Ask!

[Comrade]

Minor and totally irrelevant question:

Why is Baidu listed as a spider on the "Who's Online" list, when on pretty much all other forums I've been on call it a bot? Is it some sort of developer joke?

Only creeps and spies look at who's online.
And you know, comrade

[CoffeeDrive]

Can we have an offtopic subforum?
I was genuinely surprised there wasnt one.

[Megumeru]

Are you guys planning to hold a booth on the winter Comiket?

[Aura]

Minor and totally irrelevant question:

Why is Baidu listed as a spider on the "Who's Online" list, when on pretty much all other forums I've been on call it a bot? Is it some sort of developer joke?

The kind of bot it is (and the others) is called a Spider because it "crawls the web". It's not unusual at all.

[Aura]

Can we have an offtopic subforum?
I was genuinely surprised there wasnt one.

I don't like the idea. The function of off topic forum is to inflate community interaction and cohesion by getting people to talk about whatever and to get to know each other. At the danger of sounding patronising or condescending, we're not awfully interested in that kind of community thing. I understand that the discussion space of Katawa Shoujo is limited and at this point possibly running out, and I think some of you guys sort of want to be internet friends and keep the community together, but building a community or fan following was never a goal of ours so stuff like off topic forums haven't interested us.

Remember that these aren't some KS fan forums, these are the public section of 4LS's development forums (and because of that, we've for the past 6 years ran them in a tyrannical fashion, entirely ignoring how you guys possibly might want the community to be ran). For an offtopic forum to exist, the entire identity of these forums would need to change, from a KS community to a community of people brought together because they happened to like KS. This is what happened with the KS general threads over at 4chan. I'm sure there's merit to going the same way here too, but I'm not sure if it's a thing we want to do.

[Aura]

Are you guys planning to hold a booth on the winter Comiket?

No.

[Zarys]

As I won brilliantly in Hanako's Broken Heart for the "What must did Elessar" contest, I can have the rank "Awesome" ?

[ParagonTerminus]

As I won brilliantly in Hanako's Broken Heart for the "What must did Elessar" contest, I can have the rank "Awesome" ?

I literally cannot even...

Okay, I know this was a joke, but I know (from experience!) that no moderator/administrator on any website ever likes being questioned for ranks. I only got a custom rank once, and that was because I did something really hilariously stupid.

[Guest Poster]

Back when I still moderated a forum, I'd threaten to reward people whining for custom titles with titles such as "annoying pest" or similar niceties.

[Silentcook]

1) Even though this is a kind of a free arena and finishing the game made us less grumpy, we are not any less forgiving of stupidity. While commentary and followup questions are fine, try to not clog up the thread with unrelated posts, questions that have been answered before, or any general silliness.

[Liminaut]

What did the KS artists think of Rin's route? Did it mirror their experience of the artistic process?

[ArcCain]

An admin for a KS facebook page mentioned that: "It's implied that Rin in her Neutral Ending, (Act 4), will kill herself and that this is the True Ending as that is the name of that scene in the game files."

Would you which to shed some light over this Aura or leave it to fans to debate?

[Aura]

I'm not gonna say that some specific interpretation is wrong, even if it is.

I understand that it might be fun to try to decrypt whatever you imagine are margin notes left by us in the hopes of gaining some insight into the stories, but it's just grasping at straws that aren't even there. During development we called that ending "neutral", and it's not any more or less true than any other ending in KS. If we had wanted to make a true ending kind of thing, we'd have used the traditional visual novel structure of requiring every other ending be seen first to unlock the "true end".

[StuBenedict]

Long-time listener, first-time caller. And I've slogged through this entire Ask thread.

I'm aware that SilentCook is a nurse, and that there was a lot of thought and consideration put into the effort of accurately describing afflictions such as arrhythmia. But I'm wondering, how deeply did the dev team research the more physical conditions of blindness and deafness? Did each writer become something of an "expert" on the affliction of his assigned student? Perhaps there was a single person (perhaps SilentCook? perhaps someone else?) providing general counsel on such things? Or did you approach these maladies from more of a "this is just what seems to make sense" perspective when fleshing out stories and scenes?

Other questions. What is the nature of the feedback you've received from the disabled community? Have they felt like the treatment of their afflictions was accurate? And does (or could) current technology allow a blind person to play the game?

And please accept my thanks for completing this project. Other than Super Mario Bros. 3, Chrono Trigger, Portal 1, and Katamari Damacy, no game has ever impacted me this deeply.

[Silentcook]

Your questions are better answered by the specific writers. I'll say that I did give general counsel, but my current main specialization is and was miles away from anything in KS (non-current ones are a different story).

So far no disabled people have come after us with pitchforks, whether literary or literal. I remember a few cool people swinging by our IRC, including someone who said they were blind. Text-to-speech tools exist, and it should be possible to slave a text hooker to them, thus allowing them to enjoy KS to this degree.

Other than Super Mario Bros. 3, Chrono Trigger, Portal 1, and Katamari Damacy, no game has ever impacted me this deeply.

Damned with faint praise. Or is that praised with faint damns?