June 15th 2024: Progress Report

Hello everyone, I don't want to waste time so I want to jump right into the post for today.

It has been a very eventful and stimulating week, and the next few weeks will probably be too in unexpected ways. Through chance encounters, chance happenings, chance conversations, various threads of my life all converged to the same point last week...

And I finally achieved a mental breakthrough. The mental hurdle that was preventing me from fully committing not only an idea, but the concept of making a new game, is finally broken through. 😭

Sachinama has been and will continue to work on the P cup DLC for Karryn's Prison for the next month. But I will be moving on ahead to focusing my energy on planning and designing the next new game.

To simplify it all, I think mental hurdle I was dealing with basically because I was too into my head. Through an unexpected source completely unrelated to gaming really, I was reminded of and asked a question that made me think. Why back in 2017 after I had cancer, I was able to contact Sachinama to propose that I localize Meltys Quest and publish it on Steam? Why a few years later, were I able to design and create Karryn's Prison? And why had I been unable to move forward in the past few years past Karryn's Prison and make a new game?

There's a few ways to answer the first two questions. I hated, DETESTED how Sakuragame fucking operated in 2017 where they took indie japanese eroge and then sold them for pennies on Steam as broken, buggy, machine translated garbage. So I wanted to show them up and prove to the world that it can be properly in native English, and that japanese indie eroges are better than the trash that Sakuragame was turning them into.

I decided to make Karryn's Prison because I already proved that native localizations are way better than machine translations for everyone involved, whether it is the fans who buy and play them, or the original developers, or the eroge industry as a whole. So next I wanted to show that eroge is more than valid medium can be so much more by creating a game that marries the sex with the gameplay.

But these two aren't the real answer. They're the answer for the DRIVE, the PASSION. They are not the answer to HOW I was able to do it. It's not the answer to the WHY I was able to propose the idea to Sachinama in 2017 after I had cancer, but not before I had cancer. Detesting Sakuragame and loving eroge and experience with localization were already part of me before I had cancer, not something I magically developed a month after I recovered from the surgery.

The HOW was... simple and complicated to remember. And it was... because I wasn't afraid to fail. Afraid to make an attempt. After Karryn's Prison, I was afraid. KP used up my life's knowledge of both gaming and eroges and erotic material to create and design the concept, the concept of a game, an eroge, that iterates and pushes the concept of female protagonist corruption past levels anyone else has ever done before. It wasn't even an iteration as it was straight up jumping through levels and steps of iterations that weren't even done yet but theoretically I thought could be done and so I further iterate on those theoretical concepts.

After KP, I was afraid of what else I had left in my tank. I knew I didn't want to just make a sequel, another game that was like KP but with minor iterations. If I had ideas for iterations to KP's format, I would've already done it in the first place when designing it. And I wasn't interesting in just remaking it for the sake of success or money. I'm incapable of operating like that, I can't make a game if I don't have the passion and drive behind it.

And I was also afraid of something else too. With KP, I achieved success and with it came fans and expectations. I was making something that would disappoint our fans. But from the standpoint of the fact that I wasn't going to make a sequel to KP is already going to disappoint some fans. Someone is going to be not pleased so matter what I do.

But through the events of last week, I was reminded that I used to be unafraid to fail. Unafraid to boldly experiment. KP's success ended up chaining me down and restricting both my ability to act, and my ability to further experiment and explore ideas and concepts.

So I'm releasing my mental self bondage and saying fuck it all. Pleasing everyone was never feasible, and pleasing someone else weren't even considerations I had when I started working on Meltys Quest and Karryn's Prison. Karryn's Prison is my magnum opus, and I'm proud of the work me and Sachinama did on it. I can't speak for Sachinama but maybe Sachinama also considers KP his magnum opus. Maybe the next game will end up having a better impact, or maybe it won't. But it doesn't matter.

I've already decided on the wide, broad strokes for the next game. It will be a female protagonist RPG strategy game, but it won't be like any ever done before. It will also have ZERO BATTLEFUCK, in fact, if Karryn's Prison was a proof of testing a concept of iterating on marrying gameplay with sex and marrying sex with gameplay for an eroge and pushing it to new levels, then the next game is testing iterating the concept of what for a long time before DLsite indies appeared, what eroge generally were. The concept of a game that had sex in it. Your Fate/Stay Nights. Your Clannads. Yours Eushullys. Your Ninetails. Your Alicesofts.

