Katawa Shoujo Forums

My laptop finally got fixed, and I managed to get around to a playthrough of Act 1.

First off, let me say that this game looks amazing. You guys have done what a lot of game developers can only dream of. Evverything looks beautiful from where I'm standing.

I've already started work on my article for Tip of the Nose, but I do have one question: would it be possible to get an interview with the dev team?

I understand that I'm asking a lot, and I'll be totally fine if you decline (it's not like it would ruin the article or anything), but please consider it. I think it would strengthen the piece past what I've done before.

Thanks in advance. Keep up the awesome work.

An interview will be fine, how would you like to go about it?
It is unlikely though that you will be able to interview the entire dev team, so if it comes down to it I've been okayed to fill in for anyone.

Please set some ground rules and a date/time for the interview at your convenience.

Actually, if you don't mind, I'd like to just ask questions here in this thread. I think that gives all involved time to really deliberate their responses, for the best results.

Sure, go ahead.

Okay....

So, I guess my first question is, how did the dev team really come together? I mean, I know the story is right there on the site, but I want to know what brought the team to this project.

In terms of what actually brought everyone together, a major part of it was definitely nothing more than managing to luck out on size. In the beginning, there were hundreds of people with ideas all gathering around a single concept, so right off the bat this project was tens of times larger than most fan VNs, and that meant a large amount of contributors.

As a smaller and more solid dev team started to form and we needed more core staff, occasionally to replace people who left, a lot were probably drawn to KS because it's size had also enabled to generate a fair amount of publicity. If your concept has wide enough exposure, you've already got your foot in the door with a lot of people, I think.

Of course, the concept has to interest people as well, and I don't think the concept of this game is extraordinarily terrible or offensive. That probably had a significant part in it as well.

So in the end it was a combination of being fortunate enough to start out large enough to gain and hold significant publicity, and being fortunate enough to have an interesting concept, kind of like anywhere else.

You mentioned that you don't think the concept is offensive. What would you say to someone who would make this claim?

I would ask them why they think that is.

The characters in the game are disabled, but they are treated as normal people. In fact, we sometimes questioned if the fact that they were disabled showed through enough, because what would really be offensive would be to use disabled people in our game while completely ignoring their disabilities. At that point, the disabilities of the characters would have been a simple motif and nothing more.

The disabilities in this game aren't just exploitation, they aren't used for cheap gags or shown off like at a freak show. They are parts of the characters and indeed important to their identities, but the characters are just high school students who happen to be disabled. Naturally, their disabilities have to figure into their character, but they are not defined solely by their disabilities. In the end their personalities, development as characters, and how they would endear themselves to the player were always put before that and continue to be so.

In the end, the only reason I can see for thinking this game is offensive would be if someone were to think that disabled people are indeed different from "normal" people, and so different that they need to be protected from any media that features them prominently.

Well said. Moving on...

How long have you all been working on this project, and how many more hours do you think it would take to finish it to your satisfaction?

"To our satisfaction" would be impossible to say. If I had it my way I would probably never stop editing.

So far the game has been in development for 2-3 years with the current staff team. We hope to finish it next year.

Looking forward to it.

Now, about the h-scenes. Will the option to turn them off disrupt the game flow at all?

Yes, it will.

Erm, perhaps I should rephrase that for clarity.

Would turning off the h-scenes have any significant negative impact on the way the story moves? Or would it effectively be the same as the usual fade-to-black and make implications approach?

It won't be done in that manner. It's a surprise.

We're writing based on the assumption that people will be viewing the h-scenes, or perhaps more precisely, we are writing without consideration to those who voluntarily choose to forgo content (via the "No H-scenes" option).

Though this has been explained before elsewhere, the usual method for explaining the effect is choosing a random scene from act 1 and removing it. The text jumps and it will probably be slightly (possibly very) awkward, and anything that happened during the scene will not be recounted for those who skipped it.