Katawa Shoujo Forums

Hi all. It's been a while.

Normally, I would start a post/story like this by explaining my motivation. However, in this instance, the explaination is a little autotelic and circular, so I will leave it to the story.

i would, however, like to mention that this is kind of a fan non-fiction, in that I won't be writing a tale from Yamaku, but it is about KS, and hence I feel that it belongs here.


It is a little funny how circular some parts of life are, and how unrelated things tie together to make you understand yourself. For those of you that don't know, I used to be Hanako's writer. For a time as well I was loosely termed the "Producer" of Katawa Shoujo, but that was from a long and distant past. Katawa Shoujo was my life for the best part of three years. Apart from the nessecary functions of the day (work, eating, sleep), practically every second of my being was somehow consumed by KS. The TV shows (well, the animes) that I watched were all based on conversations from the IRC channel (so that I could fit in), and the music I listened to either came from those, or from Touhou. And let's not forget Higurashi.

The reason I got into Katawa Shoujo is directly related to Higurashi. I was in a little fansub group called We are IN Denial (WinD). It was there that a proof reader (Meowshi) told me about this weird project, and it was on his recommendation that I joined the group. I dedicated myself to WinD as much as I did to KS, hence the influence that Higurashi had upon me (and on never-to-be-revealed first drafts).

Unlike a lot of people, I find it hard to function in silence. Whenever I write, or draw a plan, or think deeply, I like to have some kind of "noise" in the background. It usually doesn't matter what it is, so long as it isn't overly repeditive (e.g. a spinning fan), and so long as it is there. So, whenever I was writing scripts for Katawa Shoujo, sending Hisao and Hanako into worlds undiscovered, Foobar or Winamp was busily turning 1's and 0's into audio sensations for me. So, when we started naming each scene, I usually did so by reading the song title that was playing when I started writing the scenes. This led to all kinds of frustrations from the rest of the devs, but for me it was fun. I could read a scene and play the music in the background, and it would "make sense". Of course, this may have been one of the reasons that I wasn't an overly good writer, but it was my "thing."

I won't go into the details of me leaving 4LS, suffice to say that life got in the way. I don't regret my decisions, although I think I would have stuck around had I the time. However, there are benefits in my new lifestyle. One of those is being able to act upon my desires to buy ever more exotic technologies. This week, it is a bran new ATC C3C center speaker, and I love it. And, because I love my speaker, I am listening to more music than usual. In an effort to hear all of the possibilities of this new speaker, I loaded every song into the playlist and went about my business.

Suddenly I was plunged right back into Yamaku. I was Hisao, on the bus, heading into town with Lilly and Hanako. Kagerou (from one of the Higurashi image albums) was playing for the first time in about 12 months. Half-baked memories of profuse typing came back to me. The day I wrote 10,000 words because I just *had* to finish my path. The two destroyed keyboards in my cupboard that are keepsakes of the "KS Era". The mad rush you get from typing and typing, never looking back.

And so I stopped writing emails to business associates, stopped planning meetings 6 weeks in the future, and logged on here. I knew that I couldn't just jump back into Yamaku after so long, but i *had* to write something. I don't imagine that my experience is much different from anyone else's. In some ways it is so generic that I doubt that anyone has battled my spelling errors to make it to this point. But pleasing you is not my aim, and I don't think it ever has been. I do this for myself, as any of the other Devs will probably tell you through clenched teeth. I do hope that this is the start of me getting back into writing something other than bland technical reports and blogs on communications equipment. If not then I will probably disappear back into the sea of obscurity, only to surface again when I buy some other bizzarely expensive peice of kit that reminds me of my "daughter" and her heart-broken suitor.

I hope that you have enjoyed this definition of the word "autotelic".

- Cam "Cpl Crud"

Good to hear from you again, Crud, I'm glad you were able to walk away from KS with good memories. I do hope that 'life' takes a bit of a break around release time. We would love to have you here.

Also, I'm pleasantly surprised that you are brave enough to reveal your name to the world. Not that I'm a stalker or anything, but in internet culture, anonymity is pretty powerful, and rarely is it given away.

I suppose you are right, but people have found me before. I got DDoS'd once. Didn't realise that much until I got $3k bill...

I've been on the internet too long and left too much of a mark to be overly anonymous. Plus, you only have to look at how they tracked the Sydney Neck-Bomber guy down to know that if people want to find you, they will find you.

Next up: Tea Stories

Normally, I would start a post/story like this by explaining my motivation. However, in this instance, the explaination is a little autotelic and circular, so I will leave it to the story.

It's funny you should say that because I saw something last night which sparked off a crazy train of thought. It sounds quite silly, but then I thought, this is just the kind of thing Rin would talk about. Why not share it? Actually why not write a story myself for once. When I considered the opening I was thinking of writing exactly what you did up there.

