Guest wrote:Obligatory praise first:
Music and art are really good (though I personally think that's self-evident). I've heard several people call the writing among the best as far as video games go (even if that's not a particularly fair comparison), so that's something, too. I also think that the direction deserves a lot of praise. You could have gotten away with the bare minimum, but ended up with best direction in any VN I've played so far (not that I'm VN_expert, 5000+ VNs played, but yeah).
1. What did you like most about the development of KS; what did you dislike? Like, say, a sense of community or the knowledge that your work would reach a large audience?
2. Is there a specific reason that Shizune's route is so much longer than the others in-universe or did that just kind of happen?
3. Did you plan/write the routes with a certain effect in mind (e.g. deconstruction, make people think) or did you "just" aim to tell a good story?
4. On a scale from 1 (not at all) to 10 (I want to bury myself) how awkward was the communication about the sex scenes with your "army of teenage girl artists"?
5. It seems like the writers were rather inexperienced before KS. Did you deliberately practice writing to make up for that or was your improvement a natural development over the years?
6. This one's for Aura. As someone who can't stand writing in his first language I'm curious: Were you completely fluent before you started working on KS? Did you notice significant improvement over the course of the development? Did you have other writers/editors check if your writing sounds somehow off? (The last one makes me personally kind of paranoid when I write.)
7. You made it quite clear that you won't make any fan disks or stuff like that. Would you consider supplemental material that's less work, like short flash animations or a short comic page (or yonkoma or whatever)? You know, something that won't take years. Though now that I read it it sounds kinda stupid. Nevermind then.
Also, thanks for being awesome, making KS and sacrificing your time to answer our questions (though I guess it doesn't exactly hurt your egos).
1. That's a really hard question. It's late so I can't really write out my full thoughts, but to throw one thing out there, it would be that the act of creation was in and of itself something very enjoyable and something I'd never really felt before. The KS development team (and the guys from the genesis of the project that stuck around) were a fantastic bunch of people, and for someone as deathly shy as me, they drew me out of my shell as the months went on working together. Without the project, I'd probably be a lot more of a recluse. The amount of people that would find the end result was pretty secondary; personally I expected a generally positive reaction to the Act 1 Preview to just come from the usual crowds that would be interested in an English VN (4chan, and maybe a small handful of little forums), and never did I imagine that the game would have this kind of reaction.
2. It's just the way it turned out. Even in the first drafts the path covered the longest amount of time chronologically, but nobody really had a problem with it. Different paths just have different timeframes.
3. Those are both the same thing, really.
4. It varied a lot, depending on scene and on developer. I think there was an inevitable amount of "squick factor" when we started seriously discussing the H-scenes between each other (both between writers, and between writers and artists), but that eventually wore down. Many, many hours were spent talking about different philosophies regarding H-scenes in general, as well as the specific implementations in-game, so to some degree it was just a matter of being required to talk frankly about it. In the end, it actually became pretty normal.
5. Not exactly sure what's meant by 'practising writing'. In terms of writing stuff that's not intended to go in-game just to work on skills, different writers did different things. Everything I wrote during my time in KS was intended to go in-game. I think I might have the most content that was cut too. Maybe Crud. The whole "first draft->second draft->editing->direction" process is incredibly simplified; while L path had two complete drafts, many, many scenes were straight up hatcheted out, entire arcs and subplots cut, etc. I guess the easiest way to put it is that the current status of L path is due to constant iteration; writing the old drafts and scenes that ended up removed was in itself practice.
7. Maybe, but they'd be small if we did do them (and definitely not games or anything). In the end though, the only stuff that's "canon" is what's in the game; any extra stuff a developer does is only as canon as the person reading it wants it to be in their head.
