Katawa Shoujo Dev Blog

Katawa Shoujo Soundtrack Up for Download

2012-01-19T17:48:00.001-10:00

The Katawa Shoujo original soundtrack is now available for download. It can be accessed on the official site in the Downloads section, or from this link:

DDL: Katawa Shoujo Enigmatic Box of Sound

All music pieces used in Katawa Shoujo are inside, including the animated cutscene music. Well done to all the musicians who contributed music to Katawa Shoujo, especially our main musician, NicolArmarfi.

- Suriko

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2 000 000 blog hits!

2012-01-18T10:53:00.000-10:00

That's a whole lot of people. Thank you for reading

The Season of Goodbyes

2012-01-15T13:55:00.002-10:00

While this is the last part of the Memories series, and my last post about creating KS, it won't be the last post on the blog. We'll use it for future news and announcements, and maybe the other 4LS members still have something they want to write about. Either way, thanks for reading.

Here where I live, it's winter right now, darkness, snow and freezing temperatures. I have to stretch my imagination a bit to conjure the spring of Northern Japan into my mind. A chill wind prickles my skin through my shirt. Cherry blossoms, of course those god damn cherry blossoms have to be there too. It's spring, after all. A walkway lined with blossoming trees, people going somewhere. It's the graduation day at Yamaku High School. And I'm there.

The graduating students walk towards the school building for the last time. It looks just as perfect as Mike's illustration above. We go inside, the hall is packed full of people. Dozens of excited conversations, even in hushed whispers, create a veritable cacophony (so happy I could use that word). The tension is palpable. I can see all the faces that are so familiar to me. Hisao, Shizune, Misha and Hanako. Rin and Emi. Lilly and Kenji. The teachers. They're all there.

And maybe we're all there too. The 4LS members, standing somewhere in the back without anyone realizing it. Graduation is a good metaphor for what we've been going through for the past week.

Maybe Shizune would hold the valedictorian's speech, that sounds like something we would do. I've been to quite a few graduations, and I think speeches are the most important part. A good orator can grip the audience and really move them, while a poor one will make the long ceremonies feel like torture. I wonder if Shizune's speech would be good.

Everyone receives their diploma. One by one, they are called to the front. Would Hanako be comfortable with a couple of hundred of eyepairs on her? How would Rin receive her diploma? All kinds of little questions.

The ceremonies are over. People shuffle outside, and all that tension is released in a flood of emotion. Teary eyes, yet happy faces. Hugs and promises to keep in touch are exchanged. The schoolmates you barely knew are your best friends forever today. Some of them you will never see again, some you might by sheer coincidence, years and years later. Still, even in that distant future, this day will connect you to each other. You might feel an emptiness inside, where the part of your life that is now over used to be. That feeling is familiar to me.

Releasing Katawa Shoujo was our graduation day.

Every day of our lives, we stand at the edge of the future and the past. Events like this just make it much clearer. They are milestones too, markers of the sharp turns your life can take. You dress up for the occasion, tie flowers in your clothes, there will be an audience too. You leave something behind. You head for something new. The future is an open road. From here where we stand, you could go anywhere.

The journey of creating Katawa Shoujo was a long one, but now it's over. I'm happy we could make it together. Thank you everyone.

- Aura

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Opening Up

2012-01-14T00:12:00.000-10:00

If you've followed the KS project at all, you're probably more familiar with me than any other 4LS member. Over the years, this blog has more often than not been a soapbox for me to talk about stuff that comes to my mind and I have made more posts on the public forum than some of 4LS members have forum posts in total. It doesn't mean by any means that I'm the voice of 4LS (Suriko, if anyone, would be that), most of my talking is just opinions and thoughts of my own. Since I enjoy doing this kind of thing more than most other members, it just often has ended up being me who does most of it. Thinking back about the stuff I have talked about, a few key points come to mind.

The early posts on the blog actually did contain stuff pertinent to KS development progress, but the blog soon started evolving into a chronicle of what it was like to make Katawa Shoujo. Many entries contain thoughts on a very general level, some not really pertinent to KS at all, some about all sorts of fringe stuff. All of it, however, is marked with some sort of openness about what we thought, and many of the entries got a mixed or even crushing reception. Still, we were a lot more comfortable with (and thought it more interesting) being open and honest about this stuff, even some of the ugly parts, than the mechanical details of development. I realize that this stance is one that a whole lot of people don't share (we did make quite a lot of people frustrated by our lack of progress updates), and also that it's one that we have the luxury to afford (more on that later). Either way, I hope that the people who've read the blog have found it a reasonably nice experience. I certainly had a good time writing it.

