Post
by Aura » Sat Sep 26, 2015 8:06 pm
Like SC's smug references to inside jokes imply, a lot of it is just silly "you had to be there" comedy stuff. Aside from that, the releases of course felt great.
The Speedboat Carousel thing was pretty important to me, since I instigated it. It happened in fall 2008, when we had been working a year on 1) getting 4LS staffed so we could actually make KS and 2) trying to make KS, specifically Act 1. We in fact had written it once already, then partially rearranged/rewritten it because it was awful. But that version was really a literary Frankentein's monster, only together with bubblegum and duct tape. The writers were forging on with the routes and at that point we had the final art team together too, so we were getting production art and things were looking pretty good for 4LS for the first time in the project. At this point I tell everyone that I want to throw out everything we have and rewrite the entire Act 1 from ground up. It's because I recognized how absolutely horrendous that version of Act 1 was (after all, it was me who had pieced it together from our first attempts at writing VNs and some other hacks) and I felt like we could do a lot better if we tried again. It didn't go over that well. It would be massively demoralizing to go back to writing the beginning of the story instead of releasing something concrete and get public feedback and all that jazz. Writers were reluctant to write act 1 again instead of their routes. Delta was furious and threatened to quit.
So I had to convince everyone that this was worthwhile and necessary to do. It was probably the longest and roughest single argument we had in the project. I had this vision for the new and improved Act 1, but I had trouble communicating the philosophy of the direction it would take so delta helpfully came up with an awful analogy involving speedboats and yes, a carousel. In the end we ended up scrapping it all like I wanted and made the entire Act 1 you can see in the final game in the following 7 months.
Anyway, to me that decision represents the relentlessness and commitment that we displayed at our best. We were (sometimes) willing to throw out work or redo it howevermany times if it wasn't up to scratch. It's also a fucking stupid and insane way of making stuff, because that way you never get anything actually made and I have no idea how KS ever got completed.
<Aura> would you squeeze a warm PVC bottle between your thighs and call it "manaka-chan"
<Suriko> I would do it if it wouldn't be so hard to explain to my parents
