encounters. Unlike Combat Encounters, 'the enemy' or really, 'the target' do not actively attack the player. It's just a piece of rock, bro. But. They still mostly do stuff on their turns. And they are mainly detrimental stuff such as causing the player to mill or 'Discard' their cards from the top of deck, thus pushing for re-shuffle faster and causing Corruption. In fact, like over half of time, the targets in Resource Encounters are trying to mill your deck. The rest of time they are buffing themselves, or debuffing Amelya or themselves, or even self harming themselves!

Part of the process of the redesign last month was that I decided to also come up with the concept for some of the Resource Encounters. It took me until then to realize that I couldn't properly design cards for Resource Encounters when I haven't even decided what they would do. It was like designing a tool for a problem that I didn't even know. So I came up with some neat ideas under this new design, and it's now like a road map of what cards the player will need to deal with them.

Lastly, there are two more things to differentiate a Combat Encounter and Resource Encounter. Some buffs/debuffs/keywords are more common in one type, and rarer in the other type. And then there is the fact that there will not be any cards for Resource Encounters that increases Amelya's defensiveness. After all, it's just piece of rock, sis. Why would someone need to waste energy trying to defend against a piece of rock.

And there is also a unique keyword for Resource Cards called 'First', 'Second' and 'Third'. This was actually the main focus of the first rework last month. I still want the player to draw 5 in Combat Encounters and draw 3 in Resource Encounters. And taking advantage of the fact that there will be 3 cards in hand during a Resource Encounter, I decided on the idea of a card keyword that does an effect when the card is played as the first card, as the second card, or as the third card of the turn. Thus, First, Second, and Third.

'But Rem,' you ask, 'From the sounds of things, won't Resource Encounters get monotonous? So basically, they passively mill your deck. Meanwhile, you draw 3 cards and obviously you would play the card that has a First effect, and then a card with a Second effect, and hopefully the last card will have a Third effect.'

Maybeeeee? But my gut feeling is that if anything, Combat Encounters would be more monotonous just because you can get that type of Slay the Spire type combat in well, any of the Slay the Spire type games out there, but you can't get what I'm planning for Resource Encounters anywhere else. Of course, just because something is unique doesn't make it interesting or fun. But in terms of the design space, it's already much, much better than my original vision and I have hope for it.

And if it ends up sucking, then I would just redo it again.😭

After the second redesign, I decided to change focus and work on the technical stuff for a bit. With the newly designed Resource Encounter and my ideas for it, there was a big worry. And that was that Resource Cards will have so much text and so many keywords in them that it will not fit in the tiny space for text in a card. I needed to code kind of like a detailed view thing where you press a button or right click on the card and it will expand to the screen to explain to you what it does lmao.

Long story short because it's just technical stuff, I managed to implement a very rough version of it. I still haven't coded in the keyword explanation stuff yet, but I don't think that part will be very hard compared to the stuff I coded.

And now here's where the timeline of the last month gets... less productive... Was the first two weeks last month, or really, even the weeks before then, too productive? Maybe I got a little burned out, I dunno. But two weeks ago, I decided on a whim to check the Lord of the Mysteries novel. And then I didn't stop reading until I finished it like 11 days later. It was so freaking long... but at the same time also too short near the end.

Anyway, can't cry about spilled milk. But while reading it, I was very impressed with the power system. It's very similar to wuxia/cultivation systems, which for those who don't know, my very basic newbie explanation and understanding of it is that it usually involves absorbing souls or pills and stuff, and after you've done enough, you meditate in order to 'breakthrough' to the next level. I'm still pretty foreign to the cultivation genre, my exposure basically being limited to: 'Soul Land 1' the Chinese anime, 'A Mage's Cultivation' a western harem-lit book by Bruce Sentar, and 'Wandering Sword' (a game I played on stream last year), 'Tale of Immortal', and 'Yi Xian', Chinese video games that have cultivation.

And my impressions until Lord of the Mysteries was that I didn't really 'get' the appeal of cultivation. Of course, it's a very different type of progression system, and that in itself makes it a bit novel to me. But I didn't see the draw in it other than that it is different.

But then Lord of the Mysteries came and I was hooked with its progression system. It's basically based on the cultivation system but improved? Iterated on? I'm not going to go into details of the differences because it doesn't matter here. But it got me thinking.