But why write a blog at all? I guess mostly because it was something I, and we, wanted to do. The days at the 4LS "office" weren't hardcore, ball-busting slave work all the time. We did fool around, chat about silly things, watch movies together, did KS stuff that wasn't development (blog, "fan" art, events like Secret Santas), that kind of thing. Though seemingly a waste of time, stuff like that helped us bond and engage ourselves more with the project. Having fun was important.

Speaking of engaging with the project, we weren't the only ones to do that. KS has been marked by a really active fan following, especially since Act 1 release. I mean, at the time of our release, Mishimmie had over 2000 pieces of fanart, our public forum had 8 times more posts than the dev forum and there were dozens of fanfics and other fan creations on our forums and elsewhere. That's a huge amount of fan material for a game that didn't actually exist. The truth is that KS wouldn't be nearly the same without all its fans. We've had some great times with not only between the guys of 4LS, but also the IRC regulars, people on our forum, translators, everyone. We've drawn a lot of strength from everyone who followed the project. However, we've also always had a bit of a problem with fans of KS: we don't know what to do with them (the other, other white meat?). A commercial team has a clear incentive to get as many fans as possible, and make them as happy as possible: revenue. We don't have anything like that, so our experience with internet fame and adoration has been a little awkward. I guess we sought to connect with the fans by being open on the blog and the forum, and anyone could always come on IRC to chat, but I don't know how the relationship worked out from the point of view of a fan. On the other hand, the lack of an incentive to please absolutely everyone has also the positive flipside of us being able to conduct ourselves as we pleased, and we never had qualms about being straightforward or even blunt to unreasonable people, or making unpopular decisions that might've cut into the hype and following around the game. So, I guess our thoughts could be summed up as us not caring whether we had fans, but trying our best to care about the ones we did have.

Fans of course make us massively happy, even if we can get kinda weirded out at times. Fans can also surprise us. Something that has really blown us off our feet has been the large amounts of incredibly emotional response to Katawa Shoujo that we've seen. I've seen people confessing having cried after playing KS, or otherwise feeling moved. I've read touching stories from people who feel that playing KS gave them an impact to change something in their lives, maybe something as simple as starting to jog, or something as deep as contacting a long-lost friend or loved one, or trying to resolve one's own issues. I can't possibly express what reading feedback like that feels like. I mean, if even one single person's life is actually changed for the better as a result of KS, we've done something objectively good. That's a possibility that never crossed our minds until a bit over a week ago. The suddenly realized implications continue, and get stranger. The chances of something like KS happening to any one of us again are astronomically small. So, it's very likely that nothing any of us ever does in life after this will matter as much to as many people as this cripple porn game. That gives some really strange perspective to the past five years.

Tomorrow's post will be the final part of this series.

- Aura

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You're Doing it Wrong (But That's All Right)

2012-01-13T13:13:00.009-10:00

Since the release we've gotten quite a bit of questions from people who want to make a VN of their own. Can you tell your secrets? Any tips for beginner creators? Well, sure. We really have gathered a ton of collective know-how about making VNs, plus another ton of theory on the subject. KS was a very unique project, and many of the lessons we learned probably are applicable only to a project like KS, or even more specifically, only the 4LS. Other things are so very fundamental lessons that they are not really worth regurgitating every time someone asks for tips. Of course, between these two extremes is a ton of useful stuff we learned (mostly about how not to do things). Based on this one project, there's really not much we have to teach to anyone, only anecdotes of what worked for us and what didn't, so I'm not going to even attempt. I think though, that if we were to do another large-scale VN and actually manage to apply all the lessons we've learned, it'd definitely be a lot smoother ride than KS was, and would likely (hopefully!) be a considerably better production.

Anyway, to give some examples I'll try to explain some design and development decisions we made, and now with perfect hindsight, maybe figure out if they were good or bad ones.

Five writers, one game

Every path in KS is primarily planned and written by a different writer. We of course collaborated heavily and helped each other, but that is the basic setup. Doing this gave us a couple of advantages, at a significant cost for overall consistency. The diversity increases the likelyhood of any given reader liking at least some part of KS. Some people love the romantic and soapy Lilly path, others really get deep into the cerebral Rin path, and so on. Of course, the diversity also increases the probability that any given reader won't like all of KS, but there's nothing wrong with that. The primary advantage however, is the increase in focus for the writers. Being able to concentrate mainly on one story definitely improved the quality of each of them, and made each individual's writing process more independent of the rest of the writing team.

