Katawa Shoujo Forums

I looked for a good page, and couldn't find a good Q&A topic, so I figured I'd make my own.

This is just a topic to ask the devlopers and artists and frankly anyone in an offical postion about devloping the game.

Rules:
No Spoilers!
No questions that lead into Spoilers!
No questions that they cannot actually answer (how tall is Paris and random stuff like that)

Anyway, here goes:


Why did your guys decide to pair up the girls?

How did you decide on the pairings?

Who came up with Kenji? (that man deserves a cookie)

Does anyone work on this game full-time, or do you all have jobs?


Feel free to ask more!

I would've liked to see the devs post in this thread, but they seem shy about voicing their opinions. Anyway, just throwing that out there - and I'm going to elaborate on that a little bit.

Did all the path writers chip in to all of the routes, or did each writer focus on just one or two routes? Who contributed the most to each route, and do you think you like the girls you focus on more or less given that you're writing for them? Did you get to write for the girl that you wanted to work on, or were they taken?

And a question about Shizune, specifically. Do you guys who wrote for her think she's a bitch like half the fans say she is? What about those of you who wrote for other girls or worked on different parts of the game entirely?

There was actualyl a good thrad like this on Fakku this morning:

http://www.fakku.net/viewtopic.php?t=18556&start=0

Where Aura and Blue123 offered to answer a lot of questions.

Most of us are too busy/afraid to post on the public side of the forums, but eventually they'll get used to it I think.

We do, however, read threads like the one you mentioned. They are good tools for us to see what we think worked and what didn't.

For the Act 1 that you are playing now, the majority of the writing was done by Aura and A22. However scenes that involved any particular character were initially written by their path writer, then edited by Aura to fit into his game flow (which no human can understand).

Past Act 1 we all work almost exculsively on our own characters, but we post each scene in the Dev Forums for comment and discuss them in the IRC channel.

Personally, I like Shizune, but I do think that she is a strong enough character to split the audience. "Weak" characters like Hanako will ususally be met with a mixture of reactions, but someone like Shizune will completely polarise the audience. And that's not a bad thing; in fact I think it means A22 is doing his job.

I think I was probably one of the reasons for pairing up the girls due to my original "Grid" design for the game flow. I can write essays on how much of a bad idea that is. But part of that involved putting the girls into logical pairs to make the grid work, and that stuck.
But even in the early days of the development the girls were paired, especially Hanako and Lilly. Their Mother-daugheter relationship is cannon from before any of us can remember.

Kenji is one of the many side characters that we used to populate the game, but A22 is the guy that turned him into the Picnic-loving man we know today.

Some devs are still in school/university, others work, others don't. But no-one works on the game full-time.

Thanks for the link, Crud. Might make some comments after I finish reading it.

Edit: Whoa, I must thank Aura for posting the scans of the other two Omakes from Schuppen Harnische. I've had trouble attempting to find them. All I need now is someone to translate the moonspeak.

Most of any questions I had were answered there. If I think of anything, I'll post it here.

Thanks for the information crud. Personally though, I'm not sure why you guys are scared to come over to the public end of the forums. I respect all of you quite a bit for the effort you've put into this game, and I don't think anyone else would have anything against you guys either. Although I've hardly ever seen Delta and Aura come around to this side of the forum except to lock topics or discipline people, so I'm almost a little intimidated by them actually.

Spoilers: their heads explode more easily.

How tall is Paris?

So, does Rin have no arms whatsoever, or stumps like Emi's?

The way she's drawn, it looks like the has stumps that end before the elbow.

ParagonDoD wrote:So, does Rin have no arms whatsoever, or stumps like Emi's?

The way she's drawn, it looks like the has stumps that end before the elbow.

i think it was said (i could be wrong) that there were stumps but then they were cut off

eaterofsouls101 wrote:

ParagonDoD wrote:So, does Rin have no arms whatsoever, or stumps like Emi's?

The way she's drawn, it looks like the has stumps that end before the elbow.

i think it was said (i could be wrong) that there were stumps but then they were cut off

I'm pretty sure she has stumps that end in the middle of the area between the shoulder and the elbow. I think she was born with little deformed hands, but they were cut off, leaving her with the stumps she has now. Speaking of Rin, one question I have is, why doesn't she get to have prosthetic arms? I'm pretty sure it would be possible, but I guess having artificial limbs would also render her not-very-disabled, which might cause plot difficulties. Still, Emi gets prosthetic legs, and Rin doesn't get anything? It just doesn't seem very just.

Seems like she chose not to get prosthetics for whatever reason.

The prosthetic arms that are available right now aren't a perfect solution. They're still hard to use even when you're used to them. Scientists are still trying to improve upon their function, and I've seen a few shows where the results look promising.

Still, a person with prosthetic arms is no where near as able bodied as a person with real arms.

Prosthetic legs are relatively simple, because legs are relatively simple. The key functions of any leg of any creature are to bounce and support weight. They are nature's pogo sticks.

Arms are much more complex for two reasons. They need to be supported by the body and finding a way of attaching them comfortably is not a simple endeavor. They also must allow the user fine control over small objects, which is a very complex set of processes. As a result, the development of prosthetic arms is rather behind that of legs.

Rin doesn't have prosthetics for the simple reason that she is much better off using her feet rather than cumbersome prosthetic arms for almost any given thing . I'm sure that if she had lost her arms at a later age, the prosthetics would've been considered.

vermithrx wrote:Prosthetic legs are relatively simple, because legs are relatively simple. The key functions of any leg of any creature are to bounce and support weight. They are nature's pogo sticks.

Arms are much more complex for two reasons. They need to be supported by the body and finding a way of attaching them comfortably is not a simple endeavor. They also must allow the user fine control over small objects, which is a very complex set of processes. As a result, the development of prosthetic arms is rather behind that of legs.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I was just a bit afraid the developers might have just been keeping her armless to maintain her originality, which made me feel a bit sorry for her. But then again, I do imagine that she would be much more comfortable using her feet by now, as Aura said.