March 20th 2023: Progress Report and Announcement

Hello everyone, Rem here. It's with a bit of a heavy heart as I'm about to write today's post. So right away, I'm going to say what it is and then give a bit of an explanation behind my thought process.

I'm going to be taking a break from work for a month, and there will be no more weekly Progress Reports during the same time period.

So, basically, the gist and source of it is that the Gym DLC has become a bit of weight around my neck, a scarlet letter, an albatross. From the day we decided to delay releasing it until now, it's been a source of constant pressure and stress. I lose about six strands of hair every time I shower now, and who knows how many more elsewhere. The other day while I was cleaning my bed sheets, I used a lint roller to collect all the hair on my bed and there was easily more than thirty.

Hey, maybe that has nothing to do with anything and the Head & Shoulders shampoo that I've been using all my life is the cause. I did order a new shampoo, supposedly made with Japanese rice or something that's supposed to heal your scalp when you're losing hair. Maybe I'm just naturally balding too.

But, I wouldn't be surprised if the cause is partially stress, because it has been stressful. I actually have quite a lot of new ideas for the next game, and they're all different from each other and of course, different from Karryn's Prison. They have different gameplay, and different requirement for the type of game systems I would need to program. I don't even know yet if I have the technical prowess to do any of them because I would need to dedicate time to writing and testing code, maybe even on different game engines. But I haven't been able to do that, my hand just stops because there is the Gym DLC that has been put on hold, and it being put on hold has put pretty much everything else on hold.

Everything just circles back to the Gym DLC being on an indefinite holding state. As long as it is not released, I can't do anything else. But at the same time I can't put myself to releasing it.

So some people who don't follow me weekly will be very lost, so I'm going to retell what happened. Basically, we were originally set to release the Gym DLC, and then we opened a public beta test for it, was surprised by some of the bad feedback we received, and then decided to not release it so we can maybe see how we can 'fix' it.

But, since the day we made that decision, I have found zero satisfactory solutions on how to or what to 'fix'. Here arise the conflict and struggle. And the actual conflict is the different between what I want, and what a player might want. I think, this isn't specifically about Gym DLC itself per-say, but more to Karryn's Prison as a whole.

Sachinama and I both spent around the last four years of our lives, devoted to working on KP every day and night. I gleefully made a plan and design at the start, and while there was some bumps and twists and turns (*cough, at one point re-doing the Passives system and by extension, the Desire system) I remained honest and steadfast to the original design and vision I had and four years later, we successfully finished KP. But I personally didn't have some kind of strong sense of accomplishment, like something out of a TV drama where it's over and then there's a party and cake and banners and we celebrate a job well done. Frankly, I remember the next two week after releasing KP as a frenzy of bug fixing and such.

So KP was finished, but at the same time it didn't feel finish because I never stopped working after that. And in a different way that baffles me, some players also don't feel KP is finished for different reasons.

But I want to stress this disconnect, KP is finished, and has been finished. I personally didn't feel like I finished something because I kept doing bug fixes or adding small minor things or improvements. And then I would feel weird when I read someone go, 'Hey, where did all the updates go? Has Karryn's Prison been abandoned? Wow.'

And my eyes fall out of their socket whenever I read comments like that because 1. KP was content complete and finished when we released it and 2. We've been working the whole time making small improvements like fixing up some CGs, adding new variations to existing CGs, bug fixes, optimizations and so on.

KP will always be our baby, and my first baby. We poured everything into KP, and I used at the time, over a decade of eroge experience and all our other experience we had into making it.

I think,

I think... (there was about a period of ten minutes as I paused and thought about what to write next)

I think, losing the timing and not getting that hollywood style mission accomplished sense of completion after finishing KP was really bad. The original plan in my heart, was something like once KP is finished I'll fly over to Japan and I can pat Sachinama in the back and hug him and go out to celebrate over some good food. But that chance never came because of Covid, and also because right away work resumed non-stop with bug fixing and reading reviews and fixing the small issues from those reviews. In fact, I don't want to put all the blame on Covid but basically I haven't left my house since Covid became a thing. Part of it is of course I was focused on KP, and another part of it was I didn't want to put my family at risk by going outside.

Then I had my wrist injuries for a month, and there was the eye surgeries stuff we both did while working on the Gym DLC, and it was just this vague sense of existence that KP had become. Is it finished, is it not finished? Of course it was finished, we worked four years on it and poured everything we had during that time. But I felt like I had to keep going even though it was finished.

And here's the struggle with designing the Gym DLC. It's very easy to see what most players would want. I'll say it, it's something simple as Karryn working out and getting harassed, and maybe even some shower sex related to the prison shower dropped soap trope.

But for one, I don't like repeating same content and choices, and two, I enjoy making something new and different. Sachinama also feels similar in not retrending the same ground. This goes into the broader expectations of what people might have for KP's continued updates.

In a business sense.......... I'm sure the right decision that 9 out 10 people would take in our position, would be exactly what most people want. That is, simply more KP content that is the same but with a different skin. More side jobs, more sex, more costumes, just give 'em a different look and put some spit shine on it.

But I'm personally someone that only enjoys trying something creatively new and different. Making Meltys Quest 2 after Meltys Quest would've been the safe and secure option. However, making KP was thrilling and exciting. We were able to work day and night for four years because we were creating something new and fun.

The Gym DLC was us attempting to add something new, a different spin to KP. It's different from the existing side jobs and content. It wasn't meant to be the same content but in the gym instead. But when we received feedback that amounts to, '...That's it? Where's xyz' It was hurtful and showed the broader disconnect that I've been talking about between how some people see KP (unfinished, abandoned).

So I want to take a month off. Like actual time off. Not the vague breaks that I've been talking about where I'm kinda of taking a break from work but not really because I'm still actually working a bit behind the scenes here and there and thinking about KP.

What I want is a bit of time to collect myself a bit. I want to rest but I've never really rested because there was always more work to do. There's going to different school of thoughts in reaction to my decision. One I'm not going to entertain is the visceral reaction. We'll probably going to be receiving more death threats in the next coming few weeks. Not sure when and why, probably there's some echo chamber in the corner of the vast internet somewhere where people build themselves up to the point where it's socially acceptable to send other people death threats for perceived slights. This is the unfortunate side of effect of having thousands and thousands of people follow you, the more people there are, the higher chance of attracting unwanted attention and types.

More importantly, there will be a logical school of thought to my decision, and it's the one that Sachinama subscribes to, which is Rem, if it's stressing you out this much, let's just release the Gym DLC as is without changing anything. Sachinama's opinion is the one the holds the most weight in the world for me. First of all, Sachinama is the only one besides me that really knows how much work we've put into the Gym DLC, and frankly, I've always thought that it was more than enough.

But like I've been talking about today, this goes beyond more than just the Gym DLC itself. Which is why I want to take some time off to collect myself a bit. Karryn's Prison is my baby, and maybe I'm just scared of letting go. I've pretty much never left my house during and after KP's development except to go to the doctors or physical therapy. Essentially, I live in NYC all my life, paying NYC rent prices and NYC taxes, but I might as well have been living in the middle of nowhere with no amenities except access to Amazon deliveries, and it would've been the same.

So I want to try something different, which is basically to go outside to look at the flowers and smell the bees, or so the saying goes, I think. Coincidentally, today marks the first day of spring. And a different coincident, an indie eroge I was looking forward to coming out last week got delayed for a month, and it's the type of eroge that is the same type as one of my new game ideas. And something that's not a coincident, is that last Tuesday I went to the eye doctor as part of my scheduled check up post-surgery, and it was discovered that my eyes were extremely dry.

Like my eye tear film? Tear ducts? Or something like that I forgot, was about 1/4 of the average size. Basically, I was spending too much time in front of the computer (of course, since I'm in front of one from the moment I wake until I sleep). So after discussing some solutions, I agree to have something called 'collagen punctual plugs' inserted into my eyes temporary for a month. And a month later, I'll go back, get re-examined and see how the situation is, and if everything is alright, insert a more permanent and expensive silicone implant into my eye. Basically, what they are supposed to do if my understanding is correct, is keep my eyes my lubricated or something. The alternatives were really: 1. less time in front of the computer, not really a permanent solution here since it's my job and also source of entertainment or 2. depend on eyedrops for the rest of my life, which I feel would be really unpleasant.

So yeah, that also happened last week.

What do I hope to accomplish by taking a month off for myself?

I don't know, I haven't done something like this before so I don't know what I would discover. Maybe nothing. Maybe during the period, a lightbulb in my head would turn on and suddenly I would have this great idea for something I can do to modify the Gym DLC to my liking. Honestly, I think the possibility of that is near zero since what, it's been a few months and there's still nothing I really want to change.

What I'm kinda hopeful for, is that by taking time off and away, I'll be able to have a firmer conviction of, yeah, KP is done and I'm happy with it, as I rightfully should be after everything I've put into it.

