Katawa Shoujo Forums

How many in the devteam was experienced with VNs before the project? How did you view the medium back then and how has that opinion changed during the development of KS?

Absolutely fantastic game guys. I think this might be one of the only games that has affected me emotionally

I don't know if this has been asked before but what school are the pictures based off of?

Hello,

I have a bit of a question for the writing staff.
I noticed as I read that the movement of the story and the interplay of the characters was causing and interesting perspective shift for me. By the end of the game I had forgotten about the character I was pursuing's disability entirely and had moved on to wondering what happens next. Was it an intentional move on your part to, kind of, walk your player's through a learning experience? to teach them something? or to give them something to think about? Or was that just a kind of bonus to writing something fun and interesting?

Thanks for you time and a wonderful game.

Gilrond wrote:How many in the devteam was experienced with VNs before the project? How did you view the medium back then and how has that opinion changed during the development of KS?

I think that most had read at least one or two VNs before the project. Some us don't really care about them, some have read them quite extensively. Working on KS obviously taught us how the VN medium works in a much more indepth way than reading even a large amount of them could've. I thought, and still do, that the medium is very interesting, but sadly there are not many good visual novels. A running joke is that working on KS made us all hate VNs, and while not true, I think we have become more critical, even cynical about them.

Guest wrote:Hello,

I have a bit of a question for the writing staff.
I noticed as I read that the movement of the story and the interplay of the characters was causing and interesting perspective shift for me. By the end of the game I had forgotten about the character I was pursuing's disability entirely and had moved on to wondering what happens next. Was it an intentional move on your part to, kind of, walk your player's through a learning experience? to teach them something? or to give them something to think about? Or was that just a kind of bonus to writing something fun and interesting?

Thanks for you time and a wonderful game.

Well, we didn't want to milk the disabilities because it felt quite a cheap approach to take, but KS is not educational. It's just a story.

Aura wrote:I thought, and still do, that the medium is very interesting, but sadly there are not many good visual novels.

What are some VN's that you though fell under the 'good' category? After finishing Katawa Shoujo I've read Saya no Uta which I found very impressing, and I just started Steins;Gate which is looking really promising as well.

uwa wrote:Assuming it's not trolling or made up on the spot, etc. it sounds like at one point Hanako's path was a lot darker: she would spend time on some kind of mental-health drugs, maybe even in an institution (with the possibility of a bad-end rape scene) or maybe she would end up pregnant (and it seems unlikely it would be intentional). One path through Grid1 even introduces her standing on the edge of the roof. The finished game might even play with that a little: Lilly's conjecture about why Hanako hates her birthday is worse than the real reason, at least to me.

Was there an effort to pull back on her story and lighten it up? Or was it just a move in the direction of a better story? Or am I completely wrong and her path was never really that much different from how it turned out?

For that matter, did any path significantly pull back on drama/darkness?

Apologies for the delay.

The original story did have some "darker" moments, but I thought that were justified by the story.

However, in my lust to create a Grimdark kind of story, I lost the plot a little and made both the "Bad" route and the exit from that route into a "Good" route untenable. Also, it clashed drastically with the rest of the game. I think a lot of my drive came from a short story that I wrote on the old Invision boards, where Hanako uses a broken mirror to kill Rin, Hisao and herself.

There were a couple of attempts to save it; one involved the entire Hanako route being "Bad," - the only way to get a "Good" ending was to go through Lilly's route, which would then have a second Hanako path embedded into it.

This was written entirely, but the actual gameplay implications were impossible. You had to get at least one Hanako "Bad" ending to unlock the choices in LIlly's path to lead to the "Good" endings... it was practically impossible.

So, after much prodestation, the entire concept was scrapped and replaced with a much more believable path, which formed the basis of the path that is in the final game.

I think at one point a lot of the paths were a little "darker," and now that I think about it, it was probably our inexperience with the School Romance genre that made us go that way. By the time we had a second shot at it we were much more familiar with the characters and the medium, so that made the stories a little easier to write.

As for the Grid 1 scene, I think that came from a bit of fan art that I seemed to like, so we kept it in for a long time. Since the art pre-dated Grid 1 it was linked to a much less "matured" Hanako. Once her character was properly developed then it no longer made any sense to have her up there.


Lastly, the original "pregnancy" ending. That was a good end. Unintentional, but I thought that it was a nice way to complete the circle (Hanako losing her parents but becoming a mother herself).
I hope this has answered the question.

My apologies if this has been answered before, but:

Towards Shizune's Bad End, you encounter Lilly randomly, who sort of gives an "I told you so" speech to Hisao about hanging around her cousin. The only problem is, in Lilly's route we see that Hisao encountered her at Shizune's house just before she was to leave Japan in order to live with her parents in Scotland. So, why is she suddenly back at the school as though that never happened?

I had I heard some speculation that Lilly decided to stay because, without Hisao's involvement, Hanako had no other friends and Lilly didn't want to leave her alone, but I don't know if that's what the writers actually intended.

Script error.

If the KS devs were in the game , which one would be the hardest to romance?

I know you guys will neither be releasing any sequels to KS nor making any major changes to the game. But do you plan on releasing a version with minor spelling/grammar corrections? I remember noticing about two small errors in the text.

There are several translation projects in the works; the first re-release with an added language will also have a correction of all the mistakes that we got alerted to in the feedback section of the forums (as long as they are actual mistakes, that is).

(Also holy crap, 80 pages)

Now, two months after the release date, what are you guys doin'? Since I took a visit to your blog almost daily and saw no more blog post up till now, I decided to ask directly... I wonder if you guys already miss the feeling of developing a game? I know that there will be an announcement if one/some of you decide to do something else related to VN/game/story, so I won't ask about that and just sit patiently.

zeroyuki92 wrote:Now, two months after the release date, what are you guys doin'? Since I took a visit to your blog almost daily and saw no more blog post up till now, I decided to ask directly... I wonder if you guys already miss the feeling of developing a game? I know that there will be an announcement if one/some of you decide to do something else related to VN/game/story, so I won't ask about that and just sit patiently.

Amongst all of the other things that I am doing (life and work etc), I am trying to find some time to tie off the loose ends that I have started in my "fan works" (if you will).

After that I am thinking about writing a text book. I'll be trying to offset that with fiction to prevent me from competely losing my mind, but I will definately be blogging a little harder from now on...

Silentcook wrote:There are several translation projects in the works; the first re-release with an added language will also have a correction of all the mistakes that we got alerted to in the feedback section of the forums (as long as they are actual mistakes, that is).

(Also holy crap, 100 pages)

Will there be any patches for those who already downloaded the 1st release in January? Or do we have to re-download the whole game again to get the new translations and error corrections?