how did i get here i'm not good with computar

Crud wants everyone in the dev team to try their hand at a blog post, so I guess this is my turn to do one. I'll try to keep it short, I'm not really very good at these.

Lately, I've been thinking more and more about the final game.
Specifically, the expectations people have for it that I can see based on the reception to Act 1 and what people have been saying about their expectations for the full game.
I'm a little disappointed people don't like Shizune as much as I'd hoped they would, but I had a feeling she would end up being disliked. Aura joked that she was the antagonist of Act 1, something I found kind of disturbing.
It's weird to say that now, because I don't really like my characters as much as I think the other writers do. But I try to make use of this and write them objectively with flaws.
Suriko and Crud have gotten some ribbing from the dev team because they love their characters a lot. Lilly is more or less Suriko's ideal woman and Crud was putting all his favorite fetishes and quirks into Hanako.
It seems to have paid off, because they're doing well as far as popularity is concerned. Maybe that is the route I should have taken. It really is limiting to write a character who can't speak, and one who is supposed to have a very forceful personality.
I'm soured on the tsundere archetype in general, because I think it is basically making apologies for bitchiness. So I tried to make Shizune not really a tsundere, just strong willed. The problem is that when there's character interaction there usually has to be conflict to be interesting, and Shizune ended up being a character at the center of some of this conflict.

Looking at this as I write it, I realize I sound a little bitter, but I'm not. If I could, I don't think I would do things differently. This is a visual novel, and I think that in this genre, it's best if the girls are divisive. The beauty is that there is a girl for everyone. Frankly, I think it is bad if you like them all. That means that the characters are generic, and written to be as wholesome as possible. That is kind of boring.
You should be able to make up your mind that you like a girl, or hate her, almost immediately. Either is good. At that point the game should cause your love of a character to grow, or your negative opinion of them to change.
There's nothing wrong with a moeblob type character like Hanako, which I see is the most often used criticism against her. It's fine if the relationship deepens, and she can become more.
And along that line, I'm fine with the fact that people do not like Shizune. I hope that when the full game is out, they will grow to like her.

Let's face it, these games are all designed around hooks. In that way, KS is not innovative outside of it's concept, but few VNs are.
The point is that while most VNs are formulaic, they are all built around their characters, even the story-driven ones like FSN and Tsukihime.
Stories, you see, must end, and speculation of them can only go so far. But characters and the feelings people associate with them are forever.
Because of this I'm proud of how we have handled our characters, and their interactions with each other and the player, and it will be interesting to see how they are received in the final release of the game.

I guess to close this post, which turned out longer than I expected, I want to talk about Molly, the cameo character featured in the classroom CG.
Me and Climatic, the artist who did the paintings and Rin's mural featured in the game, wanted to make a short game somewhat in the vein of KS to pass the time, and he designed Molly for that game, Measuring Shadows.
Around this time the classroom CG was being done, so Molly found her way into it. A cameo character for a game that is practically vaporware, pretty weird.
The reason I'm talking about it is partly to announce it. Molly has her own game. But for the most part it's to ease Climatic's asspain, because he has been bawwwing about Molly being in KS for months.
Normally I hate plugging anything, but Aura thinks that by announcing it, it will motivate me and Climatic to work harder on it. That's good because recently he just threw out all the sprites. Fucking Climatic.



So, since I'm writing this too, I hope that when it's out, you will enjoy it, although it will probably be some time for that as well.

hueHuehUehuehuehuehueHuehuEhuEuhueakakakakakawrwrwrahwra

-A22

katawa-shoujo.com problems

Just a short notice this time:

As many have noticed, our website www.katawa-shoujo.com sometimes appears to be down, or working at extremely slow speeds. This is due to the unexpected popularity following the Act 1 release, greatly exceeding what our webhost is geared for so the connections to our site are being throttled currently. We are working on a solution to allow the site to handle the amount of traffic it's getting without trouble. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for the patience while waiting for the situation to resolve.

Folding @ Home Team

Just a quick update for now.

An official Folding @ Home team has been created for Katawa Shoujo. Folding @ Home is a small program that runs in the background and uses unused CPU cycles to analyse medical data. More on the program itself can be found here.