I think our solution worked really well for a project like KS, but it would be nigh-impossible to pull of with many other kinds of stories. Something we probably should've done was improve our scenario planning before actually writing anything, to bring the stories a little bit closer together than what they ended up being. With Act 1, we experimented with one writer coming up with the entire scenario and everyone else writing scenes to fit into the overall framework. That worked okay for us too and resulted in a more coherent story within Act 1. Still, I'm not sure if we'd want to make a full game with that writing production concept and ultimately, having just a single writer is almost always superior to any other number.

Double-triple-quadruple-idiotproof

The first year of KS project was a real struggle. We kept losing people, especially artists, and getting a full stable team was just seemingly impossible. Even after the 4LS team got stable, there was always the risk of losing people to random circumstances. Nothing ever tied any of us to the project, except our desire to work on it. A huge amount of projects like KS fail because of people quitting, so we wanted to minimize the risks.

If you look at the art in KS, you can fairly easily see it's done by multiple people. The artists were distributed similarly to writers, one per each girl, but they all also collaborated across paths and on single images, and every path has art from each of the artists which sometimes can make the reader do a double take at the style shifts. Production-wise, a more optimal distribution would've been to have one artist do all the design and lineart, one the digital inking and the rest be colourists, with maybe one doing the final effects. This would've made the art in KS a whole lot more consistent. So, why did we do things the way we did?

Because it gave us a fail-safe with the art. If one of the artists would quit, the others could pick up the slack with less trouble than if we had put all our eggs in one basket. Putting ourselves in a situation where a critical job is down to one person would set us up for a gigantic failure. Imagine, our sole character designer and liner getting run over by a truck after 2 years, her work half-way completed. That'd mean that ALL the art up to that point would need to be discarded and started again from scratch. We simply could not afford that possibility.

We applied the same approach elsewhere in the production as well, and generally, thinking like this was a big part of why 4LS stayed alive and why KS got released despite the insanely long development cycle and all the difficulties.We always tried to put the project first, the product second, and the egos last. KS is by no means perfect, but it's a great deal better than having no game at all. From mid-2008's onwards, the structure of 4LS was such that we could survive any single person quitting, though an event like that would obviously make things harder for us.
The above two points maybe illustrate what lead to KS's maybe most immediately "amateurish" aspect: its internal inconsistency. A lot of it was simply a result of us trying to ensure that the game would get finished, and maximizing certain parts of the production.

Keeping it real

We wanted to make a Visual Novel, but we also had some ideas what we'd want our VN to be like. Getting our ideas to mesh together and develop took its own time, many nights of long discussions, false starts and brainstorming. I guess the main goal could be described as some kind of "toned down ren'ai story". We wanted the story, characters, relationships, the role of sex and so on feel more natural and less plastic than it often is in these kinds of game, while still keeping the feel of the genre KS is in. We had both successes and failures with that, but overall I don't think anyone is unhappy with how KS came out. Presentation, art and music followed the same school of thought.

Meritocracy and herding cats

4LS did have people with titles like "producer", "head writer" and "director", but we did not have strict hierarchy. Nobody was anyone's boss, everyone had a lot of autonomy over their own work and disputes were resolved through gentlemanny discourse and wit (and sometimes other things). Having no strong leadership was a part of the "failsafe" line of thought, plus we worked more comfortably without the necessary bureaucracy that comes along with it. It had downsides too. Organization and communication was something we did struggle with a lot throughout the project, and never really managed to get it down. I'm sure the lack of anyone to enforce us to communicate better and follow deadlines was a part of this. If we were to do another production, this would be the area we'd have to improve in the most, and possibly change our methods.

5 years

KS took way too long to make. However, much of that time was sort of hot air. Roughly: It took us 1 year to get our core team together (4LS was formed half a year after project started and delta, SC, Nicol, Suriko, and all the artists joined within the following 9 months), 1 year to learn the ropes and figure out what to do and how, and 3 years of actual production of which maybe 1 year or so was wasted time because of real lives, us scrapping and redoing content and whatnot. So, a more optimized 4LS that does everything right might only spend as little as ~2 years to make something like KS. That feels acceptable to me. We had to learn a lot of things, mostly through trial and error, and doing this only as a hobby on our spare time made the development really difficult sometimes. There was just no way around these things, and while we might've been able to get the game done faster, I don't feel too bad about taking so long.

So, if we had to do these decisions again, would be go about making KS the same way? In many cases, probably not, but I would like to think that we managed to pull off some parts of the production pretty well, for a ragtag bunch for first-timer novices at least.

- Aura

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Who We Are

2012-01-12T18:19:00.001-10:00

I call myself Aura. But that's not who I am.

