Ask!

[Aura]

Would you ever sell the IP to a developer to make an Anime out of Katawa SHoujo?

If the price is right.

[Aura]

how far along into KS's development did you guys decide on Lilly's half-Scottish heritage?

She always had one foreigner parent and one Japanese parent, but her heritage was changed around during the development. For some time it was actually a common pastime/amusement for us to come up with silly nationalities to suggest to Suriko, which he would gruffly reject. She used to be half-South African at first, and then something else, I think half-Finnish, before Suriko settled into half-Scottish, maybe around 2009?

[Aura]

Which prosthetic limbs does Emi use for running? They wouldn't happen to be Cheetah, would they?

Her prosthetics are modeled after Ossur Cheetahs, yes.

[Ariad]

I'm visiting here from KSG at 4chan. What songs do you think would fit best as good end themes for each of the characters?

[Kwyna]

Would members of 4LS consider doing an AMA thread on reddit? Just something I wanted to ask since the KS phenom was on par with skyrim at it's peak there at one point. References to KS still pop up time to time, and reddit loves indie devs anyway.
Combined with the fact that the 4 leaf story is pretty inspiring to a lot of people, I think it'd really be enjoyed by alot of your fans.

[theartificial]

How did the idea of feminist conspiracy agenda come around in the making?

[Kwyna]

Also, for NicolArmarfi.

Absolutely outstanding work on the soundtrack, really one of the highlights of KS for me. Since I'm pretty clueless about soundtrack production and how you did your own particularly, I want to ask:

1) Do you really play all those instruments? Did you mix them together for the songs or did you play along with other musicians? If not, did you use a keyboard that can synthesize multiple instruments? I'm really curious. I'm pretty good at the guitar myself, and I play a little piano(both as a casual interest) but I honestly could not imagine pulling something the likes of the KS soundtrack off.

2) Do you have other games you've produced soundtrack for? Anything else you've worked on? I really cant find mention of you much elsewhere.

3) What was the process for production of the KS soundtrack? I mean, did you just kinda do your own thing and churn out music and the devs design scenes around it? Or did they tell you "we need this emotion and this is the scene, score it".

Anyway, thats all I have. Thanks for taking the time to do this, 4LS devs.

[Kwyna]

...I honestly could not imagine pulling something the likes of the KS soundtrack off.

Pull it off alone*, I mean.

Sorry, I'll just register.

[Aura]

I'm visiting here from KSG at 4chan. What songs do you think would fit best as good end themes for each of the characters?

Themes, as in music that'd thematically fit the ending scene or a credit roll after the good end? It's pretty much impossible to give a totally serious answer to this, so I recruited a committee to suggest songs. Here's the final five:

Hanako: Eels - Flower
Shizune: Cinnamon Chasers - The World Is Yours
Rin: U2 - Beautiful Day
Lilly: The Turtles - Happy Together
Emi: Shanks & Bigfoot - Sweet Like Chocolate

[Aura]

Would members of 4LS consider doing an AMA thread on reddit? Just something I wanted to ask since the KS phenom was on par with skyrim at it's peak there at one point. References to KS still pop up time to time, and reddit loves indie devs anyway.
Combined with the fact that the 4 leaf story is pretty inspiring to a lot of people, I think it'd really be enjoyed by alot of your fans.

You understand you are posting in a thread that functionally is a persistent AMA thread, and literally anyone can pop in and ask us whatever? That said, sure we can consider it, maybe even do it. I don't know if that kind of thing would take of outside of r/ks though.

[Aura]

How did the idea of feminist conspiracy agenda come around in the making?

It was just something A22 came up with when he was writing, and took off from there.

[Aura]

Would members of 4LS consider doing an AMA thread on reddit? Just something I wanted to ask since the KS phenom was on par with skyrim at it's peak there at one point. References to KS still pop up time to time, and reddit loves indie devs anyway.
Combined with the fact that the 4 leaf story is pretty inspiring to a lot of people, I think it'd really be enjoyed by alot of your fans.

You understand you are posting in a thread that functionally is a persistent AMA thread, and literally anyone can pop in and ask us whatever? That said, sure we can consider it, maybe even do it. I don't know if that kind of thing would take of outside of r/ks though.

And bam, we did it:

[Suedars]

I've got a question for Hivemind:

I know you ended up writing Emi's path because nobody else wanted to and someone had to. Did Emi grow on you as a character over the course of writing her story? Now that the project is done, if you were to time travel back into the past when you all were choosing characters to write, would Emi be your first choice, or would you still want to write for a different character (ignoring any factor of not wanting to write the same story twice)?

[Pseudogenesis]

Any particular rationale to the way you named the characters? Lilly's name seems more romanized than the others, although I'm unsure if it's intentional.

[Aura]

Any particular rationale to the way you named the characters? Lilly's name seems more romanized than the others, although I'm unsure if it's intentional.

Lilly's name is not Japanese because of her parents, one is Japanese and the other is not. They gave one daughter a Japanese name and the other a Western one.

As for the rest, while most of the names don't carry any meaning, there's some interesting stuff here and there, both with the names themselves and their writings. Let's see:
Hideaki is named after A22's favourite anime director, Hideaki Anno
Shizune's name kanji are read "silent sound". Contrary to popular belief, Hisao's name kanji reading is not an intentional pun.
Rin's first name kanji is very unusual to reflect her persona, and her last name is the same as the "godfather of anime", Osamu Tezuka's.
Misha is named after a character in the novel Red Dragon.
Akira is named after a character from one of Suriko's favourite manga, Aria