What types of music do you like btw?

Tea has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

It's just part of my family ritual. Tea at breakfast, tea after dinner... we even stop every movie about half-way through to make some tea.
I think that might have more to do with the narcolepsy that seems to curse my family, but anyway, it's just what we do. Tea was just one of those things that we "did". If we fell off our bikes, our parents would pick us up, dust us off, and make us a cuppa. If we came home from school with a good report card, they would celebrate by buying a cake and making a pot of tea.

As you can imagine, I have become a bit of a tea snob. I'm kind of the revese of those wanky coffee snobs you meet. I can drink pretty much any coffee, but I'm very picky about my tea. Tea bags are right out. Loose leaf tea is the only way to fly, my friends. I have a number of suppliers that I use to make sure that I always have a wide vareity of tea. At the height of bachelordom, I had about 50 types of tea. At one point I even paid AU$100 for 30g of tea. I even convinced myself that it was fantastic and worth every cent.

Of course, the only way to justify having this much tea was to drink a hell of a lot of tea. When I was fansubbing and playing games I bought a 1 litre tea pot. I would make a pot of tea before editing a script or playing a game, and would drink it easily. When doing more time-consuming tasks (like timing an anime etc) I could easily smash through 2 pots. So when I started writing it was only natural that I make tea. A good scene would take a pot of tea, perhaps two. Even now I'm slowly sipping on a pot of Muscat Oolong from the very same pot that has served me for about 6 years now. I clean it regurarly, so you can barely see the stains of the hundreds of litres of tea that have fuelled my work, play, and creativity throughout that time.

Before writing a scene, I would think about what type of tea was best suited for the task at hand. For a romance scene it would be a light, flavoured tea. A dramatic scene might need a slightly over-steeped Earl Grey. A slice-of-life might be a green tea.

Because I'm not a very imaginative person, the concept of having Lilly and Hanako drink tea all the time appealed to me. I always kind of pictured Lilly having a similar upbrining as myself (in the "tea" sense that is) and hence her elegance and paraphenalia. Hanako, however, was just along for the ride. She wanted to spend time with Lilly, and saw getting interested in tea as a way to become closer to her. The teas that are described in the scenes that I wrote were the teas that I was consuming at the time. Yes, I am that unimaginative.

cpl_crud wrote:The day I wrote 10,000 words because I just *had* to finish my path.

But pleasing you is not my aim, and I don't think it ever has been. I do this for myself, as any of the other Devs will probably tell you through clenched teeth.

Any chance you could present some news that doesn't make me dread Hanako's path more than it makes me anticipate it? Rushing things rarely turns out well, and the second comment makes me think you're gonna pull some shit and piss everyone off during at least one point in the path, unless you're just talking about blogging and stuff. Please, prove me wrong.

Regardless, your tendency towards self-deprecation is intriguing, to say the least. Is there something going on here that's 2deep4me that involves Hanako's self-esteem, where you're intentionally understating your writing ability and creativity to make a point, or am I just being retarded? The more I think about it, the more I gravitate towards be the latter, but here I am, posting this anyway.

I think you're reading that wrong.

What part of a 5-year development cycle makes you think that there were any deadlines involved? (Well, actually Itried a number of times to put deadlines in place but that never worked).

If you've never experienced that rush you get from being creative then I suggest you try it. There is a book called "Flow" by Csikszentmihalyi that explains how to get there.

Basically, you start on a "good thing" and just can't stop. The same goes for doing something for yourself as opposed to doing it for someone else. Just becuase you are doing it for yourself doesn't mean that it isn't good quality.

Besides, my "self-depreciation" aside, you've read my scripts before and stuck around. It's not a one-man show here (and I have even less to do with it now); the rest of the team wouldn't let anyone realease anything that wasn't up to scratch.

Like far too many fan-fiction writers I have simply found myself with a bit too much time up my sleeve, and hence wanted to write something. The point of the first post here wasn't to discuss KS or the Hanako path at all, but an autotelec explaination of why buying a new speaker reminded my of KS and the enjoyment of writing.

Nothing deep about it. It's just a bit of prose.

Hahahhahaha
this Q&A session with you (or so is what it seems) is interesting. It's hard to picture the life of someone else behind the computer screen without actually knowing them, and this has shed some light of that... to me at least.
Do you listen to any of the Music composed by any of the Devs? or do you just surf around for stuff you like?

To be honest, I'm a bit like Buffalo Bill from "Silence of the Lambs"; I covet what I say. Or, in this case, hear.