Aura is nothing but a name for me compartmentalizing myself. There's nothing special about that, of course. Everyone does that every day, in many different situations. An internet persona is just a very concrete example, one that I like. Most people who know me as Aura don't know much about my "real life", and most people I deal with in real life don't know who Aura is. Look at my twitter account. It's not mine, it's Aura's. People who follow it are people who know me as Aura, and I follow only people I know as Aura with it. Look at the illustration above. Aura even has a face of its own, a cute anime girl, the result of our capricious artists thinking that I definitely should be moe.

Identity and the separation of "personality" from "person" are some interesting things to think about. This project brought together a lot of different people from different walks of life, all around the world. We've had to get accustomed to each other, to cooperate, to meld ourselves into a team instead of a collection of random people on the internet. Along the way, a whole lot of things have happened.

We've graduated from schools, enrolled in new ones, found new jobs and gotten promoted in old ones. The youngest of us have grown up, the oldest have become even older. We've fallen in love and had our hearts broken. We've made new friends, we've gotten married and had children. We've seen seasons change and celebrated birthdays, Christmases and New Years.

We've also written scenes, drawn CGs, composed music, coded functions. We've debated, argued, discussed, theorized. We've fought with each other and we've made up. We've seen people depart and we've seen new people come aboard. We've celebrated milestones and releases, worried about setbacks, tracked progress and pushed ourselves forward endlessly.

For five years we've lived parallel lives. We've shared some bits of these things with each other, and shared some bits of our experiences with KS with real life friends. But our two lives are still parallel. Being in 4LS has been a part of my life, yet somehow apart from it. Maybe it's been a similar experience to the rest of us, maybe not.

So, who are the Four Leaf Studios? These people I've been with for five years and done all these things with? We've traditionally been quite private about ourselves and stayed out of the spotlight. So it might be that maybe even I don't really know, but I can share some of my impressions.

Hivemind is an interesting mix of intellectual and everyman. He has constantly this relaxed air around him, but every now and then he'd bust out his scholarly side and engage us in most interesting discussions. His writing style is the most unique of the 4LS writers, something that we feared would cause trouble, but eventually just rolled with. Hivemind was the writer our head editor Silentcook got along the best with, probably because he was the only one who didn't constantly troll SC with ineptitude.

Every now and then Suriko carried the entire project on his shoulders. He always placed the success of the project above everything else, and when nobody else could, it would ultimately be down to Suriko to keep our shit together. He is a shy romantic (ladies!) who tended to get teased about everything we could use against him, but also a honest, stand up person who could hold his own against anyone and never give up.

A22 is really, really smart. He's also immensely combative and prone to obsessions, and simply talking with him could often be a struggle. As a writer he's something like a word sculptor, carefully shaping sentences until they are perfect to his liking. This could sometimes take quite a while to happen. He and moekki had a stormy writer-artist relationship that went to absolutely ridiculous extents at times, including art sometimes dictating the writing, instead of vice versa (as was the case with the other writer-artist pairs). I don't even try to understand their friendship anymore.

Cpl_crud is of very opposite nature to writers like me and A22. He is extremely intuitive and easily gets into the "flow", but sometimes frustratingly indiscreet and careless. Nevertheless, working with him is an absolute blast. Crud's vocabulary is hilariously wide and he's not afraid to use it, to the point that we had to use the standard 4LS mass mocking tactics to get him to write in 2000's American English instead of 1800's Victorian English, like he occasionally tried to (Suriko is also guilty of this, there's something wrong with our Australian writers).

Silentcook was the voice of common sense in the writing team. Or that's what he'd like to think at least. It's true that when people started getting too ambitious ideas, or too unfeasible plans, he'd be the one to throttle us down. Sometimes with threats of brutal violence. Aside from that, he worked like a machine. Nobody ever had to worry about SC's throughput or quality of work, and that is quite something in a project like this.

Delta demanded a lot from everyone, but the most from himself. The problem was, while he frequently could do the seemingly impossible, the rest of us couldn't always follow suit. Delta is a man of principle and incredibly headstrong, so getting into arguments with him could be exhausting, and nobody wanted to make him truly angry. Delta is also a visionary, the true force behind many of the things that make KS as great as it is, and likely one of the most capable VN directors in the world. He and I always got along really well, and many of my favourite memories of the past years are of things we did together.

Moekki worries a lot about everything and everyone. When things were not going well, she was the first one to get stressed over it, and when things were going well she'd invent something to worry about anyway. Moekki has a huge heart and she put all of it into the project. Like Suriko, she always would hold the project first and everything else second. Moekki was the unofficial art supervisor (easily the most ungrateful job in 4LS), probably the most productive artist, and a sort of a counterbalance to delta. Of all the people in 4LS, she's easily my closest friend.

