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!