Basically imagine games like Fire Emblem or Ogre Battle. Remember in those games, you have a progression system with level ups where you get stats (randomly but for the sake of this discussion, the random rng part is unimportant). And then there is also the class advancement or class change. And whenever you get a new class, that character gets a MASSIVE power up, whether that is just the amount of stats gained or new skills and stuff. That's basically cultivation. That huge spike in power. It felt good, didn't it, to get a huge boost in power in those games?

However, in Wandering Sword and Tale of Immortal, the two single player cultivation RPGs that I played, I didn't really like the cultivation system. (For the sake of simplicity I'm going to use non-cultivation terms both for the audience here and also I don't remember the terms so please don't kill me in my sleep) In those games, let's say you advance from Tier 5 Class to Tier 4 Class. You'll get a huge power up. Now as a Tier 4, you can bitch slap a whole school of Tier 5 scrubs into submission with your eyes closed. However, the reality was that the opponents that you will start facing in order to continue powering up are also all Tier 4s. So even though you got what is supposed to be a big power up, it feels like nothing because all your new targets also have that same big power up. This is the inherent flaw of a system like this when there is only one character, compared to like Fire Emblem with multiple characters.

But we're not here today to talk about how to make a good cultivation game because that's outside my wheelhouse.

So why mention it, other than because I spent two weeks devouring a novel instead of working on Amelya Opus? Because I gotta forcefully make those two weeks mean something, duh!!!! Get with the program!!!

Anyway, it did get me thinking about how progression will work with Amelya Opus. So my idea had been that for each outfit, which will have around 5 to 7 pieces each, the player will craft each piece of an outfit separately.

But there's a worry with that. And the worry is that one or two pieces of an outfit, might not actually make your character stronger. You spent your time gathering the resources to make those two pieces, yet when you make them, you can't find a use for them so you end up not using them. Will you feel upset? Frustrated? Call this a shit game and stop playing?

From the whole cultivation stuff, there's a new idea that I could work. That is, instead of crafting each piece individually, you craft the whole outfit in one go. Now you instantly have a complete outfit that you can either choose to wear all the pieces of and it would just work, or you can select the pieces you think will help your build and wear just those pieces.

That sounds good, but there's a new, different flaw with this approach. With the first idea, you can start crafting pieces of an outfit as you get the resource needed. With the second idea, you need to wait until you have all the required resources gathered before you can make the outfit. What this means in gameplay terms, is that when you play Amelya Opus, and more importantly, replay Amelya Opus, you would be stuck playing with the default Healer outfit for who knows how many ingame days. Every single playthrough will start out exactly the same with no deviation other than the RNG of what gets dropped. Maybe if the RNG is bad enough, you could be stuck wearing the default outfit, playing the default cards, for days and days ingame, which equals to about dozens of battles.

'But Rem,' you comment, 'Can't you for example like make the resource requirement for the starter outfits to be really low?'

And to that, I answer with the infamous Japanese phrase:

"..." "..." "..."

...I guess that's like the third idea. But I actually hate it and would rather not do that. I think right now, my heart is still on the first idea, which is to have the player craft the outfit piece by piece.

That said, there is also ANOTHER worry with the first idea. Just in Act 1 and Act 2 alone, there are a dozen outfits planned. Once you have several outfits crafted, what are the odds that a single piece of a new outfit does something that helps you? You spent your time gathering the resources to make those a piece in Act 2, yet when you make it, you can't find a use for it so you end up not using it. Will you feel upset? Frustrated? Call this a shit game and stop playing?

😔I should stop thinking like that.

To a different but related topic, my original idea for all of the cards is that they are all useful. It's won't be like in other Slay the Spire type games where you would get a card in the early game that is like spend 1 mana to deal 5 damage and then later on in the game you can get a card that is like spend 1 mana to deal 8 damage. Getting new, better cards that obsolete old cards is the form of power progression in card games. But since cards in Amelya Opus are based off of what outfit piece you're wearing, if I do that then it would be similar to Meltys Quest where you stop wearing the earlier outfits and usually with a few exceptions, keep changing to the latest unlocked outfit.

But with a dozen outfits and potentially up to twenty outfits, if the earlier outfits are just as good and useful as the later outfits, what would be the point of crafting any new outfits... That brings us back to the early scenario of spending resources to make a new outfit piece only for it to be side upgrade at best, and a waste of time at worst. And if it's useless, then there's no reason to do Resource Encounters outside of quests, destroying a huge reason for resources to be used.