Due to her busy real life, kamifish stayed aside from most of the development, really only participating in the production side and keeping contact down to minimum. This spawned a running joke about her actually not existing at all. As my partner in crime in creating the Rin path, we did spend time together visioning the imagery of the CGs, Rin's looks and so forth. These sessions were remarkably one-sided. I would spout ideas, references and concepts in a full on torrent of my stream of consciousness, and kamifish patiently listened, asked for clarifications, and finished with something curt like "I can do that". That meant that a decision was made and she'd go on to draw it, sometimes in insane 12+ hours art marathons.

Raide is infinitely curious and industrious. He wants to learn everything about everything and is never too lazy or careless to not search for sources, confirmation or further information. He keeps track of a huge amount of stuff, and has his fingers mixed in quite a few things outside of 4LS. I have no idea how he has the time and focus for all the stuff he does. While the entirety of 4LS likes being self-deprecating, Raide is sometimes too serious about it (like he is about many things).

Pimmy is the conscience of 4LS. She had zero tolerance for what kinds of assholes we could be to each other at times, and really dislikes fighting. She really just wants everyone to be friends with each other, and could get somewhat upset at times by the rest of us. Prone to anxiety and fretting, with tastes that got her A LOT of flak from the elitists, Pimmy is the most in touch with her inner child out of us. When she grows up, Pimmy will be the princess of a magical kingdom.

Weee has grown a lot. It's odd that it's the first thing that comes to my mind, but she really has grown remarkably both in character and in talent from when she joined the joined 4LS, at the young age of 14. The other remarkable thing about weee is her incredible passion for art. Do you want to get good at drawing? Do what weee did, spend a couple of hours drawing every single day for 5 years.

Climatic is the official 4LS curmudgeon. He played the devil's advocate in pretty much every discussion, or if not, ruthlessly mocked anyone who was even cautiously optimistic and/or enthusiastic about anything at all. Of course, he's also a true artist in a team of artists, in both good and bad.

Mike Inel is a professional. He has absolutely insane work ethic and endless enthusiasm and ambition. There was simply no way to suggest something that was too difficult to him, he'd not only happily do it, but always would try to one-up the suggestion by making it just a little bit fancier. Mike is way too humble for his own good, and he calls everyone else in 4LS "sir" or "ma'am".

Kagami is Silentcook's underling, probably the only direct hierarchy in all of 4LS. He's unassuming and quiet, but attentive (as a good editor should be), and has a habit of coming up with really sharp-eyed commentary out of nowhere, because he speaks up so rarely.

You know those people who are called "gifted" because they seem to excel in what they do completely effortlessly? That's Nicol. Give him a few words of description, a couple of hours and he'll compose something really nice for you. He was so productive that for several years, he went from project to project in the OELVN scene, leaving behind vast amounts of compositions and soundtracks (he was mockingly called "bike" for this). Nicol likes being abrasive, but is actually a nice and smart guy.

Yujovi is the mercenary of 4LS. Somewhat akin to kamifish, he appears in time of need, does the job he's required of, and disappears. Forever remembered for his (mis)adventures with women and uncanny ability to find pretty much any location we needed for the backgrounds.

And then there's me.

- Aura

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A Long History of Katawa Shoujo: part 2

2012-01-11T13:52:00.003-10:00

Back when we released Act 1 I decided to write up the history of the project, mostly for posterity. I recounted all the stuff that had happened between RAITA's pic being posted on 4chan and Act 1 coming out in one long, long writeup. It felt like something worthwhile to do, and the post has since been referred to countless of times. Though I already dread to take this up, I'll now tell the latter part of the story of Katawa Shoujo project.

So, let's go back in time to 30th of April 2009, the day after Act 1 was released:

The release of Act 1 spawned a whole lot of buzz. We got kind of caught off guard by the huge popularity and overwhelmingly positive reception, none of us expected anything like that. Instead of getting discussed only on 4chan and some other places we expected KS to spawn vague interest in, it spread like a wildfire through the internet. For some weeks afterwards, we spent a good deal of time trying to keep track of feedback and such, and try to learn from it as much as we could. After all, Act 1 was meant as a litmus test, to see if our ideas seemed to work with our audience at all. We were glad they did.

