Katawa Shoujo Forums

The complete game has been released 3 years ago, and you started working on it almost a decade ago.
I don't know the exact number of downloads and people who tried the game and appreciate it, but it's surely huge (not talking about the number of discussions/post through the internet related to it).

1) Did you expect at the beginning that you'll have made a game so meaningful for a such large amount of people?
2) And when you were seeing the finish line just before the release, did you supposed in some way (maybe by the support/expectations on the forum) it will have caused so many reactions?

And a little spicy one (just asking, if you don't wanna answer no problem)
3) Did sometimes happened that some writer during the making of one route had a good idea/situation/dialogue, but that should have been discarded 'cause it will have been against the information provided into the already released Act1? Or to say it in other words, did you ever regretted/had problems with the release in two steps that won't have been happened if you released the entire game?

Thanks a lot for your attention (and for your answers maybe ) and for the wonderful game experience.

1) Hell no.
2) HELL no.

Silentcook wrote:1) Hell no.
2) HELL no.

Whoa, THIS is a fast answer , thanks a lot.

Another little one, also this on the same topic: Did you expect when you released the game (or even before) it will be a forum so active still in 2015 and probably for more years, and to still log in to discuss and answer?

I really like the web and its opportunities but being an "old user" sometimes I feel a depressing transience sensation by looking some sites and/or pages I was visiting years ago and now practically dead (or no more reachable), I know it's kinda nostalgic but it still impress me.

ultraman wrote:3) Did sometimes happened that some writer during the making of one route had a good idea/situation/dialogue, but that should have been discarded 'cause it will have been against the information provided into the already released Act1? Or to say it in other words, did you ever regretted/had problems with the release in two steps that won't have been happened if you released the entire game?

Don't think anything like that ever happened, or if it did it wasn't a big deal. We had drafted a significant part of the script by the time Act 1 was released, and planned the rest.

As for the longevity of the fan community, I didn't particularly think about it. It's not really that unusual, fan communities of many other works display similar resilience to getting "burned out". Of course, KS getting an amazing fan community was very unexpected.

Silentcook wrote:1) Hell no.
2) HELL no.

What he said.

As for 3) Like Aura said, we had outlines for how everything was going to go before we even got Act I written, I think (or close to it). We took our sweet time putting out Act I specifically to avoid that sort of thing. If something big had come up, we would've probably changed Act I in the final release--for example, we considered at one point adding some more to the end of Emi's Act I arc, but decided it wouldn't add enough to the game to really make it worth the effort it would take to go and make the changes.

Hi all, it's always me (after in these days I red all the thread, I hope I'm not going to ask something I didn't noticed it already had answered). So here we go ! (And obviously, if I made a question you don't wanna answer ignore it).

1) How was difficult (and how much time did it took) to obtain a final coherence between the routes, or you proceeded to constantly check the script to avoid big continuity mistakes?
2) About the beta testing, how did you proceed? Did you give to the beta testers whom didn't were into writing the routes a (more or less) complete version of the game, or did you provided them partial outtakes from the routes to experience them? I red in more than one post from Aura that you reviewed countless times the scripts of the game to check it so I assume you did the biggest part of beta testing, but I'm just curious on how all the process worked
2b) Did never happened that you received a positive feedback from the beta testers on something you weren't so sure to include and after this you decided to keep in, or that you received good feedbacks on something you decided/had to erase from the final release despite his first reception?
3) Have you experienced situations in which one of the route writers had a much different style compared to the others in such situations like the lenght of the route, or the involvement of the "other 4 girls", or side characters, and you had to try to balance the situations to avoid a non homogeneus development of the routes?
4) (more or less) What percentage of the writing you did for a route ended in it, and what percentage were discarded?
5) During the first stages of works, what did you expect on the lenght of the final release of the game? Shorter, longer, about the same it ended... ?
6) Did it happened that some of you had a valid idea for a path that after being developed had to be discarded due to his medical inaccuracy? (If I correctly understood, your medical guide was my fellow countryman silentcook who had to clarify if there were that kind of mistakes )
7) Did you ever chosen to remove a well-explained fact from the game to let it become a mistery for the players (i.e. like Kenji's Mistery Box, or the rumored love story between Kenji and Yuuko, or the real reason of Hisao's fall during the manly picnic, or the name of the Nurse, or the discussion between Hanako and Lilly in the Lilly's route)? I'm not asking obviously the answers, just wanna know if they were always have been misteries or not for you.
8 ) Did never happened you had an idea so great but also so dumb/fool at the same time (i.e. don't know, something like: Kenji was right, and all main girls WERE feminist agents put into Yamaku only to corrupt the poor Hisao) you have to discard it?
9) (sorry to quote a message from page 99, but I have to...)

cpl_crud wrote: ...
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
...

First of all: whoa, as an Hanako fan (if I survived, and I'm not so sure I could, the first impact with the bad ending, that almost shocked me also with the final release of KS) I would have been as surprised as happy to see a similar thing in the routes of Lilly and Hanako (if necessary also with outcomes like the manly picnic if a player tried as a jerk only to pursue both the girls).
Is this the only case in which you had setted too high the bar of technical implications of the game and you have to scrap an entire route (or so)? And after such a fact (or similar ones) did you changed your way of planning the schedule of the development of the game?

Thanks really A LOT for your attention, see ya

EDIT: Forgot two questions, now I hope that's all

1) We didn't try very hard to make the routes fit together, and as a result they are pretty inconsistent and/or disjointed.
2) Testing process goes like this: A) We build a release candidate. This is a complete version of the product that will get released if no faults are found. B) it is tested repeatedly and all faults that are found get fixed. Then go back to A and repeat until a version that passes testing without faults is reached.
2b) Beta testing is meant for logic, tech and quality checking. The high level content is locked in by the time the testing begins.
3) As per the answer to 1, we didn't mind the stylistic differences an awful lot. We experimented with some methods of bringing cohesion but they didn't work well so we decided we'd rather write the way we want. Any cohesion there is between the writers was created by talking a lot about KS, and aligning our mindsets that way.
4) I wrote maybe slightly under double the words that the final Rin story ended up being. It's below average for KS; for instance Hanako's route was redrafted by a factor of 400% or more, approximately.
5) The same.
6) No. Medical issues never really are a focus in the story.
7) Sort of.
8) Probably.
9) That really wasn't structurally impossible (though a headache), it was ditched for other reasons.

Hey, I was wondering how the game will run on future versions of windows, like the upcoming Windows 10, and so forth? If it'll need patching to run or something? This game changed my life in quite a bit of ways, and I wouldn't want to lose it to something as simple as a windows update. Sorry if I format my post wrong/its been asked before, I rarely ever post on forums and I couldn't find the answer when I looked earlier.

Thanks, for everything!

Well, Katawa Shoujo runs on an engine that was released before Windows 7. So, it's made it through two Windows updates and so far it seems to work okay so just hope for the best. We totally aren't going to patch KS if Win23 or OSX Three-Toed Sloth happens to not run it though.

Greetings Aura

I've seen a few Visual Novels around on Steam and was wondering, are there any chances of Katawa Shoujo appearing on Steam?

Unless Steam changes their stance on adult content, the chances of KS getting on Steam are 0.

There are times in the game where a page of text advances with no user input; usually it's someone starting to say something, and getting cut off, and the thing doing the cutting-off happens without the user clicking for the next page. I'm a person who pretty automatically and quickly reads text without thinking about having to do so, yet I often find such "interrupted" text gone before I can begin to get a handle on it. How was this timing determined? Because whoever it was seems to be a quick reader indeed!

A similar quickness seems involved in some of the pseudo-animations (like Hanako flicking her gaze at Hisao, etc.)