So I think I have to give up on the original idea. While it won't be so dry and basic such as the difference between a card that does 5 damage and a card that does 8 damage, the later outfits will have cards that are a bit better number wise. Of course, the plan is still that in the right build, you can still use pieces of Act 1 outfits even in Act 3. But maybe it's better for general progression that other than the experts who know the game inside and out, you shouldn't go wrong with switching to a new Act 3 outfit in Act 3 from an Act 2 outfit for example. The plan still is that every card except the literal Trap Cards for the Trap Deck has uses somewhere.

And the plan for not letting earlier outfits be obsolete or useless, and also for later outfits to have a reason for existing even though you found a good build with your current outfit pieces, all have to do with the Mastery system. I have yet to describe or talk about the Mastery system in any of the Rem Diaries so far, and that is because the Mastery system has gone through so, so many redesigns already in my head and on paper. It is after all like I said, the system I had planned on using to both have early outfits not be useless later on, and also have later outfits a reason for wearing and experimenting with even after settling on a build you like. However I've yet to spend time thinking about the Mastery after my new and current decision to let the later outfits be stronger than earlier ones. After all, a decision on one system changes all the things that are connected to that system.

I'm going to call it here for this week's? This month's? This... year's??? Rem Diary. (just kidding on this being the last post of the year, unless......) Stay safe, stay hydrated, don't be like me and get proper rest and breaks, and I'll see you all next time!

Rem Diary 8/13/2025

AAAHHHH it's been two weeks and a half from the last Rem Diary and the more I put it off the longer it's gonna get AAAHHHH

Hello everyone, let's get straight right into talking about Amelya Opus.

So I decided a week after the previous Rem Diary that I wouldn't write one up because I was still in the middle of worrying and thinking about some stuff. It was a good question of what's the point of making an eroge if the sex is so separated from the rest. But also at the same time, like, some of the best eroges out there whether it is Fate/stay night or the Venus Blood series, technically and in the case of f/sn where it literally happened, you could patch out the adult stuff and it would still be excellent eroges. So being able to patch out the adult stuff doesn't mean it shouldn't have been an eroge in the first place or that it's totally meaningless.

But, I do want a better form of integration into the adult themes with gameplay, even if I want to do it without resorting to battle fuck. So the original vision was that Amelya could cheat on her boyfriend, and it would be kind of be the player's choice and not forced onto the player.

So I thought and think and thought and think and think and thunk and contemplated. For quite a bit. I even broke my 3 week-ish long self imposed ban on using AI to create porn for me to masturbate to. I was stressed out, as it often happens to people relapsing back to their addiction. But hey, frankly, it was taking too much time also to just find and search for stuff to masturbate too, it was novel and nostalgic to re-visit old mangas and eroges and stuff but there was a limit and the limit was then since I didn't want to waste too much time just to satisfy my libido and this time, fingers crossed, I just won't overindulge and spend the whole day using AI for porn. Because this time, I'm just busy as fuck with Amelya Opus.

After a bit, I found a path that I was satisfied with. So there are some criteria. I don't want to do battle fuck. Been there, just done that, wanna try something else next. I don't want game over r*pe, as it's often called in RPG eroges. I don't want the Amelya cheating and doing lewd stuff with other people to be something that's forced, as often the case with NTR eroges. But, I don't want it to be totally 100% the player's choice whether it turns into NTR or not.

What? You think to yourself. What are you even saying, you ask me.

What I mean, is that I want a gameplay reason for the cheating to become an option for the player to take. And also I want a gameplay benefit, for just cheating out right and barreling down the slut path. I want the gameplay decisions, to affect the decision for adult content.

In other words, I needed to improve the original vision to mingle the gameplay with the adult stuff, unlike the totally separated original vision.

And so I came up with the Corruption system. Very original name yes.

So the game setting is that there is a mysterious disease/illness/sickness/whatever affecting the inhabitants of the town and the area around it from which the game will take place. Humans become comatose from catching it, and even after Amelya starts curing them, they have side effect of vastly increase libido.

Now this mysterious sickness won't have as big of an effect on Amelya, but it still has an effect. And it is reflected with Corruption.

The Corruption value has two effects on Amelya: 1. Once it hits a 100, Amelya can not go on Field Trips aka the gameplay part of battling out with cards for resources needed for recipes to progress the game and make various outfits. 2. Based on the Corruption value, at the start of an Encounter, there's percent chance for each the un-upgraded card in the deck to turn into a Corrupted version for the Encounter.

So how does Corruption get increased? 1. Amelya's Lewdness value gets added on to her Corruption at the start of every day. 2. Corruption increases by 2 whenever the deck runs out of cards and cards from the discard pile gets re-shuffled back into the deck. 3. Enemy attacks and rare card abilities can also straight up increase Corruption.