After getting over all the release hulabaloo we got back to work. There was still a ton of work to do to get the full game finished. The positive reception of Act 1 gave us a big motivation boost, but also raised the expectations on the full game. We definitely didn't want it to be a disappointment, and it added some stress to some people. At any rate, it was clear that we were on the right track, we'd just have to keep at it.

Something else we didn't exactly expect was a flood of translation projects spawning from the Act 1 release. People wanted to translate Act 1 to dozens of languages, even ones that either had incredibly small potential readerbase or a only a small minority of audience not comfortable with English. Chinese and Japanese were the first major projects, and they would also become the two translation projects we'd grow the closest with. It was obvious there was no way we could actually manage or supervise all these translation teams so the decision was made to have them be autonomous and self-organizing, with the exception of us handling the actual releases of the translations. This arrangement has worked exceptionally well in my experience.

Crud had to quit his active developer role in the project in September. We did have a complete Hanako script (though it was later rewritten almost completely), and Suriko took up the various producer duties, but it was still unfortunate and put work on Hanako's route on backburner for a long time. We decided to rework significant parts of the game script across all paths, mostly a result of the growing ambitions and the sharply risen skill levels pretty much everyone exhibited compared to what we could do in 2007-08. It was a calculated risk of a kind, one one hand the longer we'd spend on the project the better it would become, on the other it would also increase the chances of failure. In 5 years' time a lot of things happen in the lives of 20 different people, and we've had to struggle with all sorts of hindrances that we haven't been able to predict or control at all. Scrapping large amounts of work was a big risk, and like with the final rework of Act 1, we debated it heavily.

December saw the completion of the Chinese translation project and thus, the release of Act 1 version 2. The decade changed to 2010's, after what was a very productive first half of 2009 and a very up and down latter half.

We did not have enough active artists to work on the huge amounts of art the full game required, so we headhunted Pimmy to join 4LS in early 2010 as the Emi CG artist. Actually, it's possible that at this point we were generally undermanned to deal with the sheer volume of work that had to be done, but adding new people to 4LS would've been so unwieldy and likely even detrimental that we just slugged on with who we got. We had gotten that far already after all, if nothing catastrophical would happen we could manage with the people we had. The difficulties we had communicating between directing, art and writing created a host of problems, most of which fell down to the artists having to draw a ton of extra art.

The Japanese translation completed almost exactly a year after Act 1 release, and was a part of Act 1 version 3 along with the redesigns of Emi and Yuuko, followed by version 4 a month later for the French translation. Later that summer, crud and Suriko did a panel on KS in the Australian anime convention Manifest. It was pretty exciting, the first (and to date, the only) time any of us have done anything like that.

The 4LS roster saw its final changes around this time. Mike Inel joined 4LS in July as an animator, Blue123 quit in September and climatic from active role in November, though both of them had been fairly inactive for longer. We were starting to get weary from all the work, but on the other hand we had steady progress, and for the first time in the project's history, we could actually see the end of the road looming somewhere ahead. All in all, from summer 2010 onwards 4LS probably was the strongest we ever were. We knew what we were doing, we had relatively few serious setbacks and kept hitting progress milestones one after another. There was no question that we would finish the game. It definitely was going to happen, the only questions were how long it was going to take and how much we could push ourselves.

The year turned once again, and on the project's fourth anniversary we decided we'd try to push the game out within the year. It was a very realistic goal, though we ended up missing on that by 4 days.

Near the second anniversary of Act 1 release, a whole bunch of translation projects completed: Hungarian, Russian and German. I've gotta give to these guys, they have real tenacity. The fruits of their labour were released in Act 1 version 5 that would become the final released version. Our Japanese translation team, perhaps frustrated that we hadn't released the full game yet, decided to attend a variety of conventions, including big name ones like Comitia and Comiket. This was really cool, we thought, and commemorated the events with artbooks that were exclusive to the cons.

I had to take some leave from active developer role, unfortunately, but step by step the todo list twindled down to nothingness. The mad dash of the autumn culminated in the beta test in December that drove everyone crazy with its intensity. A release date was set, nothing could stop us now, it was actually going to happen.

The new year and the 4th of January rolled in. We were ready. We had been waiting for this for five long years. All lights were showing green, every single thing had been taken care of, the culmination of such an insane amount of work, all that blood, sweat and tears (literally all three), was going to happen. And then it did.

5 years, to the day.

It's a long time, a long story. What I've written here really tells only tiny parts of the things that happened along the way, but maybe it is some kind of a picture of what we've gone through. We can look back to this, remember all that craziness, remind ourselves why we did it (or why we should/shouldn't do it again) . We set out to make something special, but what is truly extraordinary is the story of how it all happened. However, while KS (hopefully) remains in the memories of everyone who played it for quite some time to come, we reached our last stop that exact same moment the game was released. With our purpose fulfilled, there is nowhere for this story to go on anymore.

