Katawa Shoujo Forums

I know this has probably been answered before and i hate to ask again but i couldn't find it anywhere.Why is the KS Achievements thread closed?

Silentcook sometimes closes threads when the quality of discussion drops below a certain bar he has.

Were any characters based on anyone specific, or at least were made with a conscious resemblance to someone, either physically or characteristically?

In your opinion, with which other art form does a Visual Novel have most in common from an author's perspective?

From other things I have read here, I suspect that you didn't really approach it as a game. Do you think it had more in common with writing the other kind of novel, or on the level of an individual route perhaps rather a novella? A play? A comic? Or do you think it is so substantially different that such comparisons don't make sense?

AaronIsCrunchy wrote:Were any characters based on anyone specific, or at least were made with a conscious resemblance to someone, either physically or characteristically?

Not very much I think. The only things I can I think of are Hive using the words "David Tennant" somewhere in the first description of Mutou, and Nomiya's glasses which are similar though different colour to an old art teacher of mine.

Ritter Delorges wrote:In your opinion, with which other art form does a Visual Novel have most in common from an author's perspective?

From other things I have read here, I suspect that you didn't really approach it as a game. Do you think it had more in common with writing the other kind of novel, or on the level of an individual route perhaps rather a novella? A play? A comic? Or do you think it is so substantially different that such comparisons don't make sense?

Vns are their own thing so I approached writing KS as a VN, but obviously they share similarities with other forms of literature. I personally mostly liken them to (puppet) theater and comics, but the actual writing process still remains closest to writing straight up prose (by my own choice, there's no rule that states that VNs must have narration or natural grammatical structure).

I also recall having heard that Kenji was essentially an exaggerated A22.

That's more a joke than a fact. 22 invented the character and is the best at writing him.

There's a reason why you choose to make a game out of Raita's sketch, or it kinda just happened? Like, "Here, let's just do it around this".

If I'm not wrong, since the beggining you had a general idea of what the game was about. Do you think this helped keeping the project on track? Did anyone ever tried to change the setting/characters too much and you scrapped something because of that?

Do you know anything about 4LS's twitter?Why has it gone silent?

From my point of view it just happened, but who knows. The OP of the first thread would need to answer the question. Maybe he or she had some more profound reason than just "4chan never does anything productive, wouldn't this be cool?"

A general idea is sort of required to even start working on anything. Rather than that, having a strong idea of the scope the project helped to keep eyes on target. Beyond a certain point and certain limits, nobody tried to make any super fundamental changes because we all understood it wouldn't be possible. We picked a direction and went for that.

Darklord13 wrote:Do you know anything about 4LS's twitter?Why has it gone silent?

I maintain it, but what do you expect me to do with it? I just don't care to reply to the question "new project?" for the millionth time, especially since the answer must be so noncommittal. I'm, and we are, not very good at keeping in touch with community like that. I guess it's not really proper social media etiquette for an "official" twitter account, but we're not very official otherwise either. I'll tweet if there's something worth saying (which also is improper twitter etiquette)

Good advice/ideas for social media/public relations will be taken into consideration.

Is hisao pushed during the Manly picnic or did he just fall?

AaronIsCrunchy wrote:Were any characters based on anyone specific, or at least were made with a conscious resemblance to someone, either physically or characteristically?

Apart from David Tennant's name being invoked (the finished product doesn't look much like David Tennant, but we needed a starting point), I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Before we locked down characters in the infancy of the project a lot of people suggested basing characters off of other stuff but it never took off. Maybe it gave some folk a base to start thinking, but in the end product there weren't any conscious references.

Ritter Delorges wrote:In your opinion, with which other art form does a Visual Novel have most in common from an author's perspective?

From other things I have read here, I suspect that you didn't really approach it as a game. Do you think it had more in common with writing the other kind of novel, or on the level of an individual route perhaps rather a novella? A play? A comic? Or do you think it is so substantially different that such comparisons don't make sense?

VNs are VNs (you could, if you wish to dismissively refer to them as something, refer to them as glorified Powerpoint presentations, but you would be wrong) and there is nothing quite like them. The closest you can get is the early graphical text adventures where you'd get a static picture and type a bunch of commands in, but even those have a different sort of interactivity than most VNs. Your standard VN is most like a CYOA book, but if you're doing it right there's more to the VN than that. I'm not entirely sure we managed to accomplish that, but there you go.

Kon22 wrote:There's a reason why you choose to make a game out of Raita's sketch, or it kinda just happened? Like, "Here, let's just do it around this".

If I'm not wrong, since the beggining you had a general idea of what the game was about. Do you think this helped keeping the project on track? Did anyone ever tried to change the setting/characters too much and you scrapped something because of that?

Before we let anything get too far along, we concentrated on locking down the setting and characters. Once they were in place we started writing the thing. There was not any major change made in terms of a character's personality once we had that initial plan mapped out (not counting whimsical changes to character sexuality, which never showed up in the finished product).

As for why we chose to do this game and not another one... I've no idea. Something in the air that day, perhaps. That it went anywhere after that original thread remains the most unlikely event in the game's history--and probably one of the most unlikely events in the history of the internet (certainly 4chan) as a whole.

Why is this woman smiling?

Just curious.