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[Aura]

Dear devs, a friend of mine who regularly spends time on this forum recently proposed that we work together on a visual novel.
We are discussing possible plot and he's out of ideas at the moment.
Is there anything you'd like to tell to an amateur story writer to get some motivation?

You suck at writing. So do I. Everyone does. Write anyway.

[Munchenhausen]

Aura, can we see a photo of your eyes?

[Aura]

I tried to make sense of the Lilly timeline question but as I'm not Suriko and I happen to know that pretty much everything in KS related to locations outside of Yamaku and its immediate vicinity is retarded, I'm not going to attempt an answer. I can't even tell where Lilly is physically in some of those scenes (required to make sense of south/north) because we only refer to them by the internal scene codes, not the names. Your best hope is him showing up.

[Aura]

Aura, can we see a photo of your eyes?

There's a public photo out there that shows one of my eyes. Should be good enough.

[Suriko]

It's been years, and Lilly's path was a mess of continuous and haphazard edits. From what I can remember, this is closest to what was intended.

It seems to me it's like this:

1. Family lives in House A (the one near a city on Hokkaido)
2. Family moves to House B ("our real house", the one fairly south of Sendai/Yamaku), keeping House A as a vacation home
3. Parents move to Scotland
4. Lilly and Akira decide to (and/or convince parents to) sell House A to buy House C (the small Hokkaido house in the country which we see on the weekend trip)
5. They continue living in House B, using House C as a vacation home

I'm pretty sure it was something like:

Family lives in A, owns the summerhouse as C
They move to Scotland
Akira sells up and she and Lilly move to smaller southern house B (the 'real house')
They keep C as a holiday home/retreat

[Atario]

Family lives in A, owns the summerhouse as C

Wait, so they lived in A and summered in C, even though the two houses are quite close together?

Akira sells up and she and Lilly move to smaller southern house B (the 'real house')

Well, shit. This makes a significant chunk of my fanfic-in-the-works have an inconsistency with the canon.

Ah, screw it, I like it too much to change it now. I'll just let it be inconsistent…

[SpecimenSix]

I think I've missed my window since I'm sure A22 won't stop by the forums for at least another year, but I've always wondered since I first joined these forums...what the fuck is his user avatar?

[Aura]

It's the "anguished jew" image macro.

[brythain]

Then again, imaginary boarding school for imaginary girl who goes to imaginary academy… would be nice to find real-life analogues all the time, but what can we do?

Question: how much physical detail was provided for each character when working on art and story? Or were just the obvious plot points worked out?

[TheHivemind]

Dudes, take your conversations about where Lily went to school or whatever the hell this nonsense is about to a different thread. You got as much of an answer as you're going to get from this thread.

[Aura]

Then again, imaginary boarding school for imaginary girl who goes to imaginary academy… would be nice to find real-life analogues all the time, but what can we do? :)

Question: how much physical detail was provided for each character when working on art and story? Or were just the obvious plot points worked out?

What do you mean by physical detail? Provided by who? To whom? If by physical you mean their actual physique, the strategic measurements question was discussed a few pages back. We didn't count the number of moles on anyone's butt, but obviously things like mannerisms, posture, body language and such are important to be able to both write and illustrate a character. I spent a lot of time with kamifish thinking about Rin's body language, because she can't use hands which are a fairly important form of nonverbal communication.

[brythain]

We didn't count the number of moles on anyone's butt, but obviously things like mannerisms, posture, body language and such are important to be able to both write and illustrate a character. I spent a lot of time with kamifish thinking about Rin's body language, because she can't use hands which are a fairly important form of nonverbal communication.

Thanks; I think that outlines the range of my question and answers it in general. While you didn't count the number of moles on anyone's butt (to use your figure of speech), was there anything you did at that level of detail re the characters' physical selves? For example, where exactly do Rin's arms end, and what is the extent of Hanako's scarring?

[Aura]

We didn't count the number of moles on anyone's butt, but obviously things like mannerisms, posture, body language and such are important to be able to both write and illustrate a character. I spent a lot of time with kamifish thinking about Rin's body language, because she can't use hands which are a fairly important form of nonverbal communication.

Thanks; I think that outlines the range of my question and answers it in general. While you didn't count the number of moles on anyone's butt (to use your figure of speech), was there anything you did at that level of detail re the characters' physical selves? For example, where exactly do Rin's arms end, and what is the extent of Hanako's scarring?

Those are not comparable levels of detail. Scarring or Rin's arms are significant aspects of character design because they're almost always on view and draw attention, butt moles aren't. Granted, fibbing any detail can be jarring to an observant audience, but we didn't sweat them too much. Getting big things like your examples more consistent is just in the nature of artists. I guess Hisao's penis could be one example of semi-unnecessary detailing, especially since it ultimately didn't show too many times in the final VN.

[SiniisteR]

There was a question I want to ask about Hanako's route, specifically its plot. While the rest of the routes (except for maybe Rin, as I've yet to play hers so can't be sure) follow a similar template consisting of becoming closer friends with the love interest, eventually confessing to the LI or vice versa which begins the romantic relationship, relationship comes close to (if not) breaking up, due to a certain circumstance, and following each good ending, eventually repairs itself.

Obviously, this is different in Hanakos route due to her very shy nature that in a way, brings the whole process back a step. My question is was there ever a scrapped plot that included the 'arc' of a genuine relationship that comes close to break up due to some circumstance, but is then resolved; and if so, was there an idea of what that circumstance could've been?

[Aura]

I can't answer this without massively ruining Rin's route for you, so here's the answer in spoiler tags for everyone else and for you after you've read it. No peeking.

Yes, Rin's route is exactly this. She's thematically an "anti-love interest" where she and Hisao don't ever really click, and she's not even all that interested in romance. Her entire framework of human relationships and what she values is just different from Hisao's (and most readers'). The events in the story like the atelier arc and especially its conclusion just accentuate this. It's arguable whether the schism even gets resolved or not, in the end. There were no other storylines with similar dynamic.