Dev Diary #19 - The Future of Scarlet Law

Hey Happy Patrons,

Well, you may or not be happy after hearing this news. After months of deliberation, I've decided to completely revamp everything in Scarlet Law to the point where it'll feel like a completely different game. For a long time now, I haven't been satisfied with the structure of the game and have been experimenting with stuff to make it a more pleasurable experience. This is a passion project, and if there's something in the game that I don't like, I'll go back and try to fix it. This includes earlier and old content at the cost of newer content. I'm still in the early beta phase of this, there may be severe bugs, but I think that, overall, this change will be for the better.

The first goal of mine is creating a navigation option which you can see below:

Basically, I want to make the player (you) able to explore around Scarlet and interact with some of the objects you see (doors, people, etc). The point of this is to make the world more of a world and let the player explore at their own leisure, rather than have you repeatedly click the same stuff over and over. This may make the game feel more grindy since you'll undoubtedly be clicking more, but I think it's a problem that we can fix in the future.

I have a goal to make the characters more involved in the world as well. I want the characters to be at different locations, rather than the same place over and over. A lot of you may not have noticed (since it isn't used at all) but there is a weekly date which you can see at the bottom right. In the early phases of Scarlet Law, I wanted to make it so that certain characters appear in certain locations depending on the day and time. For example, Estelle should be at home during the weekends and be at school during weekdays. This is something I feel like I want to implement as, again, it would make the world of Scarlet feel more worldly. I understand that this might be annoying to the player since she won't always be exactly where you want her to be (due to days/time) but I think this is something I want to try to experiment with. 

Now you might say, "this looks impressive, but why do you think this might be a bad thing?"

Well, for one, this is an extremely time-consuming and arduous task. After a few days of trying to implement this system, I learned that the game (as it is) will be completely BROKEN. This means that you MUST start the game from the very beginning. Even more, it is likely that we won't reach the current part of the story as I'm basically starting an entirely new game from scratch by fixing older scenes and changing how the pace of the story works.

What does this mean? It means that we won't be seeing many of our beloved characters for quite a long time, possibly months. At the same time, the lore (for the most part) won't change much, so you'll basically be seeing a much more refined Scarlet Law at the cost of new content. So far, I'm still working on the prologue of the game (e.g. I haven't even reached the part where you meet Azula), but I'm expecting a beta to arrive early next month.

My intention, however, will be to have separate arcs so that we can have a better feel of the story and what's going on. For example, when I first started Scarlet Law, Rita's story came too early, Ferry's story came too early, Celestia's story came too early. Now, it's all over the place and players don't know/remember what's going on. It will be better if I just focused on each individual girl's story, rather than have them jumbled all over the place. 

Is this worth it? I personally think so, to be honest. I think a lot of the older scenes could do with a remaster, and it might be fun for you to experience the story again from the very beginning. 

If you're upset by the news, I apologize and completely understand if you want to un-sub on the Patreon. I know that it might be difficult to hear that I just want to focus on fixing older stuff but one of my biggest goals when I started this project was to make something I can be proud of. Hopefully, this totally new revamp will do that. It will feel like an entirely different game.

Again, thank you all for your continued support!