So how does Corruption get decreased? 1. There's only one way. By performing a Ritual (aka sexy time) with someone. At the start, Amelya's partner, Gene, is the only valid option.

Let's talk about Corrupted cards for a second. Most cards have four versions. The first is the base, un-upgraded version. Then you have the Enhanced (green) and Primal (dark blue) version. These are upgraded versions and are mutually exclusive. The upgraded versions are better than the base version, but Enhanced isn't necessarily weaker or stronger than the Primal version and vice versa. And finally, there is the Corrupted (pink) version.

The Corrupted version CAN be stronger than the upgraded version. They often are. But most come with drawbacks. For starters, almost all of them will add the "Exhaust" keyword, which means they get exiled and disappear from the deck for the rest of the Encounter after being played. The Corrupted version also usually after being played, will have an additional effect of Drawing cards from the top of the deck, or Discarding cards from the top of deck. Either Draw or Discard combined with the Exhaust functionally means that your deck is getting thinned and also cycled at the same time.

Now remember that Corruption is added whenever a deck runs out of cards and need to be re-shuffled. So Corrupted cards make it easier to gain Corruption, and the more Corruption you have, the highly likelihood that your cards get Corrupted. It's a vicious cycle where you want to keep your Corruption as low as possible in the first place.

But it could also be a strategy, whether on purpose or a makeshift strategy by accident, to have high corruption and keep a few key cards upgraded to prevent them from being exhausted, while other cards are corrupted and thin out the deck. Also remember, Corrupted cards have much stronger effects compared to even the upgraded versions. So even if not planned for, a Corrupted card will do serious work for you when played.

But, back to the matter of keeping Corruption as low as possible. Initially performing a Ritual with Gene during the Night Phase is the only option. But, what if it's not enough anymore? Maybe one or two poor plays, some bad Encounters, and Corruption is getting higher faster than you can lower at Night with Gene. And remember this game has a Persona-like timed component for the main story so you can't just waste days not going on a Field Trip because your Corruption is too high.

Then... well...

Maybe it's time to sneak behind Gene's back and find one of the now cured but horny Townspeople to do a Ritual with.

Staying faithful is going to be hard mode, because it means you are really good at the game and know its system inside-out. And it's this similar dynamic of player skill allowing both the freedom of successfully pursuing the pure route OR the slut route that is similar to Karryn's Prison that I think is going to be fun to see. >:)

So that happened, and figuring out the Corruption system brought a huge relief to my shoulders. Then the flood gates opened and it was time to start planning out the game. For Karryn's Prison, this was "just" planning out all the Passives and Edicts from the start. For Amelya Opus however, I need to plan out all the outfits, and the cards that they have.

And the planning and brainstorming I did, and are doing and will keep doing. So there is going to be 6 outfits in Act 1, including the Healer outfit that Amelya starts with and being naked. I haven't done a hard count, but I think I've came up with around an average of 8 unique cards per outfit. Cards that don't belong in the Field deck will also have three additional versions in the form of Enhanced, Primal and Corrupted. Then there's the 'Mastery' cards and I won't go into the Mastery system today since this post is too long anyway, but I think there's an average of 4~5, let's go with 4 unique cards per outfit.

Currently, there's 20 outfits kinda planned. 2 of these are kind of like post-game achievement reward so I won't worry about these for now. That brings it down to 18. 6 including the starter Healer and also the no clothes 'outfit' are available as possible options in Act 1. Then 7 more outfits are planned to be available in Act 2, bringing the total possible options to 13. And finally 5 more are planned to be available in Act 3, but really these 5 are also potentially available near the end of Act 2 too, but I'm just going to categorize these as Act 3 outfits because they are low priority. And of these 5, 1 or maybe 2 of them are kinda iffy for now.

So really, I'm looking at planning out 13 outfits for Act 1 and Act 2. And honestly, even we stop here, based off of the above math, this is around 12 x 13 = 150ish unique cards to plan and design from the get-go before anything else.

And oh, also, remember the SECS stats I mentioned in previous Rem Diaries? The Stylish - Elegant - Cute - Sexy stats, standard RPG stats really. I will be using them to scale the effects of the card so I do not have the luxury of bloating the card pool with cards that are like, 'Do 4 damage' but the next card is 'Do 6 damage'. If you count a card that does 4 and a card that does 6 as two unique cards in other games, then we are looking at 150 x 4 = 600 unique cards with just the first 13 outfits because of their Enhanced, Primal and Corrupted versions.

