dev question. path writers collaboration

[kobe]

Hisao's panties

Are you saying that Hisao is a crossdresser? Or am I missing something'?

[Rednal]

Or he just gets a pair of panties from the girl she likes... directly from them... (except in Rin's case, where he has to take them).


Or we're going to have an extremely funny twist, and KS is actually a Yuri game. That would be kind of interesting... XD Hisao would be... Hisako?

[Caesius]

Yeaahhh... Okay serious question.


Whenever there's scenes that involve dialogue between the girls, how is that handled? Does one of the path writers make a draft of the dialogue then pass it on to the path writer of the other girl to edit? Or do the two writers actually get together on IRC or AIM and make up the dialogue on the fly so they can have a basis for a draft?


Also, who's the mastermind behind Hisao and his personality? Or do each of the path writers ascribe a certain personality to him? Though, given that this is a sort of "choose-your-own-adventure" game where the paths are determined by the player's choices, I guess it can be assumed that his personality is different across routes, but who decides that choices like "kick them out of my room" should be interpreted as Hisao acting like a complete jackass? As stated in other threads, Hisao does seem to overreact to player input; perhaps simply to add some element of what feels like random chance to the game to make it damn near impossible to not make a "wrong" decision somewhere down the line (such as in F/SN, where you would have to either be schizophrenic, cheating, or hella lucky to not die at least once on any given route). It makes me wonder if, once the player makes a wrong decision, the path is deferred to the "Kenji path writer" and told that he can do whatever he Goddamn well pleases with it. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as long as all the Bad Ends are consistently hilarious.

Edit: You know, I wonder if you guys could parody/reference F/SN by having a "Katawa Dojo" instead of a credits roll if the player makes a particularly bad decision. There, Kenji and Nurse would give you "advice" on how to deal with the girl that presumably killed you - in my mind there's absolutely no way to make Nurse more creepy besides turning him into a fuckin' pedophile. But I'm just getting way ahead of myself, now, aren't I? :3


Finally, since you're all writing for your own girls, you'll definitely be injecting some of your own personality and style into them. Is it strange having your work as part of a larger project where your own little bit of "you" gets to interact with little bits of other people?

[TheHivemind]

Most dialog between girls is written by whichever author happens to need the girls to talk, and then the resulting scene is put up on our writing forums. If anything seems off about the actions of Emi, for example, in a scene written by Suriko or Aura, I would make a comment to that effect. Fortunately for us, we've all spent enough time with the characters that for the most part there aren't any major problems. Earlier in development it happened more often, but these days we trust one another with 'our' characters.

As for Hisao's personality, that's actually a direct result of whichever girl he's with at the time. We hashed out some of the main points of his personality early on (a lot of it comes from Aura, I think. I don't recall exactly)--the fact that he's a little cynical, the fact he reads a lot, things of that nature. The bad ends are going to be written by the path writers individually, and it will be slightly more obvious as to what is a good choice and what is not.

It is vaguely strange that people might wish to fuck a character I wrote (or worse, fap to an H scene I wrote), but you get over it pretty quickly. Mostly.

[Suriko]

Whenever there's scenes that involve dialogue between the girls, how is that handled? Does one of the path writers make a draft of the dialogue then pass it on to the path writer of the other girl to edit? Or do the two writers actually get together on IRC or AIM and make up the dialogue on the fly so they can have a basis for a draft?

Writers for each path will generally write a complete scene, then post it to the forum dev section. If other characters in the scene are acting OOC then they can speak up and say "Hey x should be acting more y here" and such. Sometimes when writers are unsure about how to quite handle another character in certain situation, we'll talk amongst ourselves to sort it out. That said, by now most of us have pretty decent handles on the other character's personalities due to reading each other's scenes and talking between one another (something we're constantly doing every day). Timezones and speed generally make collaboration on single scenes too slow to really be feasible.

Also, who's the mastermind behind Hisao and his personality? Or do each of the path writers ascribe a certain personality to him? Though, given that this is a sort of "choose-your-own-adventure" game where the paths are determined by the player's choices, I guess it can be assumed that his personality is different across routes, but who decides that choices like "kick them out of my room" should be interpreted as Hisao acting like a complete jackass? As stated in other threads, Hisao does seem to overreact to player input; perhaps simply to add some element of what feels like random chance to the game to make it damn near impossible to not make a "wrong" decision somewhere down the line (such as in F/SN, where you would have to either be schizophrenic, cheating, or hella lucky to not die at least once on any given route). It makes me wonder if, once the player makes a wrong decision, the path is deferred to the "Kenji path writer" and told that he can do whatever he Goddamn well pleases with it. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as long as all the Bad Ends are consistently hilarious.

