Finnish interview with Aura translated into English

[Merlyn_LeRoy]

In case people want...not done by me, this is fresh from /vg/, original here:


This is an interview with Aura (main writer and writer of Rin's route) published in a Finnish anime magazine simply called ANIME (1/2012)
The original interview was in Finnish and heres my attempt to translate it to English

NOTE:I'M NOT A NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER MYSELF SO SOME OF THE TEXT MIGHT BE A BIT WEIRD OR CRUDE. THIS IS JUST TO GIVE SOME BASIC UNDERSTANDING TO NON-FINNISH SPEAKING PEOPLE OF WHAT THE INTERVIEW IS ALL ABOUT.

In the winter Comiket of 2000, Japanese doujin artist RAITA published a doujinshi. In the bonus pages he had sketched a concept of a dating sim called Katawa Shoujo, in which all the five girls were handicapped in their own way.
January 2007, 4chan's /a/ started planning a real fan-made visual novel based on this page. After five years of work, Katawa Shoujo's full version was released January 4th 2012. We interviewed the project's Finnish reinforcement; main writer and Rin's route's writer, Aura.

>Would you like to tell about the project's early stages?
4chan has many crazy ideas daily and thanks to the site's large population of visitors many of them actually get somewhere. At first Katawa Shoujo was a project being developed by random anons. The only difference to other anonymous projects was that this idea was one of the first community projects made by 4chan.

>Being an anonymous group without any proper lead/management it must be hard to get anywhere, am I right?
Yep, After couple months the enthusiasm was almost gone, but we decided to push on with a small group that we eventually decided to name Four Leaf Studios. I think that every anonymous project goes that way nowadays since organizing the project as anonymous is pretty much impossible. The rest is pretty much up to our persistence and luck.

>How did the team's teamwork and distribution of responsibility happen? For example did anyone have any previous experience of making visual novels?
Nope, we are all first timers. Since most of the original members were writers, distribution of responsibility came from that. We thought that it would be easy to distribute the responsibility of the story to its respective writer. Later when the artists joined us,we decided to do the same thing and the rest of the required roles just happened.

>How did you decide the major guidelines and the crossing of story lines?
The planning of scenarios came topical later on, especially when we started to plan out act 1 and I was chosen to write that. Most of the work in each of the stories came from the respective writer-artist pair that had the responsibility of the route and they had the last word on everything related to their route. We tried to keep up the general structure by discussing of the matter as much as possible. We tried to keep everyone up-to-date as best as we could.

>Were you using IRC?
Yep. We also had other ways of communication - Messenger, our forums and couple development platforms like Trac, Redmine, SVN and FTP-server but IRC was the main one. If not for IRC we would have been dead long ago.
Organizing ~20 people around the globe is in the end quite hard so sometimes we just decided to go instead of trying to reach a consensus.

>From what countries is the development team from and how much did the team change during these years?
Apart from Finland we had people from Germany, Italy, USA , Canada, Australia, Philippines and Indonesia.
There's been lots of changes in the team of course but the latest version of Four Leaf Studios has been unchanged for the last couple of years. Most of the people who left did at mostly at the start, realizing that the load was too much for them to bear or when the enthusiasm quickly turned into boredom.

>What kind of previous experience did you have of visual novels?
At that time Yume miru kusuri and Tsukihime were pretty much the games that had been translated to English. And Ever 17 of course. At that time visual novels weren't really popular in the western culture.
Actually Yume miru kusuri is the game that we used to compare Katawa Shoujo to during the development.

>It feels logical that when you behave actively, introduce yourself to the class and be aggressive in a game of Risk and so on, you get closer to the class rep Shizune. And if you're not very active, the path goes towards shy Hanako. How much did you think of these details and at what point did you do it?
I was working on that during the autumn and winter of 2008 for a total of six months. Since no one had any previous experience or any theories, we just had to try it out and then rewind back to start and try again.
It was kinda like live and learn. In the end I figured out some kind of system or idea as to how I should act with these choices.

>How did you decide to connect the character tropes (such as "quiet bookworm" and "foreigner upper class girl") to the features of RAITA's artwork?
When we created the core features of the girls the project was still an anonymous project so there were many people planning the features - such as Rin being a weird artist or Emi being sporty etc.
Characterization and little details on the other hand were a result of our inner discussions and the work of our own writers. For example we had quite a long and devout discussion of shaping Hanako and Lilly to our liking. I'm talking about months of work here. On the other hand Rin got a lot of shape through my own experiments.

>Hanako seems to be quite a big fan favorite
Something in Hanako appeals to people very strongly. Even when we didn't have anything complete, Hanako was the most popular of the girls just based on description and appearance.

>Sense of protection is a strong feel...I have a theory that moe is always connected to the idea that you have something negative and faulty and make it into positive.
It can't be that far away from truth.

>So it should be quite easy to expand it into real disabilities. When you think about it, its kind of interesting that in visual novels all you usually see are your average wheelchairs or eye patches. It seems that psychological traumas are more universal features of moe.
True, its the same in anime and manga. My guess is that physical handicaps are quite a sensitive subject. Not sure though.

