Katawa Shoujo Forums

Assuming it's not trolling or made up on the spot, etc. it sounds like at one point Hanako's path was a lot darker: she would spend time on some kind of mental-health drugs, maybe even in an institution (with the possibility of a bad-end rape scene) or maybe she would end up pregnant (and it seems unlikely it would be intentional). One path through Grid1 even introduces her standing on the edge of the roof. The finished game might even play with that a little: Lilly's conjecture about why Hanako hates her birthday is worse than the real reason, at least to me.

Was there an effort to pull back on her story and lighten it up? Or was it just a move in the direction of a better story? Or am I completely wrong and her path was never really that much different from how it turned out?

For that matter, did any path significantly pull back on drama/darkness?

Hey devs, why wasn't Hisao fitted with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator?

cemex wrote:Hey devs, why wasn't Hisao fitted with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator?

Because it wasn't deemed appropriate at the time (and we needed surgery to happen later in Lilly's path).

uwa wrote:For that matter, did any path significantly pull back on drama/darkness?

The game's first draft had a bodycount of a minimum of one and a maximum of three dead characters, depending on which and how many wrong turns you took.

I kind of wish one of those deaths stayed in, too. All considered, it might have made for a better end result, storytelling-wise.

Silentcook wrote:

uwa wrote:For that matter, did any path significantly pull back on drama/darkness?

The game's first draft had a bodycount of a minimum of one and a maximum of three dead characters, depending on which and how many wrong turns you took.

I kind of wish one of those deaths stayed in, too. All considered, it might have made for a better end result, storytelling-wise.

I suppose you got a lot of people curious (well, at least me) so let me be the first to ask, could you please enlighten us a bit about that?

A question to Nicol Armarfi:

While actually sounding different, Emi's theme Standing Tall has got - in my opinion - the same distinct feeling as Vangelis' Chariots of Fire, which was a soundtrack for a movie about runners. Is it just a coincidence or was it a kind of a musical pun?

During the collaborative parts of the active writing process, how did you manage to, well, move forward?
It's so difficult to come to any sort of consensus with everybody's creative egos clashing all the time.
Unless there's a complete respect of each other's skill and opinion, protracted battles over the slightest of details tend to erupt.
Was there some sort of an unwritten rule (e.g. only to add/remove something if everyone involved agrees)?
Was someone given the power to have the final say in things?

SteelSatsuma wrote:During the collaborative parts of the active writing process, how did you manage to, well, move forward?
It's so difficult to come to any sort of consensus with everybody's creative egos clashing all the time.
Unless there's a complete respect of each other's skill and opinion, protracted battles over the slightest of details tend to erupt.
Was there some sort of an unwritten rule (e.g. only to add/remove something if everyone involved agrees)?
Was someone given the power to have the final say in things?

From the way you ask that question I infer that you're working on some sort of a project as well. I generally advice against doing things like we did, at least without proper thought, because how KS was produced was sometimes dictated by other things than what we figure is good practices. Anyway, there was no process that I could describe. We did supress our "creative egos", preferred to find compromise, and respected both feedback and people getting feedback (despite it often being rather blunt). It took quite some time for us to learn to work together and to balance between autonomy and collaboration. Technically someone always had the final say, but that was pretty much never used as a weapon in arguments.

How vision works in a collaborative project is very important. You can either have split vision, like in KS with its paths, a consensus vision (hard unless the writers work really well together), or a single vision, like a main writer. Everything has its pros and cons, but having something to "default to" really helps in figuring out what is important and what is not. I recommend writing a lot. Talking for half an hour, writing an hour and talking half an hour can be much more useful than talking two hours, especially in case of people with good judgmental skills. For KS, there's literally tens of thousands of words of text that was written just to get a grip of the characters, none of which ended up in the actual game script. Talking about something solid is helpful.

dunkelfalke wrote:A question to Nicol Armarfi:

While actually sounding different, Emi's theme Standing Tall has got - in my opinion - the same distinct feeling as Vangelis' Chariots of Fire, which was a soundtrack for a movie about runners. Is it just a coincidence or was it a kind of a musical pun?

I don't notice any similarities between the two pieces of music, and I'd have to disagree that the feeling is the same.

Silentcook wrote:

uwa wrote:For that matter, did any path significantly pull back on drama/darkness?

The game's first draft had a bodycount of a minimum of one and a maximum of three dead characters, depending on which and how many wrong turns you took.

I kind of wish one of those deaths stayed in, too. All considered, it might have made for a better end result, storytelling-wise.

so who was part of the bodycount

Iggy wrote:I suppose you got a lot of people curious (well, at least me) so let me be the first to ask, could you please enlighten us a bit about that?

Before the people who ask multiply: no.

Silentcook wrote:

Iggy wrote:I suppose you got a lot of people curious (well, at least me) so let me be the first to ask, could you please enlighten us a bit about that?

Before the people who ask multiply: no.

Why not? What have you to lose?

Silentcook wrote:

cemex wrote:Hey devs, why wasn't Hisao fitted with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator?

Because it wasn't deemed appropriate at the time (and we needed surgery to happen later in Lilly's path).

Just wanted to say that it's also a reasonable decision from a medical point of view: As someone who has an implanted defibrillator, they tried to fix my problem with medication first and decided that I should get one when that didn't work.

Any interesting developer commentary/fun trivia about the game that most people are likely to miss from you guys?

How'd you learn to deal with bad publicity, such as this: http://theglobaldaily.net/010412.html

Also, do you have any future plans for Visual Novels?