Katawa Shoujo Forums

Were some of the songs deliberately borrowing motifs from each other, or was that a natural part of the process of writing them within a certain timeframe? If so, did you provide annotation as to which were related and how? I'm curious based on some of the usage.

Also, thank you.

inthewind wrote:Were some of the songs deliberately borrowing motifs from each other, or was that a natural part of the process of writing them within a certain timeframe? If so, did you provide annotation as to which were related and how? I'm curious based on some of the usage.

I like connecting different pieces together using motifs, and with a project as large as KS there were a lot of opportunities to do this because of the number of tracks involved. The theme from Wiosna is also used in Hokabi and Stride; Painful History and Raindrops and Puddles use the same theme; Lullaby of Open Eyes used the same theme as the original Lilly track, which was eventually replaced by Concord; the theme from Friendship appears briefly in Nocturne; and all the act 2 openings use the themes from their respective characters. The only instance where I was specifically instructed to do this was with the act 2 openings, though.

Shizune's act 4 is titled "To my other self" and based on the plot I thought "other self" was supposed to be Misha, but the cover art for the act has Shizune holding hands with a younger version of herself. Am I missing something?

One question. What would you not approve of in fan works? There has to be a limit to such things i assume. Legal stuff perhaps?

Reyhan wrote:One question. What would you not approve of in fan works? There has to be a limit to such things i assume. Legal stuff perhaps?

It's not exactly clear-cut. We generally don't approve anything that manipulates KS itself (like making a new path and hacking it into the game files), anything that rips off KS's assets like art, script etc (like a live-action movie adaptation of KS), or anything that pretends to be official (like "Katawa Shoujo 2"). For all of these you can always ask for permission, and we've given permissions for various stuff in the past, but those are the things that are the likeliest to ruffle our feathers.

Rule of thumb is, if you do everything in your fanwork yourself from ground up, we're very likely perfectly fine with it.

Jobriq wrote:Shizune's act 4 is titled "To my other self" and based on the plot I thought "other self" was supposed to be Misha, but the cover art for the act has Shizune holding hands with a younger version of herself. Am I missing something?

No, Shizune doesn't consider Misha a part of her own persona.

Jobriq wrote:Shizune's act 4 is titled "To my other self" and based on the plot I thought "other self" was supposed to be Misha, but the cover art for the act has Shizune holding hands with a younger version of herself. Am I missing something?

Chancing a guess, based on what I know from reading the story over a few times, the 4th act is delving into the origin of Shizune's personality. Helping Misha get back on track leads Shizune to reevaluate herself, and that in turn results in her bringing up things about her past to Hisao to help explain why she is the way she is--her competitiveness, the compartmentalization of her relationships, and the distance she places between herself and her closest friends.

Essentially, she's expressing where she came from and trying to figure out where to go from there. It's sort of an existential crisis, but a lot of it gets relegated to internalization until she starts feeling more comfortable with both Hisao, and Misha's situation. Unfortunately, a lot of it gets truncated into a few short scenes, and the narrative instead gets dominated by Misha worries, Student Council duties, and graduation preparations.

This is just speculation, mind you, based on little more than my own interpretation of the available story. It's entirely possible the Act 4 title for Shizune's route has more to do with Hisao's slow realization about his own past relative to the future, but that would be more speculation.

Out of this, I've realized a question: In both of Shizune's endings, it seems as though the story leaves the reader to wonder whether the primary cast (Hisao, Misha, and Shizune) are really even friends at the end. The bad end seems to resolve with an obvious rift between them, but the good end has the earmarks of an eventual--if involuntary--separation of the three, which is a unique situation among the routes. Was leaving the story with that much uncertainty something intentional that was planned before writing the route, or was it simply how the story developed in production?

Wait, so I just read this and something clicked.

Kenji:"If I were going to kill someone, I´d do it by throwing them of the roof and making it look like an accident." So did Kenji murder us in the death ending?

A question to the artists:
I've seen those character "timelines" which show how each heroine's design evolved over the years. They have names next to the designs, but my question is, how "My own work!" are those designs? Is weee technically the "Hanako Artist" and Raide the "Lilly Artist"? I mean I assume that they didn't draw all sprites of a heroine on their own, but did one person give the reference implementation and everyone else agreed to adhere to that specific design, or was the design itself a collaborative effort until everyone agreed "Yeah, I can do that!"?

Carighan wrote:A question to the artists:
I've seen those character "timelines" which show how each heroine's design evolved over the years. They have names next to the designs, but my question is, how "My own work!" are those designs? Is weee technically the "Hanako Artist" and Raide the "Lilly Artist"? I mean I assume that they didn't draw all sprites of a heroine on their own, but did one person give the reference implementation and everyone else agreed to adhere to that specific design, or was the design itself a collaborative effort until everyone agreed "Yeah, I can do that!"?

Your assumption is wrong, sort of. There's nothing technical about the character artists' positions, each of them really did design and draw 100% of the sprites of his or her heroine and the side characters they were responsible for. In some cases colouring was assisted or done by different artist, and there's retouching all around, so the final sprite sets aren't completely made by a single person even if the crucial part (linework) is. Compare to the route writers, it's a somewhat similar thing.

How many times has KS been downloaded to date?

mainframe004 wrote:How many times has KS been downloaded to date?

We don't know. Aside from the fact that KS can be freely distributed (making knowing that number impossible), we don't track even the download numbers from our own server. They are pretty high though, of the order of hundreds of thousands.

Thank you Aura. I have another question. Who (if only one) did Rin's paintings? I'm especially curious. Sorry, I don't know if somebody's already asked

Reyhan wrote:Thank you Aura. I have another question. Who (if only one) did Rin's paintings? I'm especially curious. Sorry, I don't know if somebody's already asked

Climatic

I remember reading something on the trivia page for KS on TVTropes that I realized was never touched/mentioned in the full VN. An early draft or something mentioned Shizune could read lips, was this dropped or just never had a good point to be brought up in the VN?