The cut-off time was determined by trying out different intervals and seeing which felt the best. I think it's either going by delta's own feel or some sort of dev consensus.

I was wondering if we could get an official dev statement on the nature of Emi and Misha's friendship? The subject was broached on page 226 of the thread, and the exchange went something like this:

Aura wrote:
Anyway, Hive meant to write Emi and Misha as good friends, but that never materialized properly. The line is an undead remnant of that.

TheHivemind wrote: Like Aura said, there was originally going to be more hints that Emi and Misha had crossed paths on more than one occasion. It was discarded (or more accurately, never really explored) due to a myriad of reasons, some to do with being a lousy writer, others to do with the fact that Emi's path was scrapped and started from (almost) scratch about four years into development. Other hints of the Emi/Misha connection include some editorial comments from Misha during a lecture on PDA (which, come to think of it, might have also been removed but I don't remember anymore) and the fact that Misha is the one to talk to you if things go poorly (which was not so much a vestige as it was a reference to what could have been, if I'd been a) better at writing b) better at negotiating c) less burned out on the project by the end of the writing process). I think there might be one or two off-handed comments from Emi and Misha in the path that serve as more references to it (and there was something in the dinner scene at one point, but again I can't remember what made it in and what didn't).

Isn't it sad Micchan ;____; etc. etc.

OK, so here TheHivemind says that Emi and Misha having crossed paths before was never really "scrapped", just not explored. That there's still hints of it in the final game would seem to place it on the same "implied canon" level as Kenji x Yuuko...

TheHivemind wrote:

Liminaut wrote:Heh. I thought that comment meant that Emi and Misha had been friends with benefits at one point. I may have been reading a little too much into it

Ha ha ha yes how ridiculous.
<_<
>_>

...but then he jokingly implies that they were meant to be friends with benefits. This supports what I've heard about an earlier version of KS where Emi and Misha would hook up regularly in the art room. I know that we're only supposed to treat what's in the game as canon, but this seems to be a special case in which something is only hinted at, and yet by a dev's admission, not scrapped. So as a result we know that they are (or were) friends, but what's the nature of their friendship?

I'm struggling to imagine how a Emi x Misha "friends with benefits" relationship would fit with Shizune's route even if it had been fleshed out. I could see a curious Emi experimenting with Misha maybe once or twice, but I'd find it harder to feel sad for poor, "lonely" Misha if she was getting pussy every other day from her BFF. And if it's true--just not explored--how would it have fit into Misha's character arc, in which is she seems infatuated with only Shizune?

Hive never put in the work necessary to figure out the Emi-Misha relationship so it fizzled out without getting anywhere. It's kind of a bummer because the story sure could've used character interplay that didn't involve Hisao. The amount of work would've been quite high though, so it's understandable that it didn't work out.

I don't think the friendship was to have a "friends with benefits" thing, but Emi and Misha, or Emi and Rin, having experimented sexually (once) was a real concept Hive had to underline Emi's liberal and aggressive attitude towards sex. It's one of the more interesting aspects of Emi's character, but Hive didn't quite get the theme and ideas polished to perfection. Emi sex scenes do an acceptable job communicating the theme, but maybe aren't reflected upon sufficiently? Also, one of the most unfortunate things about Emi's route is that the track shed scene is a stupid fucking meme amongst the fans (THEM LEMONS XD) and no one actually thinks about why on earth would Emi act like that. This tangent aside, if you think there's "implied canon" or "early versions of KS", sorry to disappoint you. We had hundreds of ideas that got scrapped, and many of them have some remnants left in the script for whatever reasons. This is just another one. Also semantics lawyering is pointless. "Not explored" means the exact same thing as "scrapped", because both have the same end result, which is that the idea did not end up in the actual story. So yeah the official answer, whatever that means, is that they know each other, are probably friendly, but aren't really buddies.

E: should probably emphasize that the sexual experimentation wasn't integral to the friendship either, just one possible angle.