Black Tabby Games

fantastic video essay

But you haven't stayed mostly the same. You've changed in whatever ways your experiences with the Princess have shaped you.

And the Shifting Mound has been shaped by far far more things than you have. You've seen five vessels, and she's experienced every possible iteration of you and her permitted by the construct.

People often mistake her change in tone as her not caring about you anymore, or "losing her kindness," but she's literally willing to fight the only thing she loves for all of eternity to save you. Of course she still cares.

if we do console ports (not a given!) it will be after episode 7 releases on steam. if you wanna play the game any time soon, i wouldn't wait for a port

Thank you! I don't think it's fully quantifiable for a number of reasons. In particular, Abby's contributions as a writer inform how she approaches her art in a way that would be difficult to capture if we were hiring a third party to just do art.

From my understanding, most visual novels that hire out their art work also hire different artists for backgrounds and sprites, which wouldn't work with the style/presentation of our games, where the sprites are drawn on top of backgrounds using tracing paper, allowing our characters to interact more organically with the world. Assuming those two points are non-issues, though, and assuming a general advanced-career rate of ~$500 per background and ~$100 per unique pose, and $10 per variant of a pre-existing sprite... Scarlet Hollow (so far): ~$600,000 Slay the Princess: ~$250,000 for the base game, ~$150,000 for the Pristine Cut (so ~$400,000 total)

It's worth noting that Slay the Princess, which is done on smaller paper and only in pencils (instead of pencils + inks + full digital color) is less labor intensive per asset than Scarlet Hollow, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm not assigning a different cost to those assets. Possibly still low-balling things here, and again, there's so much to Abby's art that's unquantifiable in this area. But that's the napkin math.

She's also a *mindbogglingly* fast artist. I want to say she managed to do all of the art of the original release of Slay the Princess (hundreds of backgrounds, over 2,000 sprites) in about six months? I'd have to imagine that work over that time frame would usually require something like 5 artists, which then adds further challenges around stylistic cohesion.

Being a lawyer *does* come up in episode 3 if you have book smart. Ultimately, though, we ran into a wall where options from that menu were too expansive to meaningfully integrate into the game, and where lawyer felt like it would be overpowered from a roleplaying perspective (episode 3 dilemma, multiple run-ins with the police, etc etc.) Beyond balance, a lot of it also boils down to the already enormous scope of the game compared to most choice-driven narratives. Episodes 1-4, following the latest update, come in at a whopping 640,000 words. Adding yet another axis of interaction would just be too much extra load with relatively little payoff. Including that menu was, overall, a scope mistake that we wouldn't have done again if we started the game from scratch, but people like the fluff (and we do too!) so we left it in there. We don't feel the same way about the "living situation" menu, though, since that's much easier and more comfortable to masasge into the story.