Hello.
We are Fleeting Heartbeat Studios, the small international team of Katawa Shoujo fans that you might already know, who have decided to put our skills and knowledge into preserving the legacy of the game we all love, and to serve the community to the best of our abilities.
Our work has started with the creation of Katawa Shoujo: Re-Engineered, the full technical remaster of the visual novel, which preserves the story in its entirety, but adds important accessibility features, support for modern technologies (including the latest version of Ren'Py with new ways of delivering the game to our users, including Flathub and a web release). Our first release was the ignition for the November 2022 update of the general rules governing Katawa Shoujo, which allows everyone to make derived content (i.e. mods) using game assets with simple terms that everyone must follow. For the past almost two years we and our wonderful contributors have been improving KS:RE, adding fixes (including the ones, that were made by Four Leaf Studios themselves), new translations, comfort features and so on.
Last October our team made a commitment towards preserving and improving core infractructure of the game, and we became responsible for hosting the official Katawa Shoujo forums. We're really grateful that the previous forum host, renpytom, entrusted this task to us and allowed us to continue the work of updating, improving and preserving the forums for the next generation of players and fans. We love to see new users coming to the forums, it is truly a place with a long history (and huge library of fanfictions!).
Today, we're announcing another big step in Katawa Shoujo's lifecycle: As of May 6th, 2024, Fleeting Heartbeat Studios became responsible for the official site of the game, katawa-shoujo.com.
From now on, the domain will be running the remake of the official Katawa Shoujo website that we've been working on these past few months. The site now has all of its pages fixed and working (including but not limited to the Downloads and Staff section). We've fixed many outdated or incorrect translations, added new languages, a much snappier and more consistent language switcher, a mobile layout that works for modern smartphones and tablets, a better image viewer, our own CDN for downloads, and a lot more! As with any other project FHS made to this day, the remake is fully open source under the MIT license, so anyone can participate in improving the site, peek under the hood, add new translations, edit existing ones, and a whole heap of other possibilities.
Our special thanks go to:
- Sverre, the original domain owner
- Chendo, the previous hoster
- Peorth, the Katawa Shoujo community moderator
- Four Leaf Studios members who have generously provided us with the original website's source code (without that, making the modern version of the website would've been much harder)
Without your work, cooperation, and trust in us, today's events would have not been possible, thus we'd like to thank all of you and our whole community for supporting us!
We're proud to be the ones responsible for preserving and supporting our favorite game and serving the community with everything we've got. This is an enormous responsibility that we're happy to take head on and we hope that you all can enjoy the results of our work.
— Fleeting Heartbeat Studios
