Scarlet Hollow News

Hi everyone!

It's been a whirlwind of a year— Episode 2 came out in June, and we've put out a couple of major content updates to the first two chapters of the game since then. Both of us have been absolutely floored by the amount of support we've seen from our players, and it's been incredible to watch a community come to life around Scarlet Hollow with each new piece of the story, be it our discord community swelling in membership, our growing subreddit, or any of the amazing fanart people have been pouring themselves into.

It would absolutely mean the world to us if you nominated our game for the Steam Awards — specifically for the Outstanding Story-Rich Game category. There should be a button that lets you do that at the top of this update!

But we didn't just want to post this update to ask for nominations! We also wanted to take the opportunity to give you a taste of what's to come for Episode 3 (which is currently slated for late January or early February.)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We're trying a lot of new stuff in this next chapter, and we feel pretty good about it being a big step up over Episode 2. Romance will start to bloom, consequences for your actions will echo throughout the town, and you and your companions will take another step closer to the doom foretold by the Ditchlings on Monday.



And you'll finally get to meet Reese.

We are so excited for when we get to share this new chapter with you, and until then, we'll be hard at work making sure it lives up to our highest expectations. If you want the most regular updates on our development, make sure to join our Discord or follow us on Twitter!

As always, thank you again, all of you, for your support!
~Tony and Abby

Hotfixed a few UI issues that were introduced in yesterday's patch (text overlap in several menus because I accidentally did testing w/ reduced font size)

Added a flirt option w/ oscar for hot players when discussing Historical Buildings of Scarlet Hollow

Hotfixed the Loremaster achievement which should now be achievable

Hey Everyone!

After taking a look at the results of our post balance patch survey, we noticed a couple of things:

• Powerful Build, Street Smart, and Hot all shot up in pick rate as players' preferred traits, which means the patch is working as intended.
  
• Book Smart is now noticeably underpicked.
  

A couple of respondents made specific note that Book Smart felt underwhelming in the library scene, and we totally agreed with them— it's the big research montage of the story, so it should be their moment to shine. So we put together one last balance patch to wrap up Halloween season.

• Book Smart has an entire extra book in the library.
  
• Book Smart now has additional entries to read in 'Appalachian Folk Monsters.'
  
• Some previously universal dialogue options in the library have been made Book Smart exclusive.
  
• General typo fixes.
  
• Added a tooltip to introduce players to the keybinding for hiding the UI.
  
• Three new achievements.
  

Some of the information in the new books is immediately pertinent, but we're also using this patch as an opportunity to seed Book Smart players with general town and cryptid knowledge that may or may not be relevant later in the story.

Really honing in on balance at this point.

Coming away from this patch, we're pretty happy with the state of trait balance moving forward. Keen Eye is inevitably going to be the top pick for a variety of reasons, as is Talk to Animals. With these tweaks, though, the remaining five traits should all have uniquely powerful bonuses, and will all probably wind up within a standard deviation of each other.

Hey folks!

Now that it's been a little over a week since we released our balance patch, we wanted to send out a quick survey to see how players interacted with the patch and to get some fresh data on people's favorite traits!

Check it out here: https://forms.gle/M1XPhM1onCM2vbRq7

We've also hit our first threshold in the October fanart competition, with team Monsters eking out a win by one entry. We'll be doing a livestream on our Twitch channel this Saturday morning and drawing *your* monster requests. Follow us there or on Twitter to get a notification when we go live!