Katawa Shoujo Forums

I've been wondering a couple things about the staff lately. Firstly: Suriko and cpl_crud are listed on the staff page as "Project Producers," but what does that actually entail? AFAIK, film and game producers' primary responsibility is to take care of funding and other monetary/budgetary issues, but obviously that's not something that comes into the picture with a project like KS. I'm guessing it's something more like that they were the ones who were the most passionate about the project (or, god forbid, simply had the most free time to spend on it), so they naturally became recognized as The Bosses of 4LS - whatever that means.

Secondly, do any of the devs have a substantial background in whatever their role is, beyond just as a hobby? By that I mean, for example, do the composers write music professionally, were any of the writers or editors English majors in college, etc.? That sort of thing. Of course, I'm not fishing for personally identifiable specifics or anything; it's just pure curiosity. Considering the high quality of the work we've seen so far, I would assume that's the case for at least some of the staff, but I may be (am probably) wrong.

I thought Aura was the bawz :\ Didn't crud give this title to Aura or something?

I think aura pretty much runs things.... or he enforces the rules and tells us what there will be in KS and what will not be in.

Crud organized KS in it's current form.

dunno. I know that crud is writing hanako's path and Aura is doing rin's path.

I'm not sure about college degrees and professional music-writing and such, but we do know that the team had NO experience specifically in making Visual Novels.

Csihar wrote:I've been wondering a couple things about the staff lately. Firstly: Suriko and cpl_crud are listed on the staff page as "Project Producers," but what does that actually entail? AFAIK, film and game producers' primary responsibility is to take care of funding and other monetary/budgetary issues, but obviously that's not something that comes into the picture with a project like KS. I'm guessing it's something more like that they were the ones who were the most passionate about the project (or, god forbid, simply had the most free time to spend on it), so they naturally became recognized as The Bosses of 4LS - whatever that means.

Producer is basically project lead.

That said, our organisational structure is very flat (there's a somewhat lengthy blog post that goes into detail about it), so all it really means is having the final say on hirings and firings and ceremonial figurehead things.

Csihar wrote:Secondly, do any of the devs have a substantial background in whatever their role is, beyond just as a hobby? By that I mean, for example, do the composers write music professionally, were any of the writers or editors English majors in college, etc.? That sort of thing. Of course, I'm not fishing for personally identifiable specifics or anything; it's just pure curiosity. Considering the high quality of the work we've seen so far, I would assume that's the case for at least some of the staff, but I may be (am probably) wrong.

Most of us have any experience in our project-related work that goes beyond normal schooling. I think Hivemind might be doing writing in his tertiary education, but I'm not entirely sure. And of course there's Silentcook who's job in nursing gives him the honour of being our medical advisor. Delta works/worked in video editing, which has helped as well.

Mikage-sama wrote:I thought Aura was the bawz :\ Didn't crud give this title to Aura or something?

Aura is head of writing, and so has the most say on writing-related stuff (such as feedback on the path first drafts, and management of Act 1). He got the position because we think he's the best out of us when it comes to writing. Crud left me as sole project producer/lead after stepping down.

ubergeneral wrote:I think aura pretty much runs things.... or he enforces the rules and tells us what there will be in KS and what will not be in.

Public business is down to who's willing/masochistic enough to do it at the time. Aura does a good job of it, though.

Any titles are mostly ceremonial - 4LS works as a semi-anarchistic meritocracy. The power hierarchy is more based on personal relationships and one's skill at argumentation than any rigid structure - it's actually a pretty complex thing now that I think about it, at least to explain. The system has formed and evolved over the span of the game's developement. I'm the "head of writing" becuase I'm somewhat more often right than wrong about writing-related issues, we have a "producer" because we need someone to fall back to if we can't decide on something and so on. In practice it shows very little, I think. The fact that everyone exercises a great degree of creative freedom is both a strength and a weakness, in many ways.

Suriko forgot that Blue studies music, specifically composition iiirc. The artists all are just amateurs and so are the writers, with the exception of Hivemind who studies literature (which may or may not have a positive or negative impact on the quality of his work). None of us has actually written much anything before KS which has lead to a hilarious upwards curve in skill developement for pretty much everyone - we've had to scrap gigantic amounts of early writing simply because we were so shitty at the time of that writing. I wish I was an English major - it's my third language - maybe wouldn't have had to learn so much the hard way over the course of making KS.