I can't apply the words, "Don't fix what's not broken" to my life. When I had cancer, I realized I'm only one person and I won't live forever. If I can bring a meaning to my life, it would be to do something that inspires others to act. I localized Meltys Quest personally. And through that I was able to bring change, much better change than I would have been able to do just my lonesome self. You know, the founder of Kagura Games used to be me and Sachinama's very very first supporter, back in the day on Patreon in 2017 before Meltys Quest was even released. He was the first $10 supporter, and the first to comment and sometimes the only comment on most of my Progress Reports. Now we're not even Discord friends anymore, it's honestly sad but I'm still happy that someone was able to see what I wanted to do with Meltys Quest and take it further and move the industry away from the direction Sakuragame was going to take it.

I just happened to be successful in my attempt to iterate with Karryn's Prison. And it is my dear hope that one day someone else, multiple someone elses hopefully, gets deeply inspired by Karryn's Prison and makes a way better eroge to continue to show the world that eroge is a wonderful medium full of potential.

My next attempt will be to try to iterate eroge in a very different direction. I also hopefully won't be using Rpgmaker this time. I started a few days to check out Godot works. My concept for the next game involves a type of battle system and various interfaces that would've had me just completely gut how default Rpgmaker works, and at that point I thought to myself I might as well use a different engine then, an engine that is literally not Chromium and meant for browsing the internet.

Outside of the wonderful, wonderful voice actresses, translators and volunteers, KP was basically a two men project with me and Sachinama. Sachinama and I have discussed about it, but this time we're going to be willing to hire help on certain parts of the game. The core will have and always going to be just us two, but there's no reason to stubbornly do every single part ourselves. After all, it wasn't like we voiced Karryn ourselves or translated the game to Korean ourselves and so on.

So here is the plan for the next month. Sachinama is going to continue to work on finishing up the P cup DLC for KP while brainstorming with me on the Story and Characters for the next game. I actually have two trips planned within the next three weeks that I had ticketed all the way back in March. Next week I'm going to be gone for a week to go to a board game convention in Ohio during the heat wave. Then come back for a week, and the next week after that I'm going to be flying out to Kansas City to my first Mensa Annual Gathering. I joined Mensa in March because apparently I heard they have a game room during the annual gathering where people just literally play board games all day during the whole event. Like I checked last week, the game room is literally open for 24 hours every day during the event. So during these two trips, I'm going to make the most out of the opportunities and try out as many board games as I can to see if there's any take away or concepts or systems I could use for the next game.

For the most part, I already have a very high level, broad idea for the gameplay systems I have in mind. And I'm going to be putting them into paper, the first time I've ever put anything into paper since when I first drew the concept and systems for Karryn's Prison. Make it physical, and check everything over and over again in my head by running simulations of how it would play out and how it would needed to be code just like I did when I designed KP. And then this time I plan to hire someone with Godot coding experience to make the foundation. When I made Karryn's Prison, it wasn't like I started from zero, I started from what Rpgmaker gave me as well as a host of community plugins and then I added or removed as needed until I had what I wanted. Rather than start with zero Godot experience and make the same mistakes someone with years of programming already made while learning before in the past, I'll let an expert build the starting foundation of what I want, and then I'll take over. A UI expert, a background artist, a music composer are also among the people we plan on hiring at some point in the future.

But first!!!! Building blocks and baby steps, before anything can happen, it will involve me creating a solid plan of everything so there are no surprises or feature creep later. And that is my plan for the next month, and likely a few more months after?? Who knows, certainly not this guy, but I'm very excited to finally mentally be unshackled and experiment again.

I'm fucking back y'all.

(Mentally, not physically because next week and then another week later next month I'm gonna be in two different states lmao)

May 14th 2024: Progress Report

Wow It's May, basically halfway into the year...

So first up, Sachinama has continued to be a boss working extremely hard every day even through out Japan's national holiday period, Golden Week. Basically only the toilet and gym side job CGs still need to be renewed for the P cups as well the Cut-ins. So it's looking more likely than not that the P cup DLC will be completed around June/July. Remember to shower Sachinama with all the praises every week on Ci-en and on Twitter!!!