Katawa Shoujo's team ID is 167809 and the team page is here.

Waldo World Arena

Hey guys, delta here. For those who don't know, I'm the technical guy ("programmer", if you will, even though I don't actually do a lot of that) of this project, which means I do the engine side of things, installers, websites, etc. I also do most of the actual scripting of the game, as in cueing sprites and the like, which we call "directing". Crud apparently wants everyone in the dev team to try their hand at blogging, so here I am. Since I don't know if anyone would like to hear about some dreary technical things, I'm grabbing one of the good general topics before anyone else does (also, I can't really think of anything substantial to say, apart from how the pseudo-ban kerfluffle regarding eroge in Japan is a good thing, which would just lead to a shitstorm). If you still want to be bored with technical things, feel free to ask, and I will address them in a later post. Maybe.

Anyway, I'll talk about something people have been incessantly wondering about, much to our surprise: The infamous classroom CG. Now, I'm not going to explain it fully, because the writers will strangle me for limiting their options of rewriting everything once more, and also because people blogging after me need some emergency thing to write about too. But I will start with a bit of general info.

Now, the classroom CG. It has a rather interesting history. It wasn't even in the originally planned CG specs, but it became apparent soon enough that it would be one on top of the list of CGs to be done after the first batch. So the artists drew up a plan, added some old scrapped characters, some new ones, and a couple of cameos, and made a draft. It turned out that that was a good idea too, because in directing it turned out that scene without a CG at this point would have been very lame.

However, because the unofficial motto of KS is "we can't have nice things", the next step was the realization that drawing so many characters is actually a lot of work, and the CG was, in that order, scrapped, replaced with another one, and then finally after some heated discussion done after all. But that's just an anecdote, it turned out fine, a couple of people disagreed with a couple of cameos but in the end pretty much everyone thought that it wasn't a big deal at all, and we saw that it was good and used it. For the record, there is not copypasting of anything external involved in that image.

Then we made a fatal mistake: We released a demo.

Suddenly, everyone was wondering who those people were (that is, when they were not wondering what Misha's disability is. But that is a story to be left for another day). There were many speculations, some of them right, some of them wrong, all of them baffling to us. Why did people even CARE? It's not like we really had plans for any of them. Still people were mistaking original characters for cameos, cameos for original characters, cameos for other cameos, and so on.

That got us thinking. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all to at least establish who these characters are, if not for plot reasons, then at least for universe consistency and flavor? So we sat down one afternoon, put our official KS Bad Idea Slippers on, and got brainstorming. And I can now announce that somewhere in the deepest recesses of our internal reference material is a list of who they are and what they're doing in Yamaku. And as soon as we had them, suddenly fanart started cropping up. Funny how that works. Maybe we'll even actually use them in the game again, but don't bet on it.

Well anyway, here's two of them.



This is one of our originals. Naomi Inoue. She's sitting in the back row, second from the left. The reason she's in Yamaku is that she has a rather dramatic form of epilepsy, which means that most of the time she's rather normal - except when she's not. Friends with Natsume, who sits beside her. To her right is Hanako, but in practice that's no different than sitting next to an empty seat or a wall. Her looks are based on an ancient design that's been floating around in the dev channels for ages, and I won't go into detail what it is. You know who you are.

In the same row, second from the right, is a girl with a distinctive hair ring. Now that one's an interesting one. She is, in fact, a cameo of Ritsu from K-On, but she wasn't always. She started out as Aoi, who was a friend of Miki from the front row, but when it came to sorting out the classroom list we were really tired and couldn't be bothered to come up with more. Since she looks so similar to Ritsu (even though she was designed looking exactly that way long before anyone had ever heard of K-On), we gave up and just made her a cameo. A retcameo, if you will. The first time I ever heard of such a thing. Who said KS wasn't original? And I can almost hear someone starting a tvtropes page about retcameo now.

Well that's pretty much it for now, hope you weren't bored too much by this. If you were, blame the people who ask so many questions, not me. Or just blame crud. Because that's what we do.

-- delta

Tangible Outcomes

"So, how's your cripple-banging game coming?"