So, that is the end of the story of this project. It's the end of all ends. Thank you for making it this far.

- Aura

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The Curious Case of Mike Inel

2012-01-10T04:40:00.005-10:00

There always was this delicate balance and control over what about the project was transparent and what was not. We were open and very honest about what it was like to make KS, but never wanted to really explain what exactly we were doing. Not having our work under constant scrutiny from the outside made it easier for us to work, and left all the actual content in the game a mystery up until the release.

So, when we unexpectedly got the chance to really surprise everyone with something super fancy, we decided to keep it a complete secret. This however lead to us having to hide one 4LS member from the public spotlight completely up until the release, which has been hard. To remedy that, I'm going to tell you the story of Mike Inel.

It all began from an e-mail...

Mike contacted us out of the blue, offering to animate an opening sequence for KS since he was a fan of the game. Now, there's something you have to understand here. Since Act 1 was released, we've gotten dozens, possibly in the hundreds, inquiries from people wanting to join 4LS to work on KS. We've accepted none of them. The reason for some of the declinations was that we didn't want to add features like voice acting, but in most cases we already had all the people we needed, and we had galvanized into a working unit. There was simply no need to recruit more members who we would've needed to somehow find a niche in the team for, and then get them up to speed.

But Mike could do something none us could, animation. He also was exceptionally good at what he does. And animations are something that was easy to add in the game, as they only require the technical implementation. So we got interested. We wanted him to work with us. However, we really liked the OP sequence from Act 1 and didn't want to replace it, so we started thinking if there was some other good place for animation in KS. A credit/ending animation could've been ok, but it's not really where you put your most visually impressive stuff. Animating parts of the story didn't feel like a good idea. So, we ended up with a plan for 5 short animations for the beginnings of each of the paths, sort of like second OPs. It was more work than what Mike initially offered, but he was happy to take it up. And so, Mike became the only ever member of 4LS who applied and got accepted post Act 1 release.

I can't remember how it ended up like that, but Mike worked differently from other 4LS members. Instead of the usual IRC/forums/MSN, he and I corresponded through e-mail, with the normal 4LS feedback/iteration loop going through me to both directions. Anyway, that style of communication worked nicely for everyone, as it allowed me to distill the feedback to Mike, which increased his efficiency, and on the other hand, the rest of 4LS only had to bother themselves with the bits of the animation production that were pertinent to them. I don't know if the arrangement was actually better than if Mike had just worked similarly to the rest of 4LS (likely not, at least not significantly), but it worked out so there's no problem.

We originally envisioned that the animations would be maybe like 15 seconds long at most, just little interludes that are visually striking and serve as a good way to communicate the beginning of the girls' stories. When Mike completed the first animation, Shizune's, it was something like 51 seconds long. That was, of course, amazing, but I was thinking in horror whether Mike would be able to pull off making all 5. If he couldn't, we'd have to drop them all and his work would go to waste. He wouldn't let me down, however.

Months flew by, we mailed back and forth every day, storyboards, sketches, concepts, ideas, progressing forward stage by stage. Mike's own ambitions grew as he worked, and the animations became much longer, much more elaborate and much more impressive than anyone originally thought they would be. At that time the act title cards were not done, as they were right at the bottom of the artist TODO list. We thought it would be fitting that Mike would illustrate them, to have visual uniformity, but he already was doing way more work than anyone expected. Regardless, he took up this job too.

It took almost a year for Mike to complete all 5 animations and 16 title cards. But even after all that, he wasn't done. Nope, he wanted to revise and expand some of them, and when delta suggested he reimagines the OP sequence in his own animation style, he did that too.

And so, almost 13 months, 337 emails between him and me, and the longest ever thread on the development subforums later, Mike had completed the 5 story animations, the reworking of the opening sequence and all the act title cards. All by himself.

Overall, I feel that the production of the animation sequences was easily the cleanest and most succesful part of the KS project. The unique communication style, Mike's professionalism and us having learned our lessons all made me feel really positive about our capabilities. Generally speaking, many things in the KS project were dragged down by the baggage accumulated through the years, but with the animation production we all started from a clean table, and it was a smooth, fun ride for the most part.

The best part about working on KS to me has been the people I've been working with. To me, 4LS is something really extraordinary. Exceptional individuals who I've befriended and stuck together for years, working together towards a common goal, figuring stuff out together, growing as creators together, having fun together. We always said that even if nobody would ever read KS, making it would still be worth it, and that still holds true.