Anyway, that's the story of my decision that I agonized over. Thank you for reading this far. As for the actual Progress Report, the Stray Pubes DLC came out last week, and alongside fixing the bugs that popped up, I also added a new feature to the Stray Pubes DLC during the weekend. There's a new option now to separately change Karryn's pubic hair color. The default setting is that it's the same color as her hair, but if you want to, you can now color her pubes a different color from her hair within the options of purple, black or blond.

I don't ask for everyone to accept my decision, but I hope through today's writing, most would understand a bit of my viewpoint and where I'm coming from.

February 27th 2023: Progress Report and Announcements

Hello everyone, a dizzy Rem here with this week's Progress Report!

Oh god, it's almost 4AM and my head is literally spinning the room right now.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS for this week! But forgive me because I think I need to eat or something because I'm getting light headed so I'm going to copy and paste from the Steam Announcement I just wrote, which is also available at https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1619750/view/3663152658900813300

First up, the store page for our first DLC is now up!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2276690/Karryns_Prison__Stray_Pubes/

Yes, this isn't the Gym DLC I mentioned last year, however since that is currently still being internally reviewed for possible gameplay changes, we decided to work on something else in meantime, and that something else was the Stray Pubes DLC! Please take a look at the store page above for more details for what exactly it will contain!!

The plan is to release the Stray Pubes DLC on March 15th 2023, and the price in American dollars will be $1 USD. That's right, you can't even buy a six piece chicken nugget for that price. It's a cosmetic DLC containing exactly what the store page says it will contain, so if any of it interests you, please add the DLC to your wishlist!

Now for a second announcement, Karryn's Prison has now been updated to v1.2 with the following changes!!

* Implemented Lovense Integration! * Added new CG variants for Karryn's Vaginal Sex skill. * Implemented more optimizations for lower ended PCs. Credits to madtisa#8743 * for the code and ideas. * Fixed various CGs. * Fixed various minor bugs.

For people with low/underspecced PCs, I hope the optimizations that we worked on for v1.2 will help you out!!

Now, some people might have just read the above changelog and wondered themselves, what the heck is a Lovense Integration? Essentially, Lovense is a company that makes sex toys and we just partnered up with Lovense to provide the ability for people to connect their Lovense toys to Karryn's Prison and sync up the toys with the action that is happening ingame!

This was one of the major thing I've been working on in the past few months, which was not only to add Lovense Integration, but to do it in a way no one has ever done before for an eroge.

Please check out the Karryn's Prison page on the Lovense website for a moment and watch the video!

https://www.lovense.com/game/karryns-prison

Essentially, not only will your Lovense toy react when something happens to Karryn, with the RAID system that I designed, you can customize your toys specifically to only react to certain sex acts if you wish. In addition, unlike all Lovense Integrations for eroge up until now, Karryn's Prison features completely uniquely designed toy patterns specific to not only each sexual act that Karryn is experiencing, but it's also based on Karryn's sexual experience! So the way a Lovense toy reacts when Karryn is getting her nipples pulled is different from when Karryn is getting pounded in the butt, and it also reacts differently when Karryn is a huge slut!

Don't just take my word for it, here are some of the feedback from our beta testers!

If you're interested and in the position to own a sex toy, Lovense is currently running a 60% sale for Karryn's Prison players here:

https://www.lovense.com/p/KarrynsPrison

You can find the Lovense settings in the ingame Settings menu. And if this is your first sex toy, please remember to practice safety and good hygiene!!!

Now I know most people don't have the means to get a Lovense toy, whether it is financially or you're in a living arrangement where you can't own a sex toy. But I still wanted to design and implemented the Lovense Integration because I felt that the way other eroges have done their Lovense Integration to be very lacking and not using the full potential of connecting sex toys to an eroge. Doing something that no one else has ever done AND advancing the field of eroge to new heights is something I would gladly take the opportunity to do even if only ten people could currently afford to try it out. It was fun to wreck my brain on how to come up and design the RAID system, and hearing the feedback from the beta testers made it all worthwhile.

Anyway, to celebrate the release of v1.2, the Stray Pubes DLC announcement and release date, and our partnership with Lovense, Karryn's Prison will be 15% off with the next six days!

So yeah, big stuff.

AND ALSO, there's actually a third announcement that I didn't talk about on Steam. And it's about the Karryn figurine. Sachinama will be posting some factory photos of the current work-in-progress mold of the figurine in today/tomorrow's Ci-en post (And our Ci-en page is at https://ci-en.dlsite.com/creator/2068 for those who didn't know). So work on that end has been continuing to progress!

