Katawa Shoujo Forums

Hello.

We are a surprisingly unorganized bunch for a project of this magnitude. Mostly that's by choice and convinience, but along with that comes a lack of information and all sorts of not-so-convenient things. To keep us up to date (and why not the occasional visitor as well), this is the new KS dev update series/blog. In here, i'll post more or less regularly what's going on in the project and what everyone is doing. Topics vary from the discussions at the irc channel to the new deadlines(lol), ideas, design, world details and whatnot. This also serves as a log of our progress, something that Tc wanted and now is conveniently here..

Hot this week:
New artist Skim has everyone trembling from excitement as we wait for more sketches and more importantly, the sprites.
Backgrounds: Frump produced the first BG, and it's quite splendid. The next one is due next week.
Festival! Writers are preparing to party hard as the school festival is around the corner. About time, we have not posted anything for a fortnight.
Integration halted as Tc waits for new sprites before continuing.
Festival elimination completed as Aura pops several veins, resulting in elementary school math and throwing darts with eyes closed.
This game is fucking big. Why the hell are we doing something this ambitious? Because we want to.

Scenes written: 39
Scenes integrated: 18
Backgrounds: 1

Incoming:
A22: S1
Aura: R1
Crud: H1
Frump: Background - School Hallway, Kenji and Nomiya-sensei character design sketches
Nicol: Hanako, Shizune and Lilly music themes
Skim: Character sheets, sketches.
TcDohl: Ninja editing other people's posts, Improving look and feel of game, adding music, general asshattery

Ha! A challenger to the defunct "Weekly Report" appears!

I throughly encourage this log, however there are a couple of things that I'd like to say on this topic, "this topic" being our organisation, or lack thereof.

Those of you that know me from other projects will know that I'm a bit of an organizational nazi; heavens help you should you fail to apply the right version number to a WinD script...

When I first started with this project, I tried to impose a whole bunch of organisation upon everyone, and the result is pretty much what we have now; a core group of competent people who are slowly amassing more and more talent.

However, a lot of things that I tried to impose *didn't* work. A fine example of this is the "Grid" system. All you need to do is compare my original sketch of 50 scenes for Grid 2 with the flowchart in the Tech/Progging forum to see how that has evolved.

And that's what this project is about; evolution. With the expection of PyTom, none of us can claim much experience in this feild. We are all accomplished artists in our on feild, but I challenge any one of us to say that they haven't learnt anything over the past few months.

One thing that I'm particularly impressed by is the "flattening" of the structure here. I'll admit, that's partically due to my exponential workload and not being able to devote enough time to the project, but Tc and Aura have picked up the slack there, and we're starting to head into that whole "collective" ideal. I still have a vision of how I want the game to turn out, however I don't feel the need to be heavy-handed in accomplishing that vision.

A lot of that is to do with the maturity of the contributers and their ability to stick to things like the treatment and style guides.

So, whilst I'll whole heartedly agree that I'm no longer taking that "lead from the front" position, I also think that it's a little short-sighted to say that we are totally disorganised.

Also, what was going to be the main point of this rant, deadlines are great, jsut so long as we are the ones setting them, not some third-party that has no idea of the creative process.

Kthx I have another rant to write now :p