Katawa Shoujo Forums

As a newcomer, I often find myself confused as to who should have a say in things, and who should not. Also, I have no idea who to contact if I need something or want to know something, or what each person does~


so, I was thinking that, it may be a good idea to make a "Meet the Staff" sort of post to keep track of who's working on the project and who isn't. Here's an example of what I'm thinking: http://www.janus.ws/#staff
Basically, I'd like to see the staff in a list, in order of command (if some members are superior to others) and and a brief description of what they do.

for example:

A22 -- Writer for Shizune
frumplstlskn -- Background artist
skim -- character illustrator


... so on and so forth (sorry;; that's all I know)

Also, I'd like to recommend making a habit of announcing any new staff in the News Section so that everyone is aware of who is doing what job.

Staff list by their IRC nicks, all have more or less the same forums nick except end_of who is skim at forums:

Cpl_Crud: Director, Hanako path writer
TcDohl: Technical Director, Programmer
Hivemind: Chief Editor, Emi path writer
A22: Shizune path writer
Aura: Rin path writer
stirfriedweasel: Lilly path writer
frumplstlskn: Backgrounds artist
end_of: main artist, character illustrator
NicolArmarfi: composer

These are the 9 people who are contributing to KS by producing the creative content, thus making up the staff. In theory Crud, Tc, Hivemind and frump are the commanding quartet, however they have no real power as each path writer has almost absolute control over their "own" character and her path and the artists can add their own vision, within reason. However, Crud is still leading the project no matter how lateral our hierarchy is so he is the final (and the only concrete) authority if disputes cannot be solved otherwise. This never happens though since we always end up with some kind of a compromise or resolution by argumentation.

About what everyone does; everyone else but Tc should be immediately obvious. Tc's job is to take the text by the writers, the pics by the artists and the music by Nicol and combine it into the final result, the game itself.

About who has a say in what. We are practically an anarchy where things are decided by whoever shouts the loudest. Everyone's opinions are weighted by the relevance they have on the matters at hand, so instead of a command structure everyone has the most executive power in their own field, and the least power in everyone else's fields. So, for example, for all matters concerning Shizune or Misha, always ask A22 first, then Crud and the rest of the writers and finally the artists and musician (unless it's a art question, in which case artists of course share equal weight with the rest of the writers). The separation between the directors is following: Crud has some kind of a vision of things, the general *direction* of the game. Tc tries to get this vision realized in the game to the best of his ability. Crud is the captain, Tc is the helmsman.

In addition to the staff members above, there are all the rest who are active within the project and take part in the brainstorming and make suggestions and comment on stuff. Some of them also participate in making the game in some way. They have no power to change/decide things per se, other than convincing the staff of the superiority of their opinions. Many ideas by these people have ended up as parts of the game. These people include but are not limited to:

renpytom: technical advisor
Celiest: artist, character design
konflikti: artist
breathstealer: QC
Peorth: QC
Cain_Argethlam: QC
Lacan: programmer-in-training
PenguinMayhem: QC

When/if we get any more staff it'll surely appear in my news post, just like skim joining and sfw's return did.

I'm not just the background artist... I'm the Art director, and I'm supposed to have control over the art department.

I also do any miscellaneous or odd jobs relating to art.

Art director in a project this small is an awfully redundant thing, since it doesn't mean anything and i preferred the titles to actually be informative. If we had like 4-5 artists, then it would matter to have someone boss them.

Now that you mentioned this, to give their titles some meaning without additional explanation, Crud too should be "project leader" or "producer" and Tc "director", since all of us answer to him when turning in new material and he does the things that are comparable to director's job in for example in a movie production. But, deciding on titles is pretty moot semantics at best and circlejerking at worst so in the end it doesn't matter. Anyone can have any title they want imo.

Hi, I just wanted to know why writers are assigned to specific paths in the game? in somewhat unusual, usually writers just collaborate through the whole project, so there isn't any sort of noticable shift in writing style as if two separate stories from two different sources are put one after the other. Maybe this was answered somewhere, sorry about that...

Actually, it is pretty damn hard and frustrating trying to cooperatively write a path story. The four of us do have rather different styles, including slight personality differences across the characters, vocabulary usage, sentence constructions and so forth. This already shows in the early game, where there are scenes written by different authors one after another, especially the tough characters like Hanako and Rin act very differently depending on who is writing. Also, giving one writer the full control over the story minimizes retarded arguing about story details (most of the time) so we can argue about other matters.

Another reason that I like the "one writer per character" thing is that it automatically gives each character a bit of personality.
Each writer's style and feelings will be expressed differently, giving us five unique characters, as opposed to 5 similar characters that have been washed out by over-editing and the like.

It also allows for the paths to progress at the pace of the writer; we're not all waiting for someone to finish a scene before we can move on.

Sorry to burst in on this, but without a Lilly writer, we are still waiting for someone. It's just that the work piles on for some poor writer later in time to catch up with everyone else, maybe causing a burn-out and quitting.

This list needs updating.

Since we are supposed to make a push for the Emi path, it doesn't really matter about how long the vacancy for Lil's path writer goes on for, as long as we get one in time unfortunately. However, it really doesn't excuse the other writers from doing work that they could be doing and prevent the backlog from happening so when we get for their path's big push.

Still, I would like to get a new writer for Lil's path. SFW has been quite considerate and made sure no one knows she's alive or anything, or is even still interested in the character she pretty much help create. It's probably at least another two months before we see her again, seeing how she disappeared for that length of time only to reappear for a few days and disappearing again.

I still don't understand how we keep our hopes up for someone who has only fully written two scenes. We should have moved on a long time ago, even before she came back for a few days.

Maybe I could try for the Lilly writer position?

I'll have to finish reading everything written so far first though.

But I do have quite a bit of ideas if it involves romantic scenes, comedy scenes, and dramatic scenes for her.