Developer Diaries, chapter 22

After a month of procrastinating because nobody cares (except the guy on /jp/ who sparked me writing this):

All Quiet on the Western Front

Unsurprisingly, nothing particularly special happens progresswise, more words/art come in every week and that's about it. Well, we do have kinda many source photos for the backgrounds now which is very nice, just that some could always be better and obviously the missing ones are harder to get. Directing the game is still behind and stalled for the most part, but it'll get done eventually. The first draft of script is surprisingly close to finished (relatively speaking), after that we just have to race against the artists to see who gets their shit polished and finished first.

On the hilarious sideprojects front however, delta is working on the solution to make translating the game easy and userfriendly, in the hopes of making KS the Asterix of visual novels (guess how many languages/dialects Asterix has been translated to). His aspirations are not completely unbased, as parts of the script have already been translated to Italian.

4LS had its first anniversary a few days ago, marked by the date when crud took over the project leading, even though we didn't start thinking ourselves as a group external to the project until later. Looking back at the past year, it's a god damn miracle this project still exists and is doing so well, so happy birthday 4LS and may the game be out before the next one.

-Aura

4LS ANNOUNCES NEW PROJECT "KSS"

Our group announces a new OELVN (Original English Language Visual Novel) in the works, in collaboration with our Fringe Staff members called "KSS" standing for "Katawa Shoujo Shoujo," a play on the first game we are already working on.
To summarize, KSS is a visual novel project created from a spontaneous string of events (all of which are very weird in their own way).

Story

The game takes place in Sydney, Australia. A school is founded in the early 1990's with the sole purpose of being multi-cultural. With the current time being early 2005, the school has grown from its humble roots, and has expanded in almost every way. Rather than being students in an exchange student program, people from around the world who truly wish to learn the English language, other cultures and the like go to this school to learn everything they could ever want to learn. The game takes place inside the high school division of the school, focusing on the relationships of the various girls in the story. Yes, girls. Apparently, despite the school not being gender-centric, it has an overflowing amount of female students; due to the various advantages to women the school has to offer. Be advised that even despite the game being lesbian-centric (or yuri, as the Japanese call it), there are indeed normal male-to-female relationships available in this game, despite few. Due to the humongous amount of characters in the main cast, you can enjoy the game and its various stories.

Characters
You are introduced to the numerous main cast members one by one as the story begins. From a Czechoslovakian to a Brazilian, from French to Italian, American to Russian, and so on, you get to choose which girl you want to date from these lovely multi-national girls. The girls' personalities range from hot-cold personalities (or tsundere), warm and sweet personalities, and even stalkers. You also have various bust sizes (though nothing over F cup, for those that hate ridiculously huge breasts), ages and so on to go with the game's theme of "variation".

Gameplay
The game will start with you choosing which branch (out of three total story branches) that you want to play through. Each branch has its own set of characters, despite everyone being in the same school/location/area. Each branch will also have its own style of gameplay, varying from the standard POV (point of view) to styles never been used much, or even not at all yet. The game will still retain its "choose your adventure" style, like with every visual novel made, to stay true to our roots, and to provide choices for the player in order to get the girl he/she so desires. Due to the immense amount of characters, this was the only way to do so, to make sure that the theme of variation is still contained in the game itself. Think "a Negima visual novel, but without Negi" or something among those lines, and there's your description for the game.

Summary

This will probably be the first OELVN to utilize an immense amount of characters and storylines, unless someone is already working on one. With all sorts of craziness being packed into this game, and the humongous amount of work going to be put into it (I pity the artist, unless he gets a lot of help), this will be a game to wait for. And yes, it's a free game.

Sample character art: