Ask!

[TheHivemind]

...And thus, Emisha was officially born...

My God, what have you done!

You act as if it wasn't already a thing.

A search of the fanfiction forum would demonstrate otherwise.

With emphasis on officially if I may be so bold... Just like I "officially" could not resist making a godawful romantic portmanteau name for the sake of pun and now will promptly excuse myself as I am running late for my execution by firing squad.

I can only suggest that you search for developer names in the fanfiction forum to get your "officially" date correct.

[Liminaut]

A Comedy of Errors: The Making Of Katawa Shoujo

Totally a musical.

[Liminaut]

Isn't the blog enough? It's flattering if you think we're special, but most of the development was stupid shit that really isn't worth telling about except anecdotally, I feel.

EDIT: By "isn't worth" I obviously mean "would be too embarrassing"

I suspect the blog is what I'm going to get , but I can see that a synthesis and exploration could be valuable.

For instance, in the section that Bad Apple points to I'm impressed by how many times the group trashed what they had and started over again. I suspect that's why KS wound up with such a high quality product; people were willing to start over again. "Plan on throwing one away" has been a principle of good software development since "The Mythical Man-Month". In software circles this has been expanded to "Fail Fast", the principle that most ideas are bad ones and the key to getting good work is to junk bad work as quickly as possible. This creates a non-trivial ego issue in that one has to invest emotionally in a particular work to even get it to the stage where one can say it's dreck, but then one has to freely give up on the work when the junk is junked.

On the other hand, perfectionism is a known way of driving a company out of business. "Duke Nukem Forever" is a classic example here. So there has to be a balance between the drive for quality and the drive to actually get something out. This may be an area where volunteers can produce dramatically higher quality work that funded companies. After all, what would KS have looked like if you all had been working at a company with a budget and had to ship whatever you had at the end of two years?

Ah well. If it doesn't happen it doesn't happen. I just wanted to toss the idea out there.

[Merlyn_LeRoy]

Weee has recently written a blog entry on working on KS.

(tx to _AnIcePerson_ on reddit)

[ArcCain]

Who did the 100% clear art?

[Silentcook]

Climatic did.

[TheVUP]

Weee has recently written a blog entry on working on KS.

(tx to _AnIcePerson_ on reddit)

Just wanna say thanks.

[Liminaut]

Weee has recently written a blog entry on working on KS.

(tx to _AnIcePerson_ on reddit)

Thats a lot for the link ... and for Weee for writing it.

[Atario]

Searched for this, but could not find it if it has already been answered, so if it has, please for to forgiving.

How old were the various devs at the time of the game's release? (Reading the recent Weee blog post, I never knew she was so amazingly young, so it got me curious…)

[TheHivemind]

Searched for this, but could not find it if it has already been answered, so if it has, please for to forgiving.

How old were the various devs at the time of the game's release? (Reading the recent Weee blog post, I never knew she was so amazingly young, so it got me curious…)

26. I think.

[cpl_crud]

Searched for this, but could not find it if it has already been answered, so if it has, please for to forgiving.

How old were the various devs at the time of the game's release? (Reading the recent Weee blog post, I never knew she was so amazingly young, so it got me curious…)

A young 29 when it was released.

[Silentcook]

43. Old man of the bunch.

[Atario]

43. Old man of the bunch.

This actually makes me feel better. I was starting to think everyone involved in this was young enough to be my kid, and it was making me feel depressingly old…

[Gofindnova]

There were a few turns of phrase in the text that I thought ‘sounded Japanese.’ So I was surprised to discover that none of the writers are Japanese. Was there any conscious attempt to make the dialogue sound like Japanese translated to English, and/or to emulate the language of Japanese VNs/anime?

Which of the writers know Japanese?

You guys subvert the idea of ‘white-knighting’ in the game. Are there any other conventions of the VN genre that you consciously tried to avoid? More generally, are there any conventions you dislike (besides the overused high school setting)?

Thanks for your hard work on the game.

[Aura]

We didn't try particularly hard (or at all) to make the dialogue sound like the characters are actually speaking Japanese. With some regards we deliberately moved away from that even, such as everyone using each other's first names when referring to them and ignoring pretty much all potential keigo usage. The language is a messy mishmash of American English colloquialisms, Standard English prose, and commonly used structures in JA-EN translations, weightings depending on the writer.

Three writers speak Japanese to varying degrees of proficiency: crud, Suriko and myself.

While working on KS, we weren't so fed up with VNs as we are now(or didn't feel strongly at all about them), and part of KS's concept was to make a very traditional looking ren'ai VN, so most conventions I wouldn't now touch with a ten foot pole are pretty easily found, even embraced in KS. Biggest divergence was probably us wanting to handle sex in a different way from the eroge traditions, and not rely too heavily on otaku culture shorthand (as far as our limited skills allowed) when writing the stories.

Other than those, I personally dislike the insane length of most AAA visual novels. Most are way too long for the amount of content they have, often due to a massive "common route" that's full of inconsequential filler material. KS is guilty of this too: while I managed to pack the act 1 kindasorta decently, it still makes up something like 40% of an average readthrough and is unfortunately kinda bland. All in all, conventions aren't bad per se, everyone following them is. More diversity would be nice.