Rem Diary 6/9/2025

Hello hello hello, it's been so long since I wrote that I don't know how this thing works anymore. I'm going to call this a Rem Diary as a callback to the original Patreon page's URL.

So, yeah. Been a while folks. And I was sitting, looking out the window and I thought, let's just write my thoughts out and maybe there might be some sort of breakthrough in my thoughts. Why not. It's June 9th after all.

Bit of a warning, this is an unstructured, stream of conscious post.

SO!! FIRST OF ALL!! I never did it but I should have, which was to celebrate the release of the P-Cup DLC!! WOOO!! We love cup sizes featuring letters of the 2nd half of the alphabet here!! Thank you all for your support!

Now, the meat of really why I wanted to write today, was to talk about the next game, and the process and thoughts that are currently going on.

So, I am still undecided on what to really do next. For anyone not following Sachinama's Ci-en/Twitter earlier this year before he also stopped doing regular posts, Sachinama being the workaholic he is, wanted to do something while I was figuring out the mysteries of life and all that. Before working on Karryn's Prison for 5+ years, Sachinama was already a creator in the creative field, and even before he worked for himself with the Happy Life circle doing adult CG/manga/games. So after working on KP with me, Sachinama wanted to messed around in RPGMaker again on his own stuff. So he has been doing that, as well as some stuff for DMM for Japan physical goods.

Speaking of which, fingers crossed that the MouseUnit figurines can come out this month! Originally they were slated for around Feb/March but there was an industry wide production delay at the factories and stuff that I don't understand that essentially delayed pretty much most Japanese figurines. But it's been a while since we had an update so realistically, maybe it will be delayed for another quarter? But who knows, the world, I heard, has gotten a bit more crazy since the last time I posted in this site.

Back to the original topic. That is what Sachinama has been up to. As for me, there has been this and that personal stuff. Most not important enough to comment or talk about, I'll write about a lil of it at the end of this post.

So new game stuff. I have, or had, a couple of big ideas. Canned and binned obviously now. One that I keep circling around, and is one of the original ideas that I had even 2 years ago while I was stuck on the Gym DLC, was something chikan related. Chikan being the japanese word for molester, and in the context of eroge genres/themes would be a lady being molested in some sort of public transit like a train. But I have a lot of worries and concerns about committing to the idea of making one, and that prevents me from fully trying to brainstorm about it. Most of ideas revolve around some sort of roguelike chikan.

I was made aware recently (recently as in beginning of the year but that is still recent to me...) about a DLsite indie eroge that is doing a chikan roguelike, when I tried the demo then, it said the planned release date is actually this month! I haven't been following the development blog for it so I don't know if it got delayed or not, but I'm just gonna be quietly looking forward to it and being pleasantly surprised if I see in the Recent Releases section!

My idea of a roguelike chikan is very different then the upcoming indie one though, both gameplay and setting. So one of the idea that I have been playing more recently with, is a male protagonist setting. I have stated a long time ago and I still feel the same way, that I do not want to make a sequel to games. I'm just not very interested in iterating on something that I already did, much less make a rehash of the exact same thing.

Most sane people would probably rightfully find it strange to not find a winning formula and just capitalize it and squeeze it until it runs dry, but I just can't do it. I just don't want to. It's why it was so hard to be motivated after the release of Meltys Quest to do localization work until Sachinama approached me with the idea of creating a game together instead.

So a female protagonist battlefuck eroge is kinda out of the picture. So when I was toying with the idea of a chikan game, besides other concerns and worries, I also had a silly stupid self imposed restriction of not wanting it to be too similar to KP if it's a female protagonist game. I toyed very little bit with male protagonist instead but I'm always dismissive of it almost right away. There was also some other non-chikan ideas but today I am not going to be talking about those.

Instead today I'm going to be talking about battlefuck again, but this time male protagonist. Now the standard male protagonist battlefuck eroge, is pretty formulaic at this point. Like 80% of them involves a Monster Girl Quest style situation where the male protagonist, usually lets just say, short of stature, is masochistically fucked by a variety of ladies in female domination style. The other 20%, which now considered rare and almost extinct species, is kind of like a pokemon style fuck'em all with a variety of ladies.

I'm not interested in making either.

Which is why I never considered making one.

Now recently, I say recently again, but this was like last month before some personal stuff happened (detailed later at the end, don't worry it's not like a bad thing or whatever.). Now recently, I had an idea.

I had this idea before, but I dismissed it then because well. It would be too damn similar to KP wouldn't it.

But recently I thought about it differently. The original idea that I dismissed long ago, was: What if it's like Karryn's Prison

wait for it

But instead playing from the male point of view?!

So I dismissed this crap because I didn't want to recreate KP. But the most recent idea was,

What if, instead of "it's like Karryn's Prison"

It literally IS Karryn's Prison but from the male point of view?!?!

🤔

So to backtrack a little bit first. When I did P Cup DLC, I said it would be the last DLC and I meant it, because I did not want to modify KP's core mechanics or gameplay any more. It's not just an issue of feature creep, but an issue of you can actively make something worse if you keep fidgeting with the darn thing. There's a point when something is done and you just leave it alone. I know a lot of fans want this or that, and some have been wanting it since the first alpha build cough certain side jobs cough. But I just don't want to mess with the core gameplay and if there is an unfortunate theme about Rem that you want to leave today with, that is when I don't want to do something, I just can't. It's a brain worm.

