Happy New Year, dear adventure fans! May 2024 be a peaceful and productive year for you and may you find plenty of time to play the games that bring you most joy!

This week we'd like to talk about one of our core pillars: meaningful exploration. To put it shortly, we want you to have plenty of reasons to explore the mansion and its surroundings, without wasting your time. There is optional content, such as collectibles and optional puzzles, that you can choose if you want to engage with. But more importantly, we want it to make it easier for you to progress through the game. And when you do decide to dive deeper into the lore, we try to give relevant pieces of information and stay away from fluff text as much as possible. Below are some of the ways we use to achieve this.

There are plenty of objects you can inspect in the game, as any adventure game has. But one of our first goals in this game is to not make something interactable just for the sake of it, so you can read something along the lines "What a lovely painting!" We want you to inspect objects to learn new things, relevant info about the Rosenthal family or Irina, their present or their past, about Marius, his memories and what defines him as a person. Another rule we have is to keep the amount of objects you can inspect high enough to make the world feel rich and lived in, but low enough to not overwhelm the players, making them lose interest in exploring.

Get close enough to an object you can interact with and an icon appears over it. Get even closer and roughly look in the direction of the object and the icon scales up, while a label indicates the type of interaction. Click or press the interact button to perform the action: inspect, pick, read, talk or interact - this last one is for a more complex interaction, for example for puzzles, placing items, triggering something etc.

We implemented this intuitive system to make it easier for you to spot important objects when you explore and to process at a glance the actions you can perform. We didn't want you to pixel hunt that one item or interaction needed to progress, but to highlight things as soon as you get close enough. Furthermore, important objects that you need to interact with to progress the story are marked with an easy to spot red exclamation mark, similar to the important dialogue topics.

Sometimes adventure games can be a bit obtuse. What makes sense in the designer's mind isn't necessarily the most intuitive thing. Other times you have to stop playing, only to come back days later not remembering what you were supposed to do. To make it clear at all times what you have to do next, we have an objectives system. The current quest and its goals can be checked at any time. Objectives update constantly depending on your progress.

When you need to bring fresh water to your father, that objective is put on the list. Need to find an empty cup first? That's another objective on the list. Interacted with the well and realized you also need a bucket? Yet another objective on the list. Found the elusive empty cup? We're taking that objective off the list. Completed the well puzzle and now you have a cup of fresh water? The list now displays only one objective: bring the water to your father. This system ensures that you can enjoy playing the game, not become lost and frustrated. We want you to figure out not what to do, but how to do it.

In a future post we'll talk about another of our core pillars - light puzzles. Remember to wishlist and follow the game and check back frequently for more updates on The Crimson Maid!

In this week's post we continue with our dive into the core pillars for making The Crimson Maid, with the second part about optional depth. As stated in the first part, there are plenty of ways to get more out of the game, but it's up to you if you want to explore them. Aside from the optional dialogues, the tile puzzles and the documents, all described in the previous post, here are some more game features that allow you to immerse into the story just as deep as you want.

A key mechanic in The Crimson Maid is the journal. Marius, who you play as, will often write down his thoughts on events, people and discussions. Some of these thoughts will be revealed just by following the main path of the story, while others will need a bit more involvement from the player. Try to go over optional topics, solve optional puzzles, find collectibles, inspect the environment etc. to unlock all the journal's pages.

In-game, you'll notice empty areas in the journal where you still need to unlock some of Marius' musings. And you can also check out your journal progress in the main menu, by going to Chapters and checking out how many journal entries you've unlocked for each chapter, out of the total available.

Did you notice that Marius has a pet robin? He took the little guy with him when he left home to the seminary. Now that he returned home, he brought him back - you can spot him inside the car. Marius loves these cute birds and there are several birdhouses around the property where robins can take shelter and eat the seeds left for them by the Rosenthal family members. As you explore, when you encounter a birdhouse, you can interact with the seeds box to feed the robins. It's the wholesome thing to do!

But of course kindness is not the only reason why you should feed the birdies. For some reason, your selfless act makes a robin bring you a tiny piece of paper with verses on it - who knows where it's from? Better collect them all and read the entire poem.

Leon Rosenthal taught his children how to take pictures and paint over them - it became one of their shared hobbies. Find these lost pictures around the estate, depicting portraits of the Rosenthal family members at various moments in their lives. Marius will keep them in his journal, so these precious memories are never lost again.

In a future post we'll move on to another core pillar - meaningful exploration. But in the meantime remember to wishlist and follow the game if you haven't already done so. And check back frequently for more updates on The Crimson Maid!