After a hard drive failure a few years ago, my playlist is only about 5500 strong. Of the things I listen to most of the time I would probably (embarissingly) say that there is Classical, J-pop/urban, anime songs, rock and show tunes in there. About the only thing that I can't really stand is heavy metal.

I spend a lot of my time and effort making listening to music more enjoyable, rather than doing the reasonable thing and expanding my playlist.

An example of how I pick music to listen to:
As a Canon photographer I am obsessed with the rumors surrounding the next camera release. I have no intention of buying one the the second it hits the shelves, but I need to know when I can. So I make canonrumors.com one of my daily sites.
They had this up there a few weeks ago.

After obsessing over the video clip, and the other ones (like MirrorDance) I got all of the anDrop CDs off Amazon. And I tell you one thing; the beginning to MirrorDance sounds awesome through my new speakers.

Edit:
Forgot to mention that some of the KS composeers, past and present, have their tracks in that playlist.

Now that I think about it, I suppose my initial response was out of place. I just see the name "cpl_crud" and immediately think "Hanako's path writer", when in reality there's a person behind that handle, just like in my case. Anyway, it's nice to get the misunderstanding about "*having* to finish her path that one day" out of the way, since I thought the comment was referring to your life getting in the way and your departure from 4LS.

However, the point I was trying to make about you doing it for yourself wasn't about the quality of the work, as it is possible to make a very high-quality story that succinctly pisses me off. Rather, it stems from a fear that's been haunting me thanks to a post on the forums here, which I'd rather not locate, that states how much sense it would make for Hisao to die in Hanako's good end. Suffice to say, I am not a big fan of endings so bittersweet that they give you diabetes and clinical depression at the same time. But if you have no interest in discussing Hanako's path, that's fine and I'll respect that, but I really felt like I had to get some things off my chest.

If Hisao died, it wouldn't be a good end.
Though I don't remember if there has ever been a statement to the effect that every path is going to have at minimum one good end...
Akiha's path in Tsukihime only has a bad and and a slightly less bad end...

Well, that's better than having no ending, right Misha?

Occasionally I catch the train to work.

Most of the time I bury myself into my studies (time is a premium), but about two weeks ago I did see something unexpected.

Before I moved out from my parent's place (scarily, this happened over a decade ago), I used to have access to all kinds of books. When I was in primary (elementary) school, we were once asked to count all of the books in our house. We stopped around the 3,000 mark. I was a little ashamed when I got to school the next day, knowing that we had fudged the last few hundred. I shouldn't have worried so much; the next nearest compeditor had about 1,000 books in their house.

So I was never stuck for choice when it came to books. I had read everything by Anne McCaffery by age 12, and once I got hooked into the Discworld (through the Truckers series) I don't think I ever stopped.

When I got into year 7 (1st year middle school) I was admonished by my English teacher because most of the books I read were "Hamburger" books. In many ways we was right, but I didn't see it that way. I was reading above my level, and reading a lot, so what was the issue?

After many battles with various English teachers (I've learned a lot more about English through my other Language studies rather than pure English classes) and the ever-increasing allure with the sciences, I stopped caring so much about fantasy, and started filling up on the "real" world.

By the time I had reached University I had practically given up on reading for pleasure. I'll admit that I got a little lazy in Uni; my grades were high enough without study that I didn't really need to read anything. So, for many years, there was a gap in my reading.

When I started working for KS, I had started reading again.

I dropped in on my parent's place (by now completely corwded with brik-a-brak) and started looking through the bookshelves. One title spoke to my scientist side, and I took it home with me.

Life of Pi was a fun book, but one that I probably would have never read had I read only the blurb. But the story was fun enough that I decided to keep it in my head. Shortly after, the narrative of Hanako's path required a "real" book, so I thought I'd put Life of Pi in there, knowing that the title alone would be enough to ensnare (and embolden) people like myself.


So, back to the present, perhaps 5 years after reading Life of Pi, I see a young woman on the train, reading the book.

For a moment I was tempted to ask her why she chose that book. For me, it was win-win; either she read the book due to KS, or she just found the book on the shelf and decided to read it. In either case, I had a story to back it up.

But I decided not to approach the woman on this occasion. It felt a lot better to know that there was an ever-so-slim chance that there was a chance meeting IRL of 4LS punters. Sure, there is a great chance that she got the book from a book store without any further input, but now that moment will stay with me forever, as there was a chance that someone was reading a book because of something that I had written on a whim. And that felt good.

TIL crud is too shy to talk to women.

>Crud plays the tile-hopping game
>Crud used to read a lot
>Crud has black hair okay it's not purple, but everyone thought her hair was black before it was specifically said to be purple
>Crud is evidently shy
Okay.

I feel like this is an appropriate time to mention that I miss having to type Hanako's name every time I wanted to post.Hanako