As for me, I've extremely slowed down on board game exploration and playing last month. Oh! And I also went to San Francisco for five days last month, I almost somehow forgot about that until just now. That was a big event. I was actually thinking I might have time during the trip to sit down somewhere and reflect and brainstorm but nope. I even brought my Switch but I never ended up playing until during the flight back home went one of my seat neighbor insisted I bring out my Switch since the in flight entertainment TV wasn't working.

So the San Fran trip was my first time ever going on a completely solo flight. Up until now, I've flew a few times but each time I would also be meeting up with Sachinama at the destination. It was a very interesting experience. I always wondered what people mean when they say they are well-traveled or they've been to like 30+ countries or whatever. I thought to myself, what can possibility be more interesting out there compared to booting up the PC to play some eroges hahahahaha

I'm not sure I found my answer though. Because while it was very informative and interesting trip for me, I also went out of my way to socialize and engage with other people every chance I could to listen to their stories and experiences, which were all new and interesting to me! But I also noticed during the trip that a vast majority of the people, especially those who came with friends or family or mistresses or whatnot, usually kept to themselves and don't engage with other groups even when approached and given the opportunity. So are these people who go to like 40+ countries or whatever with their friends, what experiences are they really getting? I'm sure they're having fun or they wouldn't be traveling so much, and of course those fun experiences would immediately be shared with their friends or secret lovers or whoever they're traveling with. And of course not everyone who travel in groups just strictly keep to themselves. But I just wonder and I still don't have an answer.

Anyway, it was fun and interesting! And I almost died! That was... fun, maybe. I'm hopefully not actually dead and typing all this out inside a brain coma. Being a city boy, specifically a new york city boy, we don't exactly hike or climb rough terrain out here, and my stupid new yorker ass decided that I would be perfectly fine challenging a barely marked hidden shortcut path to quickly get to the top of a 450+ feet high hill. That was a valuable lesson on only sticking to the marked and public paths when going on trails, thank you very much.

Other than the trip and preparing for the trip, I ended up spending quite a bit of time post-trip reading up on some books! Specifically one series I would like to introduce as probably more than anything else, my audience is probably also a good audience for these type of books is Bruce Sentar's harem fantasy stuff. They were extremely easy and fun to read!

The weather is somehow getting warmer, and the sun is staying in the sky longer and that is all very scary to me right now. Time continues to relentlessly march to its own beat. Stay hydrated and stay safe out there everyone, and I'll talk to you all again next month! (Assuming I'm not in a brain coma right now)

April 10th 2024: Progress Report

Oh god it's already April it's-

Alright, let's skip that to save time, and get right into the Progress Report! First, Sachinama as usual has been working like a beast breeded with a machine every day and every night on drawing the P Cups. And boy are they huge. If you don't mind being spoiled, remember to check out Sachinama's weekly Ci-en posts! There's about 15ish more non-cutin CGs for Sachinama to renew/draw P Cups for but most of those are from three of the side jobs (Toilet, Stripper, Trainer) so they will be hellishly time consuming. Remember to give support to Sachinama by commenting and encouraging him during these trying times!

(The rest of today's post is just personal stuff, you can skip it if you're only interested in Karryn's Prison development)

As for me, it's been the usual like last month? But also not usual at all? In terms of board games, so the big box game I was talking about last month was Primal the Awakening, and I enjoyed a lot. However. However... I've also been waiting since last month for the eBay seller to send me the rest of the non core box expansion stuff because apparently they also haven't received it yet from the publisher. But just core box by itself is still really fun and neat, I'm impressed by the design and hopefully! Hopefully I'll find some time this month to get it back on the table!

Another big box board game that I brought on a whim from eBay was Tainted Grails: King of Ruins. I enjoyed it to, but mostly for the narrative stuff instead of the gameplay part. In terms of inspirations for how I would like to a make a game, Primal is definitely more up my alley but I'm still happy to have played Tainted Grails KoR.

Those two and more Spirit Island (mostly teaching it to new people) were mainly the board games that I played since the last Progress Report. And that is because......