EDIT: The photos are now up at: https://ci-en.dlsite.com/creator/2068/article/811099

I think I really need to eat or drink something or I might faint, so I'm going to end this week's post here. Please don't be like me, and take care of your body and stay warm and hydrated!

Publishing Game Announcement

Hi everyone, Rem here with an announcement today! Also potentially a long post down below so get comfortable and drink some water!

At the beginning of the year, on here and on Steam, I talked about that we're going to localize and publish a new eroge this year, and this eroge is one of my favorite of 2021. Well, the localization work on the game is almost finished now, and I submitted for review and approval to Steam last week. And on Tuesday, I finally got a reply back and it was beyond devastating to me. Not only did Steam reject the game, but it's a firm and strong rejection in very strong and severe language. I barely got any sleep that night and woke up the next day with a headache the whole day.

However, the silver lining here is that since it's no longer possible to release the game on Steam, we're going to release the game earlier than the original plan of early September since there's no longer any need to go through the whole Steam review and waiting process. The plan now is release on non Steam online vendors around the last week of July or the first week of August, it will really depend on how talks with the vendors pan out from this point forward.

But without further ado, I would like to introduce to you all the game that we are going to publish next, which is......

Kiara -The Knight of Icicles-!!

Developed by Sensouya-san, localized in collaboration with Cursed Atelier

Go check out the homepage I made for Kiara for some quick details and screenshots!

https://remtairy.com/kiara/

Kiara will retail hopefully for $10 after I talk to some online vendors and again, hopefully we will be able to release it on the last week of July or the first week of August.

Have you checked out my website above yet? Because the rest of this post will be pretty long and assumes you've at least glanced the info above for a bit.

So Rem, why pick Kiara to localize and publish?

Well, the answer is extremely simple. Because I like the game, and I want to see the developer be more well known by having one of their eroge be localized and available on Steam.

Kiara, to put it very simply, is a CG hunter game. It's an RPG style eroge, made in RPGMaker MV, but there's no leveling, no grinding, very minimum gameplay all around. You control Kiara moving around in simple maps made with the default RPGMaker MV tilesets. The menus are also default and basic, and with the exception of the character sprite of a few characters like Kiara, everything is right out of the box of RPGMaker MV stuff.

However. The mapping might be simple and plain, there's no gameplay, so what is so good about the game Rem?

I've played, been playing, and still playing eroges, for over a decade, with hundreds and hundreds of titles under my belt from professional $100 eroges to indie and free eroges. And I plan on playing more because I love eroges. Astronauts is coming out with a $80 RPG drawn by M&M at the end of this month. You bet your ass I pre-ordered it and I'm gonna be playing it next weekend. All the top sellers on DLsite that came out, you bet I brought and played them. And even the non top sellers, I buy and play them. Just like Kiara here which at the time of this writing, has a very respectable 8K sales on DLsite. I think when I decided to publish Kiara around the start of this year, it had only around 4K sales, and when it was just released, I think it had about 2K sales on its first week. First week sales on DLsite usually is an indicator of the general consensus around a game, so 2K sales lands Kiara above a lot of other indie RPG eroges that only get sub 1K sales in their first week, but also means that it is firmly below the blockbusters that get 10K~30K on their first week with a lifetime earning potential of 10K~100K sales. A 2K game would be lucky to break 10K sales in its lifetime, so the fact that Kiara is currently at 8K is actually a big surprise, and it's most likely because of Sensouya-san's most recently released eroge about a pink hair elf that they just released at June of this year.

I'm throwing out a lot of numbers right now, but what I'm basically trying to say here, is that to me, Kiara should not be a 2K tier game. At the same time, especially as a veteran of eroges, I can easily surmise why it's a 2K tier game. You can see it in the screenshots, the UI is the default RPGMaker MV style, the tileset, map, everything feels very much like an indie RPGMaker MV. Basic and no frills. And in fact, it's a CG hunter type game, so there's not really any gameplay involved.

Yet, to me, Kiara is not a 2K tier game. Which is why I want to localize and publish it on Steam so more eyeballs can see the game. The screenshots, don't do it justice. At the same time, of course naturally, Kiara is not a game for everyone.

So who is Kiara for?

Kiara is female protagonist eroge. So a big deciding factor is if you find the protagonist attractive, because pretty much all the sex scenes will be about her. So this is the obvious thing. If you don't like Kiara's design at all, then Kiara isn't for you, simple enough.

