Case 3 Devlog

Hi again! Thanks for all the support for episode 3 so far! I was pretty nervous releasing it since it's quite different from the previous episodes since it's a lot more linear and lore-focused. Sorry for the numerous delays! Life has beaten me with hammers. 

I wanted Astrea's involvement to be a surprise so I was pretty selective with the screenshots I show while working on the game...as a result 90% of them is just Alicia bullying Itou (?) They were fun to write, though.

When I initially drafted an RPGmaker game, Astrea was actually the protagonist and Alicia was the reoccurring witness. Her cult background was already decided since then so it was something that I planned from the start.....I also wanted to make sure  that it's conveyed properly that the client's mother is a victim who got caught during a vulnerable moment. Even Beaford and Alicia who already suspected that something is up still get manipulated in the end. 

Fia is...well, you're gonna laugh at this but Fia was originally a guy but I struggled really hard to come up  with a design. It's not until I turned her into a woman that the design clicked. Her personality changed a lot from the initial draft too...her original temperament is more of a calming, charismatic priest. I think her current charm is more of  an independent woman which causes a lot of people to idolize her, especially housewives.

I'm glad I finally revealed that Alicia was Lillian's bodyguard. The fact that it was literally part of her job to protect her doesn't help with the guilt. Beaford guessed that Alicia was a detective before but! She was actually a bodyguard,  Knowing how to search and secure rooms are useful for investigating "haunted" houses, knowing how to disarm people makes her know how to safely hold down those that are potentially possessed and by her experience of doing background checks she successfully uncovered a fraud or two.

In the initial draft of case 2, There was actually supposed to be a bomb in Astrea's car which Alicia defused but it felt too tone-breaking.  Crazy to think about now. 

The first draft of this episode also had a lot more jokes but I removed a lot of it because it breaks the flow/doesn't fit the serious tone of the conversation. I might just move them around to more lighthearted parts of the other episodes. 

I did wonder how people would react to Alicia and Beaford actually arguing. They've always gotten along really well but considering how different their personalities/values are, a clash like this is bound to happen. At the end of episode 3, Beaford's still mad at Alicia but at the same time thinks he's just throwing a fit for nothing....while Alicia doesn't even realize that Beaford's mad and she thought they moved on from the conversation already. What a headache. 

About Itou, he's the only extrovert of the group so he had always felt more of an "outsider" when he's around Alicia and Beaford. He actually likes Alicia because he can completely drop the nice guy act around her but the feeling is not mutual. Although Alicia acknowledges that Itou is much better at reading people than her, she still finds him annoying.  Alicia-Beaford-Itou is created to be a trio though so with this case, I wanted to show the different sides of their dynamics.

Well, I don't have time to show Itou's whole backstory since in the end, this game is about Alicia and Beaford. But if you examine a photo frame in the house, you'll find out that Itou's parents actually died when he was a teenager and he had to raise his sister alone. This is part of why Beaford pushed Itou away instead of talking to him after the hospital incident, he'll feel bad complaining about his family to  Itou when "he had it worse" in Beaford's eyes. Itou actually tried to visit Beaford a few times but his family didn't let him in. 

The throwaway line about how Alicia was actually on trial for Lillian's murder.... there was actually an idea of Eurydice from Post Memory being  Alicia's lawyer.  But thinking of episode 4, at their core, Astrea and Eury is actually really similar and there was too much of a role overlap so I had to scrap it.  I'm sorry Eury fans. I even researched a lot about international lawyers for this but realized nobody cared how Franziska and Klavier can just suddenly move countries  in Ace Attorney. Oh well. The stacks were really against Alicia so it was definitely the kind of case that Eury will take., though. 

Putting Eury in also kinda felt like this. She felt too out of place.


Do you know Rafael was also originally supposed to be Itou's friend. He was supposed to be a shopkeeper? in Silver Thread when I wanted the game to have RPG battles when you exorcise ghost....imagine. Some Post-Memory trivia for you. This is part of why Silver Thread's 2nd case took 2+ years to come out by the way. It was such a mess.  

Well, I was gonna talk more about release plans for the new episode but I think I'll need another devlog for that...this is long enough haha. Thanks for reading this far!  If you guys have any lore questions, you can comment here and I'll answer it in a comment or you can ask it in my  marshmallow.