self-professed fan of the SaGa series. Production began mid-2013, with Kawazu describing development as "turbulent". It was built using the Unity engine. Scarlet Grace was first announced in December 2014 under the title "SaGa 2015" as part of the series' 25th anniversary celebrations. Its official title was revealed at the Sony press conference at the 2015 Tokyo Game Show. Instead of releasing a game demo, Square Enix restricted the game's public pre-release appearances to trade shows. The game was released in Japan on December 15, 2016, as both a standard edition and as a limited edition, which included a soundtrack album and artbook. Unlike many PlayStation Vita titles, Scarlet Grace did not support PlayStation TV as Kawazu decided to focus on optimizing performance for Vita alone. Sony and Square Enix collaborated on special edition Vita consoles themed after Scarlet Grace. Design Inagaki acted as the game's lead designer, while Kawazu was both game designer and scenario writer. Prior to being joined by battle designer Ikuta Yasuhiro, Kawazu deliberately avoided creating anything but rough battle design concepts, instead focusing on other aspects of the game to Inagaki's frustration. Yasuhiro was responsible for creating most of the battle system, including the data related to what enemies would appear in encounters, which was difficult as random encounters were removed from the game entirely. Many of the mechanics related to skills, weapons and enemies were inspired by Yasuhiro's love of card and board games, and his dislike of characters starting out with unfavorable weapons and abilities. The Timeline mechanic was implemented to give players greater freedom of choice during battle, while also giving them battle and turn information in a streamlined way. Developing the Timeline mechanic was challenging for the team due to the necessity of incorporating both the player party and enemies into the system. The lack of 3D dungeon environments was due to budgetary constraints, as they would have required a sizeable dedicated team. LP and skill names were also carried over from earlier SaGa titles, although LP was changed to remove its earlier implementation of permadeath. Kawazu had pushed to change the names of returning battle moves, but the rest of the staff opposed this. During early development, navigating the world map was just a question of selecting a town or dungeon location, but it was changed to a free roaming world map to increase players' enjoyment at exploring the world