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.