However, when this revolutionary idea came to me, where instead of 'like Karryn's Prison', it literally 'IS Karryn's Prison'. I thought about it. The brain worm in my head poked out of its nest, eyed me for a minute, and then crawled back inside my head to take a nap.

As in, that COULD work, I COULD make it. It would essentially be like adding a new game mode to the game, so it would be outside of the core gameplay loop that I do not want to touch with a five foot pole (or 3 meter pole for the metric system using crazies not using an English only imperial system). And it wouldn't be remaking KP since I would just be using KP to do it. Crazy how I need to find loopholes in my own self imposed fucking restrictions.

So we cleared the first hurdle of that I CAN make it. But now SHOULD I make it, which is the real question of the day and the real reason for writing my thoughts out today.

So to give a little pervy peephole into my head and see a little bit of what I'm seeing, in this hypothetical game mode, instead of controlling Karryn, you would be controlling a male inmate. You would, hehe, I'm not even gonna hide the inspiration, be selecting a class at the start like you would in Slay the Spire for the run. And the Captain would give you a bonus for the run ala the whale.

Great, awesome start. Literally copied from another game. But then here's where I start walking into mud because the idea gets murky.

What would be the goal? Form a ragtag crew, and maybe something like you gotta make Karryn reach Slut Level 100 or something by Day 60 or whatever.

So there's already a few issues. In the original male protagonist battlefuck ideas, they always had ya know, a few different female targets. For this idea, there would be one female target, the titular Karryn that we all know and love. In games like Slay the Spire and its derivatives, you don't fight the same enemy over and over again. One battle you're fighting shieldy boy and a healer. Next some annoying dodgey boys. Next some spikey boys. Then a boss that does poisons you and fills your deck with garbage cards. And so on and so forth. Of course in this idea, Karryn is going to be growing and getting stronger, and also getting weaker from new Passives. But will that be enough?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm......

And then there's another issue right away. In Slay the Spire and its derivatives, when you lose a battle you're fucked, figuratively in this case, and the run is over. Basically, you know that the build you were trying to aim for, was in fact, shat and doomed and you simply start over again and try again. But for my idea, obviously you will be losing every fights against Karryn. Does that mean your build is shit? Is your run doomed? Not really. Since technically a run is only doomed when you reach the Day 60 time limit and didn't make Karryn a Level 100 Slut or whatever. But realistically your run was probably already doomed by Day 45. In Slay the Spire and its derivatives, not being able to handle the escalating difficulties of each new chapter was a sign your run is doomed.

For my idea, there is no obvious way to discern that your run is doomed and you would be better off starting over. And when there is no obvious way to tell, would a player just choose the worst, most anti-fun way of playing which is restarting the game at the slightest perceptive drawback? Of course it would be nice if like the main Karryn's Prison game, players can just adopt a Dwarf Fortress style 'But losing is FUN!'. But I dunno, I worry that without an obvious way of dooming a run, players would get confused and give up earlier then they should have, or also don't give up when they probably should have and end up getting frustrated either way.

The first problem, the diversity of the battles, can be 'solved' with some tricks and new, different systems. Just because it is Karryn's Prison doesn't mean both Karryn and the inmates need to use the exact same skills from the main game. In this hypothetical game mode, Karryn's Passives would need an almost arcade style highly accelerated growth in the first place. Pressing the Pet Butt skill a hundred times for one slut level wouldn't make for very fun gameplay. So why not also play around with the combat skills too in a way that I don't want to in the main game.

The second problem I really worry about though. Or maybe it's not a big deal? In Slay the Spire, it's obvious because you are literally fighting battles the whole run and you die you lose. You lost to the act boss? Your build didn't cut it, Jack. But for this idea, how would you know?

Maybe I can have something like oh you need Karryn to be Slut Level 10 by Day 15, and Slut Level 30 by Day 30, and Slut Level 60 by Day 45, and so on.

BUT. Folks, BUT.

BUTT. 🍑

Here's the thing too. The cool thing with this idea, and the concept of inmate PoV version of KP, is that it's not freaking Slay the Spire, and more importantly, it's not linear. In Magic the Gathering/Hearthstone terms, maybe you're doing a reckless Rush style build this run, where you try to get Karryn slutty early on, way before Day 60. Then obviously for this build, you can easily pass those arbitrary 'Get Karryn Slut Level 10 by Day 15' or whatever.

But what if you're running a slower build? Instead of aiming for a high or die early build, you're working towards the long game of trying to get Karryn to Slut Level 100 around the 50ish days mark? If I make some sort of arbitrary You Must Be This Tall To Ride This Ride, people who are slow growers wouldn't be able to have fun and I would be restricting the game and disallowing builds that go all the way to Day 60.

I don't know. Maybe the 2nd problem really isn't that big of deal as I have it in my head. Or maybe there is already a different flaw that I'm not seeing with the concept and idea.

Phew, I think this post is long enough already so let's end this here today and I'll rummage my thoughts some more and maybe see what y'all have to say. I'm not even going to go into the personal stuff I mentioned at the beginning but basically tl;dr: Got a new PC and went to a multi-day board game thing. Maybe I'll write it about next time if there is a next time. Anyway, thank you for reading, my condolences for taking a peek at what's in my head!!!