Since the last month's report, I actually decided to plan and go to three domestic trips in the future. So I never traveled until I got this job and my first time traveling was to Japan back during Karryn's Prison first year of development to meet Sachinama and do business stuff over in Japan. Since then, I've traveled two more times, once more pre Covid and then my second time to Japan last spring. So all three times, two of them for work, were trips where I would meet and see Sachinama at my destination. This time however! All three trips will be completely solo and without Sachinama. 😭

For the time being, the first of those three trips is actually going to be NEXT WEEK to San Francisco where I will be checking out the Cherry Blossom Festival over at San Francisco, kind of like a replacement for last year's Japan trip to see cherry blossoms over in Japan with Sachinama. All three trips will last less than a week, but I'm bringing any laptops so it will be essentially a break from PC time. Will I discover or find something during these trips? Who knows. I'm nervous since I will be by myself during the whole trip but in a way I will also be alone from both computers and people I know and just chill.

Hopefully I won't end up on an episode of South Park as a guy jerking off in public in San Francisco, hah.

Now for some bonus material for reading this far! I know a lot of people have been curious, but work on the next game has not begun yet. It's simply not possible because in Sachinama's case, working on P Cup DLC and family stuff already takes literally all his time. In my case, well, I'm still figuring out and narrowing down my ideas and concepts and experimenting. But I'm really happy with having discovered the world of board games because it really introduced systems and concepts I never thought about before. I'm thinking of checking out one more big box board game called Kinfire Chronicles. It's pretty much out of stock everywhere but I caught with my lil eyes last night a place that had a physical copy of it but I didn't buy it last night because I didn't research about it yet. I also brought my first hardcover book since like forever that I'm taking with me on the trip next week to read and who knows, maybe something or nothing might pop up.

I also haven't forgotten about my bread and butter which is playing and testing out eroges but honestly not much has come out recently but I have had my eye on one indie game since the beginning of the year that I've enjoyed alot. But it is also very similar to Karryn's Prison... yet it's so fun and appealing to me... and like so my heart and mind (and something else) wavers on deciding on what form the next game should be. It's so hard, no pun intended, it's like something stuck in the back of my throat or I guess, like something thick in the back of my head trying to push out, no pun intended.

Anyways. That's it for this month's Progress Report! Hopefully my plane won't disassemble mid air or anything crazy like that and if it doesn't, I'll talk to you all again next month! Or if it does, I guess I'll talk to you all on the other side instead. Stay safe, hydrate, and wear sunscreen!

March 5th 2024: Progress Report

Oh boy, it's March already. Every month when I do a Progress Report I'm surprised by how quickly time has passed.

So let's get right down to this month's Progress Report! Sachinama has been beasting and about 50% of the CGs now have P Cups, not counting the Cut Ins!

Which you would already know if you have been following Sachinama on Ci-en, so why haven't you been?! Sachinama has also been posting weekly updates, unlike me who have switched to a monthly update format.

https://ci-en.dlsite.com/creator/2068/article

Speaking of me, so my board game journey continued in February, and I took a look at BoardGameGeek.com where I had logged my plays and

A lot of board gaming went on! And it's good thing I logged my plays because I would've forgotten them. The big thing in February was that I started moving onto campaign board games, first starting with Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion (I thought it was eeeehhhh) on the first week of February, and then into the two big, big campaign board games that I brought and had arrived starting in the third week of February, which were Middara Act One and The 7th Citadel, both really fun and neat! I am still impressed how board games are doing stuff not being done with normal PC/video games. I also had just purchased my third big, big box campaign board game, and hopefully that will arrive next week... assuming no delays......

But, I think my journey into exploring the board game space is going to come to an end sooner than later. One thing that I've realized after playing and buying a whole lotta board games since December 2023 (According to my logs on BoardGameGeek.com, 30ish board games) is that I can hone into the types and mechanics of board game systems that I personally enjoy and have fun with. And within the systems that I personally enjoy, there is a smaller subset of systems that I would personally like to iterate and expend on myself. That third big, big box campaign board game that is (hopefully) coming this month is going to be me confirming if this is a mechanic I would like to incorporate myself in some way shape or form.

As for some personal health stuff that happened, I actually unfortunately caught pink eye around the third week of last month. It was actually pretty scary because not only was it the first time I got pink eye since I was a kid (and me getting pink eye as kid to me was the trigger that started deteriorating my eye sight...) but also because of the recent few years with me getting LASIK eye surgery and Sachinama and all that stuff that happened with his eyes (which are doing fine by the way!!) so I was a bit sensitive to anything related to my eyes.

