Hey folks! It's another between-episodes interlude, so it's time for another balance patch.

There's quite a few changes here, so we'll leave you with the high level ones:

•More flirting. The romance in Scarlet Hollow remains at a slow burn, but we figured it could maybe burn a little faster. Players with the Hot trait have even more flirt options in the first three Episodes, and everyone now gets a little something to move things along a bit faster.

• More trait-specific dialogue options and passive narration. Every trait's gotten a little something extra, with an emphasis on providing more unique social benefits to Powerful Build (which remains the least picked trait in the game) and providing additional context to Mystical. One of our original design ideas was to use the existence of special dialogue options as a means to convey additional information to our players, but from watching streams and recordings of Scarlet Hollow, it was clear that this wasn't how players interacted with those options. This was particularly a challenge with Mystical, where a lot of options fell a little flat, so wherever possible, we've provided players with that extra information in advance, and we're leaving it up to them to decide whether or not to share it.

• We've overhauled and/or replaced a few pieces of art from earlier episodes that we felt were either lacking, or that needed changes to better reflect established canon. This includes the hill overlooking the town at the beginning of Episode 1's cryptid hunt, as well as several of Kaneeka's earlier sprites — she now has a proper set of sprites when you first meet her in Episode 1, and we've changed the head of her library sprites in Episode 2 to better reflect the final character design we landed on.

Old Kaneeka library sprite on the left, new sprite on the right!

• We've added a special friend to several backgrounds throughout the first 3 episodes. I think you know who we're talking about ;)

• There's a brand new line of inquiry at the mines in Episode 2.

• A long list of other small changes we've made over the course of the past few months, which I have since lost track of.

How does this update affect your saves? It doesn't! But it'll make the first three episodes feel just a little richer, and it's a perfect excuse to take a summer vacation and make your way back to the Holler.

This is, definitively, going to be the last major patch for the first three episodes. I'm sure we'll still make plenty of small tweaks and additions as we go, but we're pretty happy with how things are right now and want to focus the rest of our attention on the future! These patches were also a lot more manageable back when we had less content to go through, but the longer the game becomes, the more of an undertaking it's been to expand our pre-existing content.

Speaking of the game becoming longer, Episode 4 continues to come along well, and, unsurprisingly, it's going to be a big one (the script is currently 400 pages long, meaning it'll contain more content than Episode 3). It'll be finished and released at some point before the end of the year (ideally looking at Halloween, but we're a little too far out to settle on a final release date.)

On another note, we have a second (much smaller) game in the works that we've been developing in our off hours — we'll be announcing it soon, so keep your eyes peeled! We're approaching this new game so it has a minimal impact on our workflow for Scarlet Hollow — it's being written in parallel to Episode 4 (since only one person can really be actively working on the script at any given time) and is using a different (but still gorgeous IMO) art style that ONLY uses pencils, meaning the amount of time it takes to create a given sprite or background is magnitudes quicker than its equivalent in Scarlet Hollow. Check out a preview of that style below:

There'll be a demo available for this new game later this year, and we're expecting it'll be fully released some time early in 2023, in between the releases of Episodes 4 and 5 for Scarlet Hollow.

If you haven't had the chance and want to be plugged in to the Scarlet Hollow community, don't forget to join our Discord,  follow us on Twitter, or join /r/scarlethollow. Or do all three! Likewise, if you like the work we do and want extra early previews of what's to come (as well as occasional alpha builds for work-in-progress episodes or new games), consider supporting us on Patreon!

Thanks so much for your continued support, and we can't wait to share more of what we've been working on!

~Tony and Abby