Aura wrote:I wish I was an English major - it's my third language (...)

Having (although somewhat half-assedly) tried and failed to learn both Spanish and Japanese, I find this quite impressive.

Anyway, thanks for the responses! It's always fascinating to find out how things happen behind the scenes, especially with something like KS that has such a non-traditional development process. Hopefully someday we'll see some kind of blooper reel with bits of the worst of the early drafts, if any of it has survived - and assuming some of it was "so bad it's funny," rather than just "so bad it's bad."

Unfortunately for the writing job, learning about literature has only caused me to be able to natter on about literary theory which isn't much use when it comes to actually writing a narrative--not one like this, anyway, where the plot and structure are necessarily restricted by the genre (the previous sentence was brought to you by five years of book learnin' and being a pretentious fuck). My current studies might have been more useful at the beginning (having expanded beyond print and into all forms of the so-called 'new media,' of which the visual novel is one facet) but probably not.

And yes, there was a lot of crappy stuff written at the beginning, but it has mostly been eradicated. You probably could find some of it with enough digging, but trust me when I say that you probably don't want to. Not really.

I'm a media designer so I'm probably as qualified for the directing job as anyone is ever likely to be. As far as programming is concerned I'm a total amateur though.

Csihar wrote:Hopefully someday we'll see some kind of blooper reel with bits of the worst of the early drafts, if any of it has survive

The Fan Fiction board has some early Bad End drafts, IIRC, if you go back a few pages.

They were never developement material, like none of the texts by staff writers on the fanfic board.

The studios organisational structure also betrays their roots as channers.

Flat with it mostly being about who shouts and screams the loudest.

Anonymass wrote:The studios organisational structure also betrays their roots as channers.

Flat with it mostly being about who shouts and screams the loudest.

Like any organizational structure could betray chan origins. If it is so, many governments are channers, if we follow this logic. Then again, these two sentences seem to place the word (or status) "channer" in a negative way. Like a word "Judas", "sinner" or "heretic". At least I see it so from, this.

If you ment it as an insult- throw your pc away and visit the church. or chop your hands of. (two option way)
If not- well, have a nice day.
It's not much of an "organisation" to begin with. Just dudes, who want to do something cool. And they're good at it.

Anonymass wrote:The studios organisational structure also betrays their roots as channers.

Flat with it mostly being about who shouts and screams the loudest.

I disagree. Reckon it has more to do with the history of the project. We've always been collaboratively creative, all the way from back when it really was channers "screaming loudly" at each other to this day and us discussing about the minutiae of VN direction or CG angles. KS never was, and never will be made to fit the vision of a single person, or even a small subset of dev team. There was a number of attempts to make structured organization for the project back in the days before 4LS, but it's not really that easy for people who don't know shit about VN making to take the reins of a project of this magnitude.

Anonymass wrote:The studios organisational structure also betrays their roots as channers.

Flat with it mostly being about who shouts and screams the loudest.

That's really very presumptuous as well as being wrong.

After the early attempts to form a rigid organisation it was realised that the best way to settle disputes was to give the majority of the control to the writers.

So if anyone wanted to do something with Rin, they would have to speak to Aura, etc.

If there was ever a conflict then it would usually go to the person that was able to curry the favour of the most devs. And since most of us only act like children some of the time, this would usually mean that we would get the best result for the game.

The "Producer" role was similar to that in film/stage productions (for the information of the person above who said that the Producer deals with the money, you're thinking of 'Executive Producer" in most cases.).
The Producer's role is basically to make sure that the right person is in the right job, and that they keep doing what they are supposed to do. In our case that usually meant being the one who hired/fired the various people and tried motivating the team. As Suriko said, it was also the "last call" person; someone who could use a "final Answer" attack to settle disputes (see: Photo backgrounds). I left this position after I ran out of motivation myself.



Anyway, this structure differs differently from a horde of people reposting whatever is popular at the time, with minds that are altered by the "elite" few mods/janitors who regulate what people think.