Scarlet Hollow News

Finally, a way for you to keep your good friends Wayne and Avery with you at all times. Avery brought you a cutting, and Wayne left his horrendous odor at home. instead smelling of delightful seasoned cherry wood! This unlikely pair is eager to grace your keychain with their particular kind of charm, in charm form, no less.

Just like last time, these charms are going as a pair, and we've got 285 of them before they're gone — forever! The last campaign we did sold out in just a couple of days, so if you want 'em it's probably best to act fast! You can check out the campaign here: https://go.topatoco.com/products/ah-sh-charms02

Look at em! So small! So cute!

We don't have any new development updates since last time — we're in the home stretch for Slay the Princess right now (wishlist and play the demo if you haven't already!) And we're about half-way done with the script for Episode 5.

If you want all the latest updates for both of our titles, the best places to get them are our discord and newsletter. Links for those:

Discord: discord.gg/blacktabbygames
Newsletter: bit.ly/blacktabbynews

Note: our discord server has an automatic filter that will auto-kick accounts that are under 5 hours old — so if you're making your first account to join, bear with it and check back then.

As always, thanks so much for your patience and support. Both of our games mean a lot to us, and we're so happy you're all along for the ride.

Best,
Tony and Abby

Made the character creation flow accessible to players who require screenreaders. Self-voicing will now describe the flow for each screen, as well as tell the player what traits they've hovered.

A couple of minor bug fixes for menu logic as well

Heya folks!

It's been a little while since our last update, so we're here to share a couple of exciting little things and to give you a general progress report on how things are going with Scarlet Hollow Episode 5 and Slay the Princess.

First thing's first! We're doing a limited run of wooden character charms/keychains, and the page to order them is live right now. We're starting out with Tabitha and Stella, but if they sell well, we've actually got designs mapped out for most of the main cast.

A preview of some of our other charm designs!

Next up, today is also the start of the Steam Summer Sale, and Scarlet Hollow is 25% off. We're going to do something a little special for this sale, where for every 10 copies sold over the next two weeks, we'll be making a free copy of the game available to claim on itch.io, starting with 5 copies available at the time of this post going out. And as a reminder, until at least one or two sale cycles after the full release, 25% is going to be the discount we run Scarlet Hollow at. There's no steeper cut around the horizon to hold off for, but also if you're planning out your spending, you don't need to feel like you'll be missing out if you want to hold off until the next discount cycle.

STILL if you're looking for an opportunity to buy Scarlet Hollow or to gift it to a friend, there's no better time than the present.

Work on both games is continuing to go well. The first draft of Episode 5 is nearing halfway done, and Slay the Princess' script is also well past that point, with the Tower, Adversary and Stranger routes fully written as well as a ton of other never-before-seen content. We've locked in an internal release date for Slay the Princess, and are confident about hitting it — there'll be an announcement in the coming months so keep your eyes peeled!

In terms of release schedule, anticipate Slay the Princess later this year, and Episode 5 some time in the first half of next year — it's going to be our biggest chapter yet—with much more content than Episode 4—and now that we're a little more stable as a studio, we're making sure we're prioritizing our health instead of burning the candle at both ends for years straight.

Both games'll be well worth the wait!

Thank you as always for your support and patience! It means a lot to be able to make our games the way we want to make them :)

Best,
Tony and Abby

You can now toggle auto-advancing text and set that text's speed in the game's preferences.

Hey folks!

Everyone really seemed to like the beach poster (it funded in ~an hour~), so we're doing another! And this time, it's everyone going to the State Fair.

The crowdfund is live now and will run for 15 days, so it should end on the 19th, and the first 50 backers get an enamel Ditchling pin thrown in for free ^^

You can back the campaign here: https://go.topatoco.com/products/ah-sh-ncstafefair-pr

We've got quite a few more AU prints planned, though we're not sure when/if we'll do print runs for them — I guess it'll depend on how well this second campaign goes! You can see the art for the next one and download HD wallpapers of all these prints and tons of Scarlet Hollow game art on our Patreon right now!

We've got a few other things going on this week too, since it's the start of LudoNarraCon, a four day online festival celebrating narrative games on Steam!

• Scarlet Hollow is 25% off for the next week. It's very important to us that we're transparent about discounts, so a reminder: every single discount we run from now until at least couple of cycles after we leave early access will be precisely 25% off. So if you want to pick up the game right now but money's tight, don't worry about FOMO pressuring you to spend. It'll be on sale at this same price again soon. Likewise if you're holding off because you think a steeper discount might be around the corner, that wait's going to be quite a while.
  
  
• Slay the Princess has the honor of being one of the exhibitors for LudoNarraCon, meaning that out of hundreds of applicants, it was one of only 43 titles selected for prime-time featuring! We don't have any major updates for the Slay the Princess demo for this event, but that's because we had a major update a little over a month ago. If you haven't had the chance to check it out, the demo's been updated with a director's cut that features roughly an hour of brand new content and is much closer to the vision we have for the final game. If this is the first time you're hearing about it, Slay the Princess has cosmic horror meets The Stanley Parable vibes, and if you've enjoyed the humor in Scarlet Hollow, you'll probably enjoy it as well! It's also fully voice acted, featuring the talents of Jonathan Sims and Nichole Goodnight.
  
  
  
  
• I'm hosting a panel for LudoNarraCon about using game mechanics and systems as tools for narrative design. It should go live on the event's Steam page on Friday at 4pm EST. We managed to pull together some amazing panelists, including Emily Short (Creative Director at Failbetter Games), Sarah Northway (I Was a Teenage Exocolonist) and Son M. (Love Shore). Should be a treat if you want to hear about people's writing process.
  
  
• We're also doing a Q&A livestream where you'll get to see Abby work on some background art for Episode 5 of Scarlet Hollow and ask us all sorts of questions about both of our games. The stream will be simulcast to the Slay the Princess Steam page as well as our Twitch channel, and we'll be sure to look at chat in both places to make sure we see your questions!
  
  

Work on both games is going really well! The first draft of Episode 5 is about 25% done and we've been having a lot of fun writing it. It's felt great from Episode 4 onward to finally be able to start cashing in on things that have been set up from the beginning on the game, and it's only going to get more fun from here. It's still too early for us to have a release estimate for Episode 5, but rest assured that we're working incredibly hard to bring it to life!

Thanks so much for your support!
Tony and Abby