Ask!

[gorgo]

I have some questions, sorry if has been asked.

There was a time, while you working at the game, in which you have thought about quitting and leave everything?

Have you ever considered the idea of a character who play musical instrument or sing?

[cpl_crud]

I have some questions, sorry if has been asked.

There was a time, while you working at the game, in which you have thought about quitting and leave everything?

Have you ever considered the idea of a character who play musical instrument or sing?

I did quit the project after a few years. I had taken on a new job and I couldn't handle both the job and the work load required, so after a few tense discussions I left.


Lilly was going to play the chello and Hanako was going to sing in private, but those are from very early versions of the story

[Nicol Armarfi]

There was a time, while you working at the game, in which you have thought about quitting and leave everything?

I did quit for a few years, between 2008 and 2011. I came back eventually to clean up my old tracks and fill in a few small gaps in the soundtrack though.

[TheHivemind]

There was a time, while you working at the game, in which you have thought about quitting and leave everything?

I never officially quit, but I did disappear for a while with little to no explanation (the explanation: I was frustrated with how poorly my efforts were going, so I thought I'd give up. Silentcook and crud came after me at some point and got me to clean up my mess).

[cpl_crud]

There was a time, while you working at the game, in which you have thought about quitting and leave everything?

I never officially quit, but I did disappear for a while with little to no explanation (the explanation: I was frustrated with how poorly my efforts were going, so I thought I'd give up. Silentcook and crud came after me at some point and got me to clean up my mess).

Maybe a better question is "was there anyone that didn't quit/go on hiatus?"

Weee did a blog piece a while ago that went into some of the woes of the artists (things I didn't even know about) and almost all of the artists seem to have had an "I quit" moment.


Made me feel less bad about my lack of commitment....

[TheHivemind]

There was a time, while you working at the game, in which you have thought about quitting and leave everything?

I never officially quit, but I did disappear for a while with little to no explanation (the explanation: I was frustrated with how poorly my efforts were going, so I thought I'd give up. Silentcook and crud came after me at some point and got me to clean up my mess).

Maybe a better question is "was there anyone that didn't quit/go on hiatus?"

Weee did a blog piece a while ago that went into some of the woes of the artists (things I didn't even know about) and almost all of the artists seem to have had an "I quit" moment.

Made me feel less bad about my lack of commitment....

I spent some time reading old PMs tonight trying to figure out just how long my impromptu hiatus was, and oh MAN were we all burned the fuck out by like, 2010. The fact that we then spent another two years working on the damn thing was nothing short of a miracle.

[Kakureboshi]

I don't remember this being asked before, so here goes...

Devs, what were your highlights of the project?
It could be the funniest moment you can remember, the moment that helped you grow the most as a person, or just some random incident you remember fondly.

[Silentcook]

Oh, I dunno... Word Substitution Night, the Teambuilding Exercise, the Speedboat Carousel Incident, random giggly fits at three o' clock in the morning on IRC...

[Aura]

Like SC's smug references to inside jokes imply, a lot of it is just silly "you had to be there" comedy stuff. Aside from that, the releases of course felt great.

The Speedboat Carousel thing was pretty important to me, since I instigated it. It happened in fall 2008, when we had been working a year on 1) getting 4LS staffed so we could actually make KS and 2) trying to make KS, specifically Act 1. We in fact had written it once already, then partially rearranged/rewritten it because it was awful. But that version was really a literary Frankentein's monster, only together with bubblegum and duct tape. The writers were forging on with the routes and at that point we had the final art team together too, so we were getting production art and things were looking pretty good for 4LS for the first time in the project. At this point I tell everyone that I want to throw out everything we have and rewrite the entire Act 1 from ground up. It's because I recognized how absolutely horrendous that version of Act 1 was (after all, it was me who had pieced it together from our first attempts at writing VNs and some other hacks) and I felt like we could do a lot better if we tried again. It didn't go over that well. It would be massively demoralizing to go back to writing the beginning of the story instead of releasing something concrete and get public feedback and all that jazz. Writers were reluctant to write act 1 again instead of their routes. Delta was furious and threatened to quit.

So I had to convince everyone that this was worthwhile and necessary to do. It was probably the longest and roughest single argument we had in the project. I had this vision for the new and improved Act 1, but I had trouble communicating the philosophy of the direction it would take so delta helpfully came up with an awful analogy involving speedboats and yes, a carousel. In the end we ended up scrapping it all like I wanted and made the entire Act 1 you can see in the final game in the following 7 months.

Anyway, to me that decision represents the relentlessness and commitment that we displayed at our best. We were (sometimes) willing to throw out work or redo it howevermany times if it wasn't up to scratch. It's also a fucking stupid and insane way of making stuff, because that way you never get anything actually made and I have no idea how KS ever got completed.

[Nicol Armarfi]

I don't remember this being asked before, so here goes...

Devs, what were your highlights of the project?
It could be the funniest moment you can remember, the moment that helped you grow the most as a person, or just some random incident you remember fondly.

The highlight of the project for me was that one time we simulwatched Enthiran. That movie was the shit.

[Aura]

Yeah that was definitely the best movie night we had.

[Suriko]

Cash or credit?

I pay with gun

[gorgo]

Rin's surname, is an homage to Tezuka Osamu?

[Aura]

Yea

[Kon22]

Did you guys start the project expecting to finish it, or did you think it was eventually going to get dropped? And, was there a point during development where you thought the project was going to die?