1. Hisao's personality is... not one of our shining accomplishments. We've tried to work it out to the best of our ability, but due to the way the project began (almost all thought on the heroines, rather than the protagonist), his personality slightly differed between paths before we went "Woah there, we need to sort this shit out." Live and learn, I guess.
2. There's no real 'dedicated' Kenji writer, though A22 made most of his scenes in A1 and set his personality. Writing side characters such as him is generally the task of whoever's writing the scene at the time.

Edit: You know, I wonder if you guys could parody/reference F/SN by having a "Katawa Dojo" instead of a credits roll if the player makes a particularly bad decision. There, Kenji and Nurse would give you "advice" on how to deal with the girl that presumably killed you - in my mind there's absolutely no way to make Nurse more creepy besides turning him into a fuckin' pedophile. But I'm just getting way ahead of myself, now, aren't I? :3

We tossed that idea around, but ended up dropping it. We felt it just didn't quite fit the nature of the game.

Finally, since you're all writing for your own girls, you'll definitely be injecting some of your own personality and style into them. Is it strange having your work as part of a larger project where your own little bit of "you" gets to interact with little bits of other people?

I can only speak personally on this, but I don't find it weird at all. When writing a character, generally the best results come from being detached enough to view them as a part of a whole, rather than your darling little baby. Being able to step back and view things objectively is important as we can sometimes be quite merciless in our criticism of both ourselves and other's writing, which extends to characterisation.

[cpl_crud]

My answers to most of the questions are the same as Hive/Suriko's, save for the last one.

There is a running joke that I treat Hanako as my Daughter, and in the first iteration of the Hanako path, she pretty much was. I was pretty protective of her, to the point of creating a "secret" path for her, which was only accessable from Lilly's path, and was the only way you could have an H-scene with her.

I'm a lot more detached from the current Hanako, but I still call upon my own expeirences when dealing with her. Seeing people repeat those experiences through the eyes of an 18-year-old burn victim instead of through my own is kinda cool.

One thing that I find interesting is how other people (even fan writers) handle Hanako. The current Hanako has been in my head for about a year now, so I pretty much know exactly how she will react/speak/whatever. As a result, reading anything featuring her feels a little strange.
Obviously the other devs are on a similar level of familiarity with her, so it's rare to read anything that requires my attention, but I don't think I've read a single fanfic that has captured "Hanako".

The other interesting thing is people that are playing/doing Hanako-ish things. That always makes me do a double-take; something that was born from my brain has made someone go and do something... I'm not quite sure how to react to Hanako cosplayers, for example.

I get the feeling that I haven't answered your question at all.


Oh, here's some live DevCave discussion on this topic:

[7:57pm] <A22> why does misha seem so bitchy?
[7:57pm] <!cpl_crud> I dunno
[7:57pm] <A22> not enough tildes
[7:58pm] <A22> wtf ordering
[7:58pm] <!cpl_crud> that's an easy fix.
[7:58pm] <A22> you made them both too harsh
[7:59pm] <A22> shizune never actually orders hisao to do anything
[7:59pm] <A22> and misha seems bitchy

This is how the process works.

[Caesius]

I get the feeling that I haven't answered your question at all.

Yes and no -- you three have answered my question rather indirectly, but still that was quite an exposition.

I was referring more to what it's like having Hanako (a character you wrote) interact with Lilly or Shizune (characters others wrote), and I initially assumed you got those scenes done by having each writer write their own dialog. The idea here is that you'd have to "speak" in the personality of a character you invented to respond to the "speech" of someone else's invented character, but since you guys write those scenes individually the weirdness should thus come from the other writer's interpretation of your character and how they would interact with their own character. Given your initial protectiveness of Hanako, I'd imagine that at first it was indeed very weird when writers got their hands on other writers' characters, often writing them OOC; but as you all have explained you're all very well past that stage.

If anything, weirdness should come from the five different personalities that Hisao will develop in this game.

[vaen]

Yeaahhh... Okay serious question.

thanks for rephrasing/expanding my question in such a way the devs had something to go with :p
I enjoyed those answers.