And with the cards keeping up with theme and class archetype of each outfit, I need to bring 150ish cards for 13 outfits before continuing.

So the Sunday that just passed, August 10th. That would have marked the two weeks mark since the previous Rem Diary. I originally planned to write a post then and there, talking about the Corruption system as I did in today's post. At the moment of time of August 10th, my progress with the outfit and cards was that I was working on the 6th and last outfit of Act 1. But then I was thinking. What if this task is going to be much more challenging then I anticipated? What if I do a big post yapping about Corruption and current progress on the outfit and card designs, but then end up getting a writer's block and such, and get stonewalled in the planning?

So I decided not to post. I want to have more work done to be sure that at least 13 outfits is even feasible.

So right now as of this moment, I would say 9 out of 13 have their non mastery cards planned out. 5 out of 13 have their mastery cards planned out. 11 out of 13 have their Ultimate planned out.

I would say I'm making pretty good progress compared to three days ago to be confident that I can at least come up with 13 outfits for the game. 12 if you discount being naked as an outfit. It would still be a lot of different builds and styles of play. There's even one potential infinite combo that isn't a true infinite but it comes pretty close and would be cool to experience if all the pieces line up. Basically a meme build and who doesn't love shooting for the stars for meme builds in strategy games

There's a lot of dynamics at play here, because unlike a normal Slay the Spire-like cardbuilder game, cards are chosen beforehand based on the outfit pieces you selected. You don't really get more cards into your deck as much as you swap some cards for others. And it also turns conventional learned cardbuilder wisdom of trying to trim or cycle your deck as much as possible on its head because remember, that will come at cost of causing you to gain more Corruption faster. Yet at the same time, it does bring you consistency and control so it's not a bad thing.

So there's a lot of things going on. But it's fun!! Honestly, the planning and brainstorming is both the funnest and hardest part. Back for KP I basically slept, ate and brainstormed and that was the whole day every day. And right now it's the same with my work-life balance being completely wrecked and one-sided again. But I also just can not wait to finish up this post and go back to coming up with ideas so that's what I will just do.

See you next time and thanks for reading!

Rem Diary 7/27/2025

Already once again another week, another unstructured post by yours truly.

First, Project Amelya now officially has a name!! And it is "Amelya Opus"!!! Amelya Opus will be the third title in the Remtairy Heroine series!👏👏

So for this week, I started off once again on the Settings menu code, and I got the ingame language setting working, which was the main reason I set out to work on it first. It's boring technical work but it's done for now and good riddance. There's still stuff like control remapping and fullscreen toggle and all that stuff but that's in the low priority list now. I probably won't even work on that stuff for the first alpha build.

Then, I brought the card game combat plugin for RPGMaker MZ and have been studying and tinkering with it. I've already started the preliminary stages of coding in the four decks and all the work that revolves around that stuff. This is also technical stuff like the settings menu but to me it's way more fun and challenging to play with. I already have so many things I want to do but I'm squeezing and pinching myself to only focus on the most important things and to do them step by step before I overwhelm myself with too many things to work on at the same time.

And finally, for 3ish days in this week, I've been relaxing (escaping) a bit playing new games and checking out some anime. One of new games I played was The Great Villainess. The more I played the more disappointed I got with it. Battles all play basically the same way, so there is no tactical aspect involved. The map has very little strategic element to it, there's basically one right way to tackle the objective and trying to do it any other ways just means wasting more time doing the same battles over and over again. It was tedious and grindy and time wasting. No tactical or strategy value. And there was no feeling of getting stronger since the difference in level up was minuscule with the enemy scaling up to you in the next chapter. Like sure, Fire Emblem is the same in that enemy stats also get higher each chapter, but despite that you definitely feel stronger with more tools to play with.

It was another valuable lesson in game design. It's going to be very important to me that Amelya Opus does not end up feeling like that.

As for the rest of the 3ish days, I randomly put on an anime to watch while eating lunch, and I ended up enjoying it alot. The first episode was pretty meh, but then the not-Chopper character showed up in episode two and it got significantly, drastically better for me. I ended up finishing the rest of the season after dinner, and then I went straight into the manga the next day and ended up reading the rest of the 150-ish chapter.

I am talking about "I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I Can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability". There are quite a bunch of major sus stuff in the anime/manga. But if you can ignore it, then what you get is IHMO a very comedic light hearted story with a serious character moments here and then as well as the wonderful trope of enemy turned friend, which is always a joy when it is done well and for me it was done very well here. I loved all the chibi and tsukkomi comedy and silly faces/reactions. Its bad point really is the sus stuff that makes it hard to recommend to more polite company.

