I know they said you can't have mods, but is there any way to edit the text already in the game?
I want to change some scenes since I changed a character's artwork.
Yes, but you have to edit a minified JavaScript file as the game's text content and code is combined when it is built. The JavaScript file is located at
./CoC II-0.3.22-win/resources/app/main.e3ae291f68165caa9d30.js in the downloaded version of the game. This file name changes from version to version, but it will be some form of
main.numbersletters.js. You can also just look for the largest file ending in
.js.
Unfortunately, this is a large file so you will need a more robust text editor than notepad. Notepad ++, VS Code, or Sublime Text should be able to open it, but it will still be slow. You will have to use find+replace to change the text you want to change, and I suspect it will be unpleasant to do. You also have a good chance of breaking your game and save file if you mess with the wrong areas. Try to make sure what you replace only affects the text, and back up your save to file.
It is also possible your text editor will be overloaded and soft crash while attempting this, which adds to the frustration. You could try command line tools which may perform better at find+replace.
Some tips for better performance while browsing the code is to run it through a code formatter like Prettier. The only issue is that this could break the code, and I have never actually tried formatting the code and then saving to disk and running the game. I mostly use this to study the code itself without changing anything, as search performance in VS Code improves greatly when there are newlines.