If you pass the attractiveness test, next is the actual game contents. Kiara doesn't have any gameplay, and it doesn't really try to throw in any gameplay. And so what if it doesn't. Sometimes, a fella is just in a mood for a simple sex romp. I remember, in the infancy of the indie RPGMaker eroge community, where there is so many games padded with meaningless basic RPG gameplay when what you're really after, is the next sex scene. Of course the scene has long evolved since then. There are indies with better plots. Indies with gameplay. Battle fuck. Sex during combat. Oh the minds that were blown, among other body parts, at the open possibility of sex scenes not being an isolated event outside of combat, but something that can be part of the gameplay.

But does every eroge that you ever play need to re-invent the wheel? Maybe you do. But I personally, sometimes like to just play a simple short eroge that is hot and arousing as fuck. It's like a balanced diet. Play an epic 100+ hours eroge. Then play a few short indie eroges to cool down. For me, Kiara is that pallet cleanser. If I'm stuck on a desert island and I can only bring 5 eroges with me, I would pick Rance X and Ikusa Megami Zero for my #1 and #2 pick. These are the $100 eroges with epic stories, characters, gameplay, the full works with 200++ hours playtime. And then for my #3, #4, and #5 picks, it would depend on my mood but I would be perfectly fine if Kiara was one of those three so I have sometime when I just want to be purely horny and see an attractive female protagonist get fucked silly for hours.

Okay Rem, cool, you like Kiara, we get it.

Yup. Alright, so for the main selling point of Kiara, which is what I call, 'scene progression'. I'm going to use a few vague examples here. People with lots of eroge experience, will know what I'm about to poorly convey.

Let's take a popular indie eroge trope, which is the shared bathhouse sex. The female protagonist enters a bathhouse, and finds out that either there is a shared bath, or there is a separate male-only and female-only bath. The mind boggles here. Slutty protagonist and sex-on-the-mind player will try to enter the male-only bath section, if there is one, or 'accidentally' enter the shared bath. And oh no! There's penises in the shared bath!

Anyway, some sort of sex scene occurs. Now let's throw some vague examples of how a few eroges in history has handled this trope: Game A: Only one sex scene. The female protagonist has to be very slutty to enter, and she enters knowingly that she will have sex inside. (Spoiler: She does. With four different men.) Game B: At first, it wasn't a shared bath. However, the owner switches it up, and it turns into a shared bath. Outraged, the female protagonist leaves once men enter, no sex occurs. However, once her lewd has increased a bit, she can enter the bath again. No sex, but there is light groping. Once she's even more lewd, the next scene occurs and she has sex with two men at the bath. Game C: The female protagonist enters the shared bath, a man come to her and start chatting her up. She's embarrassed by his naked body and that's it. Once her lewdness is increased a bit, the next scene occurs where there's light touching and handjob involved. And then once her lewdness is further increased, the final scene occurs where she has sex with the guy at the bath.

In these examples, Game A had one stage for the bathhouse scene, Game B and Game C had three stages. This is what I mean by scene progression.

Now in Kiara, there is also a bathhouse event. And in Kiara, it has SIX stages of scene progression.

Veterans of indie eroges, especially RPGs. You know what I'm talking about when you see a scene in an RPG that you really, REALLY like, but then you're slightly disappointed that there is only one scene, or as is the standard for most of the popular top sellers RPGs, there is only three stages for that scene.

In Kiara, the major sex scenes all have about five to seven stages.

FIVE. I, Rem, I hope for the day that all the top tier blockbuster 10K++ sales RPGs, will go from three stages to at least five+ stages. Because it is, so, so, soooo, fucking hot when the situation escalates further then three stages. Shinachiku-castella is one of my favorite indie eroge developer. Anyone who has played their eroges know that their scenes have way more than three stages, and it's amazing. Shinachiku-castella found a publisher, so they don't need my help.

I'm not publishing Kiara for the money. In fact, since Steam has rejected the game, chances are that I won't make back the time and money I spent on getting Kiara localized and published. But I like Kiara, I like the eroges Sensouya-san makes, and I want to see them succeed, and I want more eroges with better scene progressions. Kiara is not going to be for everyone. I'm not selling a false product saying everyone will enjoy Kiara. Everyone has different sexual preferences after all. But if you like female protagonist RPGMaker games, and you don't mind playing a game with no gameplay, and you want to see a basic, simple, but extremely well done take at popular eroge sex scenes tropes found in indie RPGs,

You're gonna love Kiara during its few hours of staying time.

Thank you listening to my TED Talk, I'm Rem and I post on SubscribeStar every Monday.