I went to the eye doctor that did my surgery, got some eye drops and you know, the dang fucking pink eye just wouldn't go away. I figured ya know, when you get a bad cold or sore throat and go to the doctor and get some antibiotics, you start seeing results after like 4ish days right? But not with this pink eye apparently, it wasn't as red and itchy but it was still a bit red and itchy for way beyond a week. But last Saturday I went back for the followup and the doctor looked into my eyes, and said I should be good with continuing the eye drops for three more days and stopping. Alright then.

And that's it for this month's Progress Report, wash your hands, don't touch your eyes, stay hydrated and I'll talk to you all again next month in April!!

February 6th 2024: Progress Report

Oh god it's already February, hands in the air screaming while the house burns down panicking

So what have I been up to since the last Progress Report? Mostly two things, one is that a few days after the last Progress Report, Steam finally approved of the game! It is none other than

TADA

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2745710/Modern_Pink_Elf_RPG/?curator_clanid=33020227

Modern Pink Elf RPG developed by the talented Sensouya-san (Warshop) and localized by our friends at CursedAtelier!!!

Modern Pink Elf RPG is similar to Sensouya-san's previous eroge which we also published, Kiara -The Knight of Icicles- (which unfortunately Steam did not approve so that gave me PTSD for much of December and January while waiting on Steam's verdict for Modern Pink Elf RPG......) except the setting is a different and there is no combating at all, just a pure slut slutting it up around town.

I really liked it so I decided to get it published on Steam for you all, and hope you enjoy it! It's available at a 20% launch discount on Steam until basically 2/8, so grab it if you haven't yet! And if you enjoyed Modern Pink Elf RPG, you probably would enjoy Kiara -The Knight of Icicles- too if you haven't gotten it yet over at Itch.io!!

https://remtairy.itch.io/kiara-the-knight-of-icicles

So yeah, after it was approved I worked on final touching up and implementing Steam Achievements (which was bugged for the first several hours during release 😭). I always disliked how originally, you can only access the smartphone and navigate the main menu/smartphone with only a keyboard, so I worked to make it all accessible with a mouse or gamepad too.

The second main thing since last month has had to have been just more and more and more board gaming. Among the many I have played, my favorites have been Pax Renaissances and Imperium: Horizons/Classic/Legends. And while it wasn't my favorite, I also played Kingdom Death: Monsters and the way the game was designed essentially occupied my brain space with inspirations and ideas for the next game. It continues to impress me with how board games are designed and played and how those certain elements are either abstracted or just not at all in the PC games I have played, and I've played a ton. So it continues to be a very educational (and expensive...) experience with just going hog wild on board games to catch on years and decades of board game design history and iterations.

And that's it for this month's Progress Report! The sun is slowly rising earlier and slowly staying up in the sky slightly later, and the world continues to keep moving and changing! Stay safe, stay hydrated and I'll see you all again later!

November 7th 2023: Progress Report

Hello everyone, Rem here with this month's short Progress Report covering Sachinama's work! Mostly for people not already following our Ci-en account posted by Sachinama himself, which you should be doing!

Sachinama has finished making the P Cup variations for 4 CGs total out of 50+, and is about to finish the fifth one! Currently, Sachinama is working first on the oldest CGs in the game, which is the combat CGs, and then it will most likely be followed by CGs from Level 1 and so on. The older CGs also happen to use a different layering technique compared to the newer ones, so not only is Sachinama drawing the P Cup variations for the older CGs, but also basically redrawing the CG's base layers from the ground up so that it can actually support P Cups, thus the significantly higher difficulty and time that it takes to get each CG done.

On the plus side, since the CG's base layers are being redrawn, it also means that the combat CG have been getting new pose and facial variations to go along with them! I gotta say, the 5th CG that Sachinama is working on, which is Karryn's Evade CG, is making Karryn look SUPER cute (imho) with the new variations. Karryn is cute, CUTE!

The estimate for the P Cups to be finished still remains at the earliest somewhere around the first quarter of 2024. Until then, make sure to stay hydrated, stay safe and stay warm this winter!