Developer's Diaries' Lucky #13

TcDohl made this DD in Aura's absence. Here it is:

With the holidays and all, real life has hit the members of the project. Despite that, there has been some progress. On the writing side, we've got a new Lilly storyline that we're hammering through, as well as a few new scenes submitted. On the art side, we're finalizing some of the designs that our new artist silentkyon has submitted. I'll also be overseeing a new set of Basic Information documents. Nothing really much to report on, really. No rant or musing today. I kind of had one, and I put a lot of thought into it, but as I was writing it, I kind of saw how stupid it was. So let's turn this around then. Let's put the reader in the spotlight. What is the reason that you work on this project? If you aren't a developer, why are you one of the faithful?

A new Developer Diaries is fine too...

Aura wrote in the Developer's Forum:

Despite the finals and whatnot, some stuff has been happening, mostly in the writing department. Paths are coming along and so is editing in parallel despite the head editor losing his computer a few weeks ago, causing the Act1 be stalled for some time. Beta testing begins as soon as he gets the edits done somehow. Delta works his magic with the engine, the looks of the game are going to be pretty nice.

We finally completed the writer team with the fifth member, Suriko, and luckily because of some quirks in the game flow he isn't even much behind. Due to private reasons, Syureria had to give up artistry, passing the torch to silentkyon.

No rant today, lazy.

Aura, courtesy of KS Minister of Propaganda.

KSDood edit:

We've started taking the game logic of Act 1 throught it's paces.

No, we're not going to have any voice acting in this game

What voice actresses do you think should play the girls in a hypothetical Japanese voice version? Who would be the most fitting?

TcDohl's picks:

Emi: Mai Nakahara
Rin: Fumiko Orikasa
Shizune: Rie Tanaka or Houko Kuwashima
Hanako: Chiwa Saito
Lilly: Ryoko Shintani
Misha: Ami Koshimizu

Almost one year since the KS sticky. What's happened since then?

Hi. TcDohl here (who isn't the KSGuy, by the way). It's come to my attention that the one year anniversary since the famous KS sticky on 4chan's /a/ board came about. The following is a personal account of what's happened since then. I remember that it was around New Year's and stuck around for about a week before dying. I remember that I came to what was then known as the project about two weeks after the sticky. Back then it wasn't much of a project at all, quite often just a bunch of people throwing their two cents into the bucket and leaving, not making much of a commitment to the project. I've always wanted to do something like this, a collaborative project to make something like this. I thought, I've played a lot of visual novels and bishoujo games so why not contribute? However in retrospect, no matter how committed people are in making the game, it was never going to see the light of day the way it was back then. It was quite disorganized, and no one really knew what to do, other than put in their two cents. I also remember when the character traits, names, and even the main character's name and disability were voted on. No one could decide on the main character's name for months. If people couldn't decide on the name for that long, how could the project take a single step forward in producing the game? In short, it was in failsville, doomed to die in a whimper.

Which is why the project greatly benefited when we cast off the original boards, the original "core team", and got the creative talent from the original group and made it into a leaner team that could get stuff done. We actually, started *gasp* producing the game when we got our act together. Writing scripts, producing art, making code. But as the game progressed (albeit at a snail's pace), so did the project organization. I saw a comment somewhere (I think it was on the Lemma Soft Forums) on how the team was organized and how we were "very bureaucratic" and too focused on "job titles" which then turned into a leaner operation with people who previously sat at the top of the ivory tower (myself included) took on multiple tasks, playing on their individual strengths. However, the pitfalls of a collaborative effort came about. For example one of our (now errant and former) writer was hit by a truck, the artist who had pretty much defined the visual look of the characters quit. People were falling off the boat with not enough people to man the oars. The project lost quite a lot of momentum as a result of some key people disappearing and quitting. At one point, it was mentioned that the project couldn't be salvaged. It's funny though. Around that time, there was a resurgence of interest in KS, infusing us with new blood and energy to keep going.

So. What's going on at this point? Well, if you've been following the blog, you see that we've got a new artist. She may not be able to produce art right now due to her being very busy right now (as she's turned pro), we're very hopeful that we'll have something to show around... next year. We're also chugging along with the writing. Here's the lint report we have at this point:

The game contains 8986 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 117435 words.
For an average of 13.1 words per screen.
The game contains 26 menus.

If I'm not mistaken, that's probably one of the biggest word counts ever produced in an OELVN. And that's only slightly more than 1/5th of the total planned length of the game.

Keep in mind that though the project has been only around for a year, but we've only been really hardcore about making the game since the summer.

An update is fine too...

First, we have the eyecatch for Act 1, entitled 'The Bundle of Hisao', it features art by lulz.

Next, we demonstrate the user interface and provide an explanation of what the title means.

Enjoy? :D

Edit, updated with links to higher-res versions.

and

Developer Diaries, Chapter Eleven! (No more witty titles for you!)

Aura wrote in our Developer Diaries section of the forum today:

I finished writing Act 1 and the preliminary design for the choices that decide which path the player is dropped on the end of the act, so after editors and delta are through with their part, the (hypothetical) beta testers can have their fun with it. Now I can finally get back to path writing as well. Apart from that, our character artist is too busy drawing pokemon and furry porn to regularly contribute, one of the writers quit his job so he can write fulltime and all the students in the dev team are clogged with exams and other coursework for a while.

ETA for Katawa Shoujo is a funny thing to speculate on. Since we now got a full team save for one writer, if no more disasters happen the bottleneck will be the script (despite the ridiculous amount of art) and more accurately, the slowest path to be completed. Delta estimated release date at somewhere in 2020 based on current writing progress, but his zero point was the new years while writing didn't actually begin until June. A more realistic ETA based on current progress was somewhere in 2009, but hopefully we manage to release before the next year is over.

Hot topics in the past week:
-Name for Act1 is still undecided, no it will not be "Parties Unknown"
-Romance vs. everything else, is the period before love-love stuff too long and boring?
-Fetishes and the appeal of H-scenes, should someone be into BDSM?


Thoughts?