Katawa Shoujo Forums

Darklord13 wrote:Do you know anything about 4LS's twitter?Why has it gone silent?

I maintain it, but what do you expect me to do with it? I just don't care to reply to the question "new project?" for the millionth time, especially since the answer must be so noncommittal. I'm, and we are, not very good at keeping in touch with community like that. I guess it's not really proper social media etiquette for an "official" twitter account, but we're not very official otherwise either. I'll tweet if there's something worth saying (which also is improper twitter etiquette)

Good advice/ideas for social media/public relations will be taken into consideration.

Is hisao pushed during the Manly picnic or did he just fall?

AaronIsCrunchy wrote:Were any characters based on anyone specific, or at least were made with a conscious resemblance to someone, either physically or characteristically?

Apart from David Tennant's name being invoked (the finished product doesn't look much like David Tennant, but we needed a starting point), I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Before we locked down characters in the infancy of the project a lot of people suggested basing characters off of other stuff but it never took off. Maybe it gave some folk a base to start thinking, but in the end product there weren't any conscious references.

Ritter Delorges wrote:In your opinion, with which other art form does a Visual Novel have most in common from an author's perspective?

From other things I have read here, I suspect that you didn't really approach it as a game. Do you think it had more in common with writing the other kind of novel, or on the level of an individual route perhaps rather a novella? A play? A comic? Or do you think it is so substantially different that such comparisons don't make sense?

VNs are VNs (you could, if you wish to dismissively refer to them as something, refer to them as glorified Powerpoint presentations, but you would be wrong) and there is nothing quite like them. The closest you can get is the early graphical text adventures where you'd get a static picture and type a bunch of commands in, but even those have a different sort of interactivity than most VNs. Your standard VN is most like a CYOA book, but if you're doing it right there's more to the VN than that. I'm not entirely sure we managed to accomplish that, but there you go.

Kon22 wrote:There's a reason why you choose to make a game out of Raita's sketch, or it kinda just happened? Like, "Here, let's just do it around this".

If I'm not wrong, since the beggining you had a general idea of what the game was about. Do you think this helped keeping the project on track? Did anyone ever tried to change the setting/characters too much and you scrapped something because of that?

Before we let anything get too far along, we concentrated on locking down the setting and characters. Once they were in place we started writing the thing. There was not any major change made in terms of a character's personality once we had that initial plan mapped out (not counting whimsical changes to character sexuality, which never showed up in the finished product).

As for why we chose to do this game and not another one... I've no idea. Something in the air that day, perhaps. That it went anywhere after that original thread remains the most unlikely event in the game's history--and probably one of the most unlikely events in the history of the internet (certainly 4chan) as a whole.

Why is this woman smiling?

Just curious.

Some people do that while running, but that expression struck me as odd too when I first noticed it. It looks too happy to be a grimace but not smiley enough to be unfocused. Same with the girl behind her. I look forward to finding out what exactly was on her mind, if anything.

SpunkySix wrote:Some people do that while running, but that expression struck me as odd too when I first noticed it. It looks too happy to be a grimace but not smiley enough to be unfocused. Same with the girl behind her. I look forward to finding out what exactly was on her mind, if anything.

With the eyebrows, it reminds me of a Misha expression. Like she's planning to catch up to Emi and give her the ol' switchblade-to-the-back.

HarvestmanMan wrote:

SpunkySix wrote:Some people do that while running, but that expression struck me as odd too when I first noticed it. It looks too happy to be a grimace but not smiley enough to be unfocused. Same with the girl behind her. I look forward to finding out what exactly was on her mind, if anything.

With the eyebrows, it reminds me of a Misha expression. Like she's planning to catch up to Emi and give her the ol' switchblade-to-the-back.

It does look like her face a little bit, actually. I've always liked the idea of Miki and Emi being running rivals too, since this scene. There's not enough fan art of that.

Not a dev, no must answer, but.

Maybe she just likes smiling? Emi smiles while she runs, though not in THAT scene. That's like asking, I dunno, why Kenji is so weird. Or why Misha use drills in her head. Or why Emi's sex face and angry's face are the same.

TheHivemind wrote: (not counting whimsical changes to character sexuality, which never showed up in the finished product).

Could you elaborate on this?

Hmmm, with various ghosts of Rika and Saki popping up in the other discussion threads, I was wondering:

Have Aura and/or Silentcook actually done outlines of Saki and Rika plot lines, and to what level of detail (whether just shooting the breeze, penning something, or is it only the character art and basic info we've already seen)?

No. I first found out about Rika in the blog post, same as everyone, and haven't done anything at all in that direction. April's fool is foolish.

No. They were April fools. That was a joke. They weren't a part of KS's development. As SC says, he wasn't even aware of it before the blog post was made.

I just tend to ignore everything that happens on April first. It's kind of like the one day a year where I'm as quizzical of the world as kenji.

I'm perfectly aware those were an April Fool's joke. I was just wondering if the joke had any roots in 'reality', though. Thanks for the clarifications!

unseencamel wrote:

TheHivemind wrote: (not counting whimsical changes to character sexuality, which never showed up in the finished product).

Could you elaborate on this?

You know when you've been writing a story, and you think to yourself "yeah, I think it makes sense that this character would be bisexual," but then you also realize that there's no way to bring it up or show it without it being A Thing that would probably distract players from the story you're trying to tell, because who cares if she's bisexual (answer: some of the audience probably does, and will argue ways to show that she wasn't really bisexual, just curious, or there's no way he could be gay, because that's for some reason terrifying for a lot of dudes to consider (or in the case of poor Misha, will argue that she couldn't really be an out-and-out lesbian, because that means that I as a dude have no shot with this imaginary girl, so I will ignore what she says and call her bisexual), and go on to possibly miss the point entirely), it doesn't have really anything to do with anything?

Basically like that--the sexuality of most of the characters never really comes up--so what's the point of pulling a Dumbledore and being like "oh by the way the whole time I was writing Muto I was thinking of how he's probably gay" or something like that (FULL DISCLOSURE: I did not actually think of Muto as gay, although if you want to look hard at the way Tennant's Doctor flirts with Captain Jack and pretend that's relevant to the discussion, feel free). It adds nothing to the narrative, it's just a bullet point to put on TV Tropes--hooray, we ticked the box for "CLOSET CASE" or "FAUXMOSEXUAL" or whatever the fuck category they decide to shoehorn it in. Stuck under WORD OF GOD, because I typed it up just now on this message board.

EDIT: Jesus that came off a bit angry, didn't it? The long and short of it is that it wasn't important to the plot to outright state characters' sexuality (well, apart from Misha), so whatever I imagined while writing them isn't really important.