>Of course this kind of topic is interesting for also the fact that it gives you a more believable reason to write characters with strange traits - such as Kenji with his theories of feminist conspiracies.
Heh, sure. In our stories we tried to balance between disabilities and disorders and on the other hand balancing with romance and friendships.

>A more concrete example of characterization is the difference between the manner of speaking such as Misha stammering with difficult words. How much did the writers have to do with these or were they decided preemptively?
Some characters were easy while others required a lot of polishing - mainly Kenji and Rin. The decision to give each girl to different writer made it easier to create their manners and matter of speaking since everyone has their own way of writing. But of course, we still had to work on it.

>On the topic of integrity - how did sharing the work between artists work? Or between writers and artists?
It was a big challenge. The artists spent a lot of time finding a style that everyone could mimic. We had more than one artist working on every picture which also evened out the differences. Visual style differences are much more noticeable than textual so here and there you can see the hand print of the specific artist but overall we are happy with the result.

>In the final product there are many technical little details that you probably wouldn't normally even see in other voluntary projects such as eyelid animation in the morning, how Hanako shakes while scared and the animation of steam and crowds. And also the sound effects which you probably couldn't find even in commercial works such as the sound of Emi's prosthesis snapping/clicking against the floor.
While making sound effects we had movies as an example and their way of production and editing. Most of the technical details were done by Delta, who is probably one of the best VN-directors, including the Japanese professionals.

>You made Katawa Shoujo using Python-based VN-game engine called Ren'Py. How easy was it to work with it?
You can do a lot with Ren'Py if you know how. We had to customize the code a lot for Katawa Shoujo, Delta learned the Python language from zero just for this project. That man is truly hardcore.

>The fan community has been a part of the project in a very interesting way. There's KS imagebooru, lots of fan art, blogs, April fools... Reminds me quite a bit of Star Wreck
Yes,thats been very important all this time. We have tried to stay in contact with our fans as much as possible, however with our terms. And of course we got a lot of energy from our fans during the development.

>What kind of comments and observations have you gotten from outsider facets? I remember seeing an article that this might just be commodification of handicapped people.
We have seen lots of negative and positive comments. If i remember correctly I wrote some sort of counterpart to my blog about the matter. I also tried to explain our stance of sex in Katawa Shoujo in that counterpart.

>We'll put a link along with the interview. But still, there must be many people who say that its just porn. I've seen comments of people inquiring if the sex is really required or not.
Sure - or actually for those who have played the game, rare think so. Theres been a lot of controversy during the whole time of production. Some people wanted the game to be nothing but handicap-fetish porn while others think that there shouldn't even be a mention of sex in the whole game. Still, we wanted to do it our own way.

>It might be a bit highlighted American perspective that entertainment containing eroticism is somehow its own category in its own porn valley apart from everything else that can be considered art. (I have no idea how to properly translate this. Even the original sentence is really weird.)
If I'm talking as an artist, to me its more important that my work stops people and makes them think about things rather than it makes them just like it. Not all can like everything and thats okay. I don't think that everyone can enjoy Katawa Shoujo or the stories in it.
I'm happy about those fans who tell how Katawa Shoujo has genuinely made an influence to. Many have commented crying and saying that it made them stop and think about their lives or their attitude towards other people. And many people have been inspired by this project themselves and feel like creating something themselves.

>What kind of reaction did you see from Japan towards this project? If I remember correctly you had a stand in Comiket.
Yes,we had a stand in the last two Comikets. I heard that they have been following this project closely and enthusiastically in Japan.

>Does the team have any future plans? According to the blog Four Leaf Studios' story is over but I bet it feels melancholic to put the big and long polished group project out into the world...
Really melancholic. I don't know about the future - nothing has been decided. "The next project" is many years old joke that we tend to suggest every now and then.
The same exact group of ~20 people will not be doing anything together anymore but you never know, maybe some of them one day will. We have gained so much experience from this project after all.

[DH531]

Thanks so much for this!

[encrypted12345]

Hmm... I can see the influence of Yume Miru Kusuri in Katawa Shoujo. The execution and tone are significantly different though, so they're two different beasts.

[N. Bekkler]

I don't know about the future - nothing has been decided. "The next project" is many years old joke that we tend to suggest every now and then.
The same exact group of ~20 people will not be doing anything together anymore but you never know, maybe some of them one day will. We have gained so much experience from this project after all.

This kind of thing gives me hope for the new groups working on their own titles - even if the original tam won't get together again, they can still spread their influence to others.

[gRaViJa]

Interesting read!

[Woody Alien]

Thanks for the translation, it was quite an interesting read!

[AnonymousOfNorway]

Some reviewers here in Norway have liked Iron Sky too.

[Titus]

Thank you for the interview!

[ivegottogodosomthing]

Nice to hear about these behind the scenes details. Thanks for the post!