I have a strange relationship with my friends. From what I've heard, many people are too afraid to mention KS to anyone but their most trusted e-Internet.com Buddies.
Two of my friends were beta testers for Act 1, and another discusses it with me openly.

"Good. We got like 100k hits and we must have about that in downloads. You played it yet?"

"No. Gimme a copy when we get back to your place."

"Sure. Dev version or the release?"

"I was joking."

Actually saying the words out loud feels totally different to typing them out for a blog or on the forums.
About 6 months ago I was bored, so I was looking up KS on Danbooru and Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, there was nothing there.
Now there are tags for all of the characters and our Wikipedia article hasn't been deleted.

And yet I'm at a loss as to what to blog about. I'm looking at 4 days off, all to myself and my keyboard. This is mainly just a "clearing of the pipes" so I can crack straight into writing tomorrow morning.

I don't want to feed you the same shit we've been shovelling at you for the past 6 months. Yes, we're still working on the game, but no, you won't see anything changing for some time. The response to Act 1 has affected all of us in one way or another.

For me, checking the KS forums and trying to pay attention to the IRC channels have become the only thing I do in the evening. Sure, there aren't five thousand requests to translate Act 1 every day anymore, but trying to pick out the threads worth reading now takes time. And there's time to consider a response to the ones I do read, even if that involves posting photos of inappropriate swimwear.

In early 2008, one of the devs proudly and succinctly stated "Why are you trying so hard? Not even 50 people are going to play this!"
We've now easily surpassed 1000 times that many downloads that we can trace, and who knows how many downloads via mirrors.
Even if we wanted to "stay cool" about that, I think all of us are, in some way, excited about how popular Act 1 was. There is a lot of disbelief, and a lot of "But why do they care, it was only a demo?"

Anyway, I think this ramble has gone on long enough. I'm not sure if anyone cares, or if you all really just want to hear us say "We're in post production!" every month for the next year or two. If that's the case feel free to flame me here and I'll hand the Blog keys back to Aura and Suriko. Right now there is a conversation about Black Holes and Camera Lenses that I have to go and win.


PS: Today's image is from weee, but I decided to steal it to make this boring post interesting.

- Crud

State of the Shoujo, June '09

Hey all.

It's been a while since the last status update, so it's time for the first post-act-1 report.

Overall:
The release of Act 1 saw a lot of things happening in a very short amount of time, which disrupted devlopment for a good few weeks as we all came to terms with what we'd wrought. Every developer took different things from this period of time, but the most resounding was surprise at just how popular our Little VN That Could ended up being. However, this also brought with it a number of new things to learn such as forum moderation, dealing with a deluge of help offers ranging from translation to writing to art, and how to manage an exponentially growing IRC population. The experience though, in the end, has been a big morale boost. Now that we're getting back into the thick of work, the feedback we've recieved as been very helpful and at times surprisingly insightful.

Writing:
All paths have their first drafts complete, and writers are now refining their paths through the second draft. Feedback of the paths is given by all developers, especially the other writers and the path's respective artists, with each draft recieving a different level of rewriting and editing. Scenario is first and foremost what is scrutinised between drafts, with characterisation and overall writing style also being under strong consideration.

Art:
As with the writing, art is also once again starting up after the Act 1 release. Sprites and CGs are being worked on, with good progress being made. Every side character has a sprite set now, with Meiko's set having recently been completed.

Other:
- "When's the game coming out?"
"When it's done" is the stock answer. However, please do not expect it this week or this month; it is still a long way off.

- "Fandisc/expansion/sequel where?"
Woah there, we haven't even finished the game yet. None of us have much idea of what we'll do after Katawa Shoujo is finished, and are paying little heed to the answer of that question until we finish this game first.

Finally, as blog posts without pictures are boring, here's an in-game screenshot of Hideaki.



- Suriko

200K Blog Hits

In a startlingly short amount of time, we've gone from 100,000 hits on the blog before the demo release to 200,000. Thank you to everyone who's contributed, played, or even just taken an interest in Katawa Shoujo. In celebration, a picture of Akira Satou from Raide.