But a light hearted comedy with a bit perversive and a bit serious was exactly what I needed. Because oh boy, if you haven't been following what had been happening in the adult gaming world the past week and all the news around it. It's honestly depressing and distressing. And it didn't start just from the events of this week.

If you know me, I dislike talking about politics and all that stuff. But just because I dislike it doesn't mean it just goes away. In my earlier Rem Diary this month, I talked about the main reason I haven't outputted anything in the ten months before this. But before AI Porn Addiction took a hold of me, I had a different worry and issue going on for a while by that point. The events of this week, for those who are unaware, where 'payment processors' have caused Steam to change their policy towards adult games, and Itch.io to self-immolate themselves and essentially hide or remove all their adult games, didn't just start this week. For years now, there has been an anti-porn attack from all different angles. Japan and sites like DLsite have been under fire for awhile with Visa/Mastercard. Countries like China have always been anti-adult content, and had been getting stricter with stuff like that since the Covid lockdowns began. Countries like South Korea and Germany have been putting bigger and bigger restrictions and bans on adult games. Culturally there are even attacks in the form of psyop movements with 'nofap' or 'semen retention' claiming this or that with unproven pseudo science. There's just been attacks from all angles everywhere from the people with money and the people with power.

It's depressing. It's distressing. And most of all, it's sad for me. In multiple ways, I would not be here today without the adult industry. But there are people out there actively fighting to oppress, ban, and make illegal for people who are different than them, people who want to enjoy and like things that have been legal since forever.

But what can I do. That's where I got lost. But since the incident earlier this month, and after finishing the current manga for the Reincarnated as the 7th Prince, I found my answer. I can't do the fighting. Because my skills lie in creating something worth other people fighting for and that would make a bigger impact overall. If the argument is not something general such as 'All Video Games Are Bad' or 'All Porn Are Bad and Must Be Outlawed', but more specific such as 'All Adult Games Are Worthless Meritless Shovelware or AI Slop and So Should Just Be Illegal Because blahblah', then I can provide the ammunition to counter that. Exhibit A: Karryn's Prison. An adult game that marries game systems with adult elements to create something unique and different. It's not everyone's cup of tea nor is it perfect, but at this point in time, I don't think someone can objectively call it a game that is not as good or interesting or deep as other video games.

And I want Amelya Opus to become Exhibit B.

When I first was designing Karryn's Prison, I had already planned a fallback plan: to make a safe version of KP where you would need to patch in the adult content like Club Bifrost and Island SAGA. But I thought the wind was blowing ok and never fully developed that fallback plan and just let the sex stuff fully integrate into the gameplay making it extremely hard to separate.

This time however, the winds are looking really, really bad. Who knows what will happen few years from now. But this time I'm designing from the start with the fallback plan of the game being playable without the sex stuff. Even without the events of just this week, I think with everything else that had been going on in the past few years, I would've ended up feeling this way, though not as strongly. In the first place, I have already said years ago that I don't want to create another Karryn's Prison, another battlefuck eroge. I want and need to do something different. And on Sachinama's end, when he first came up with this project that he intended to do on his own, he intended for it to be a bit of a spiritual successor to Minako, a NTR Rpgmaker game that had no gameplay. Except it would have gameplay this time.

Someone on Discord commented that vibe surrounding the project feels more like a successor to Meltys Quest then KP and that is definitely true for me.

If Exhibit A is proving that an eroge, an adult game, can have sexual content deeply integrated with tight gameplay. Then I wouldn't exactly want Exhibit B to just rehash that. No, I want Exhibit B to prove that an eroge can have tight gameplay while having sexual content. Instead of battlefuck style sex, Amelya Opus will sex scene that is visual novel style like Meltys Quest, the type of sex scene that is usually associated with anime style eroges.

This might be very disappointing to fans and supporters hoping for another game like Karryn's Prison from us because they are tired of most other eroge doing that VN style sex scene. But just like how KP is not everyone's cup of tea, Amelya Opus is also not going to be everyone's cup of tea. And I think that's fine. No video game or any piece of media is everyone's favorite. I think it's important that Sachinama and I just create the game we want to create right now.

I'm going to leave things off here today. It's past midnight and I still need to shower and get ready for bed and tomorrow. There's so many things to do, and the future looks scary but I'm going to try my best.

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!