Katawa Shoujo Forums

Okay then. My next question, then, would be about what ESRB rating you're going for here. Are we looking at Teen or something like Mature or Adults Only?

Adults only, of course.

Traditionally, games with sexual content milder than in most softcore pornos have to work to not get slapped with an AO rating. Since this game will contain explicit sexual content, the ESRB would stamp it AO very quickly.

Huh. Alright then, would you say it deserves/will deserve that rating? Seems to me that this would be an M game, at most.

Please note that toast and exhau are not developers (the posts have now been removed). I'm pretty sure this is meant to be an interview with the devs, so if people who aren't could try and resist from heckling, that would be nice.

I have a lot of problems with the ESRB rating system, but according to their guidelines it would be an AO game. Personally, I think that the AO rating in general is completely redundant, anyone capable of handling an M-rated game would be capable of handling an AO one, unless the content in such a game were particularly extreme.

For this game I don't believe an ESRB rating really matters, and would not do anything. This game is being distributed for free over the internet, so it would be impossible to enforce any sort of rating in the first place, ESRB really only affects people who buy their games from brick and mortar retailers.

Okay, moving on from the rating, were there any character concepts that got scrapped or reduced in role?

There were supposed to be two side characters named Aoi and Miki who could fill in as generic students and/or provide basic exposition, but we couldn't figure out how to use them enough to justify the need for two more sprite sets.

Were any of the current characters different in your original drafts?

Yes and no. After the overarching concepts behind each of the characters was nailed down, there has been minimal change to them since. Because some characters have gone through or had chunks of their scenes done by different writers, you couldn't say they haven't changed at all.

What about the music? Did the character's themes just work in their first versions, or did they have to be reworked more and more?

With two composers, music did shift around a bit, but for the most part it hasn't changed. However, a couple characters did switch tracks. I can't remember who, but some music written for one girl or some situations ended up sounding more fitting for others, so there was a bit of swapping. Again, not much.

Might anyone else remember? All the devs are free to answer whatever questions they'd like.

I don't think anyone else remembers.

If you want questions any dev can jump in with you might want to ask questions about specific characters.

Alright, then, you asked for it...

About Misha and Shizune: where did the idea for their relationship come from? Had any research been done beforehand on similar situations?