Ask!

[Loonie]

I'm not entirely sure about the thrust of your question, but it was a minimum of three hours a day, every day.

Okay. Interesting, but I meant a bit more like...

I understand this may not be the case for everyone, but how could I NOT think about unfinished business which I could actually affect by chipping at it?

There we go. Thank you - that satisfies my 'thrust', as you put it. And thank you to Aura as well.

[FortuneSnowman]

Music question, I know the animations were made first with the music added in (presumably to sync up with it) afterwards, but I'm wondering about how the rest of the music came about.

That's kinda vague, so to explain, I mean another chicken or the egg question. Was it a case of "Okay, we need you to make this many depressing ones, this many spritely ones, and this many ambiance ones", which were then adopted and edited based on if they fit, or was there more knowledge to it going in? Same deal with the character themes, was it a case of "You know, this music really fits this character, let's use it as a theme" or was each one created with that character in mind?

[Nicol Armarfi]

Music question, I know the animations were made first with the music added in (presumably to sync up with it) afterwards, but I'm wondering about how the rest of the music came about.

That's kinda vague, so to explain, I mean another chicken or the egg question. Was it a case of "Okay, we need you to make this many depressing ones, this many spritely ones, and this many ambiance ones", which were then adopted and edited based on if they fit, or was there more knowledge to it going in? Same deal with the character themes, was it a case of "You know, this music really fits this character, let's use it as a theme" or was each one created with that character in mind?

The character themes were the first things I wrote, I was given a list of the main heroines and their personalities so the tracks were based off of that. I'd say at least half of the soundtrack, though, was just a bunch of music I wrote and thought "I think these might work in a visual novel", so I gave those to the rest of the staff and they figured out what to do with it.

[TheHivemind]

for me though it is just the melancholy of the title theme that captures what I feel is the sadness of it.

Funny, because for me it captures the warmth of it.

I guess it's best to just say: Whatever KS did, does and will continue to do for good or ill - it was, is and will always be needed.

Now to ask another question of anyone who cares to answer and if you can remember. During the 5 years that this was in development, how often or perhaps when did you get around to thinking about KS? Every time when you sat down at the computer? Or, if you were an artist, whenever you sat down to draw? That kinda question really...less so about did you think about it 1 month per year and moreso - when did your mind wander towards KS during the time you were making it?

Pretty much every time I sat down to write, which was at least once a day for a good long while, I was thinking about the game.

Really whenever I had downtime I at least thought about it a little.

[OtakuNinja]

I'm a little curious about how old you guys were when you joined the crew?

[TheHivemind]

I'm a little curious about how old you guys were when you joined the crew?

21, I think. Maybe 22?

[hectoramrit]

Did any of the artists or musicians get to read KS as it was written or at all during its development?
If so, did KS affect you or how you lived in any significant way?

There are quite a few life lessons and much advice I've found in this work. Advice that I've tried to follow, wish I could have learned in my formative years, and even have passed on to others. I appreciate that. Were the advice and lessons the characters learned things that you, as the writers, learned in your own lives?

Nicol, your music is excellent. It greatly increases my enjoyment of KS, and I'd say I enjoy the pieces as much as many of Uematsu's pieces. Please don't stop composing music.

[Nicol Armarfi]

Did any of the artists or musicians get to read KS as it was written or at all during its development?
If so, did KS affect you or how you lived in any significant way?

We all had access to KS as it was written, as well as the artwork as it was being made and the gamescript as it was being directed (eg with sprites and musical cues still being put in). Personally though I just used basic descriptions from some of the writers to come up with music pieces they needed, and I have yet to actually read the whole thing.

[inthewind]

Were some of the songs deliberately borrowing motifs from each other, or was that a natural part of the process of writing them within a certain timeframe? If so, did you provide annotation as to which were related and how? I'm curious based on some of the usage.

Also, thank you.

[Nicol Armarfi]

Were some of the songs deliberately borrowing motifs from each other, or was that a natural part of the process of writing them within a certain timeframe? If so, did you provide annotation as to which were related and how? I'm curious based on some of the usage.

I like connecting different pieces together using motifs, and with a project as large as KS there were a lot of opportunities to do this because of the number of tracks involved. The theme from Wiosna is also used in Hokabi and Stride; Painful History and Raindrops and Puddles use the same theme; Lullaby of Open Eyes used the same theme as the original Lilly track, which was eventually replaced by Concord; the theme from Friendship appears briefly in Nocturne; and all the act 2 openings use the themes from their respective characters. The only instance where I was specifically instructed to do this was with the act 2 openings, though.

[Jobriq]

Shizune's act 4 is titled "To my other self" and based on the plot I thought "other self" was supposed to be Misha, but the cover art for the act has Shizune holding hands with a younger version of herself. Am I missing something?

[Reyhan]

One question. What would you not approve of in fan works? There has to be a limit to such things i assume. Legal stuff perhaps?

[Aura]

One question. What would you not approve of in fan works? There has to be a limit to such things i assume. Legal stuff perhaps?

It's not exactly clear-cut. We generally don't approve anything that manipulates KS itself (like making a new path and hacking it into the game files), anything that rips off KS's assets like art, script etc (like a live-action movie adaptation of KS), or anything that pretends to be official (like "Katawa Shoujo 2"). For all of these you can always ask for permission, and we've given permissions for various stuff in the past, but those are the things that are the likeliest to ruffle our feathers.

Rule of thumb is, if you do everything in your fanwork yourself from ground up, we're very likely perfectly fine with it.

[Aura]

Shizune's act 4 is titled "To my other self" and based on the plot I thought "other self" was supposed to be Misha, but the cover art for the act has Shizune holding hands with a younger version of herself. Am I missing something?

No, Shizune doesn't consider Misha a part of her own persona.

[Helbereth]

Shizune's act 4 is titled "To my other self" and based on the plot I thought "other self" was supposed to be Misha, but the cover art for the act has Shizune holding hands with a younger version of herself. Am I missing something?

Chancing a guess, based on what I know from reading the story over a few times, the 4th act is delving into the origin of Shizune's personality. Helping Misha get back on track leads Shizune to reevaluate herself, and that in turn results in her bringing up things about her past to Hisao to help explain why she is the way she is--her competitiveness, the compartmentalization of her relationships, and the distance she places between herself and her closest friends.

Essentially, she's expressing where she came from and trying to figure out where to go from there. It's sort of an existential crisis, but a lot of it gets relegated to internalization until she starts feeling more comfortable with both Hisao, and Misha's situation. Unfortunately, a lot of it gets truncated into a few short scenes, and the narrative instead gets dominated by Misha worries, Student Council duties, and graduation preparations.

This is just speculation, mind you, based on little more than my own interpretation of the available story. It's entirely possible the Act 4 title for Shizune's route has more to do with Hisao's slow realization about his own past relative to the future, but that would be more speculation.

Out of this, I've realized a question: In both of Shizune's endings, it seems as though the story leaves the reader to wonder whether the primary cast (Hisao, Misha, and Shizune) are really even friends at the end. The bad end seems to resolve with an obvious rift between them, but the good end has the earmarks of an eventual--if involuntary--separation of the three, which is a unique situation among the routes. Was leaving the story with that much uncertainty something intentional that was planned before writing the route, or was it simply how the story developed in production?