Tomorrow will be the second part of a long, long story that I probably don't remember half of anymore.

- Aura

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One Week's Worth of Memories

2012-01-09T10:06:00.006-10:00

Lots of things have happened in the past five years, good and bad and everything in between. I thought I'd write about some stuff I've been holding out on, about looking back to all that has passed, and about what I feel now that we're finished. This will be a series of writings on all of these things, one post per day, for every day this week.

First of all, the aftermath of the release has been, in a word, insane. We've been absolutely flooded by all the response to the game release. Forums, message boards, email, IRC, blogs, social media... thousands and thousands of comments, thoughts and discussions. It's been completely impossible to keep track of everything, not to mention reading all the feedback and comments and whatnot and we've managed to respond to only a microscopic part of it all. There's no way we can ever take in all of that, so here's something of a response:

Thank you, everyone who wrote a comment, or a piece of feedback, or words of thanks. Thank you, everyone who waited for KS and followed the development. Thank you everyone who played the game and were touched by something in it. Thank you everyone, for all your support and love.

As for ourselves, I suppose we are trying to ride the wave still, and getting used to the feel of the project not being there anymore. It's a strange feeling, to not have to care about any of the things that were such a big deal for years and years. No pictures to draw, no words to write, nothing to review or discuss. It's all finished. Maybe it is a kind of a momentary emptiness. Some of us turn to self-reflection because of it. Some of us quickly pass through it, without worrying about it too much. Some seek to aim themselves somewhere else. Either way, I think we are quite satisfied, right now.

One other thing I'd like to comment on is the unfortunate choice of words in the release post. The announcement that we are "disbanding" has caused a lot of questions and confusion. A better word might've been "frozen" or "hibernating" or something. So what does it mean? Making KS is what we set out to do, it's what brought us together and it was our only goal. Now that we've accomplished that, the future is open. Some things are for certain, however:

1) There probably won't be any more KS. No sequels, no extra disks, no content patches, no side stories, no spinoffs. We've always felt that KS was this one game, this one project, and it seems unlikely that we would change our minds.
2) We have no plans to make other visual novels. That doesn't mean that we never will. We might, or some of us might, at some point in the future, but for now there are no plans.
3) We are not just going to disappear, and neither are the KS sites. You can still contact us just as before. It's possible that some members eventually depart permanently, but for now we all are still together.

Anyway, we are not disbanded, as in "we won't see each other ever again", we just don't have any current plans to work together.

Tune back tomorrow for the next part of this series, which will be the tale of a certain member of Four Leaf Studios.

- Aura

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Important: Hotfix for the Linux version available

2012-01-04T06:54:00.004-10:00

ATTENTION: The Linux version has a faulty and potentially dangerous (as in, it might change permissions of more files than it's supposed to if called from the command line) launcher script. Until the full download can be replaced, please download http://dl.katawa-shoujo.com/gold/Katawa%20Shoujo.sh and replace the one in the full download (see previous post) with it.

UPDATE: The torrent in the release post has been updated. Users who have previously downloaded the Linux version may use the hotfix linked. New users should use the torrent from the release post (and will not require this hotfix).

Katawa Shoujo Released

2012-01-03T19:19:00.007-10:00

After 5 years of development to the day, Katawa Shoujo is now complete.

Katawa Shoujo download links:
Torrent: Windows | Mac OS X | Linux x86
DDL: Windows | Mac OS X | Linux x86
Do not download this content if you are not 18 years old or over.
Direct download links coming back soon

The Internet, January 4th 2012 - Four Leaf Studios is proud to present the full release of Katawa Shoujo, free of charge. It's been five long years until this day, with a multinational group of twenty-one developers working on art, music, writing, programming, and direction, to say nothing of the innumerable contributors to the project both past and present, but it's finally here.

Katawa Shoujo is a visual novel set in the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled children, located in modern Japan. Hisao Nakai, a normal boy living a normal life, has his life turned upside down when a congenital heart defect forces him to move to a new school after a long hospitalization. Despite his difficulties, Hisao is able to find friends — and perhaps love, if he plays his cards right. There are five main paths corresponding to the 5 main female characters, each path following the storyline pertaining to that character. The story is told through the perspective of the main character, using a first person narrative. The game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV text box.

The story of Katawa Shoujo is a long one, spanning over a decade. In December of the year 2000, the doujin Schuppen Harnische was released by the artist RAITA of circle Zettai Shoujo. One of the pages in the extras section of the doujin contained a sketch imagining a game about disabilities set in a Japanese high school. If not for later events, that may well have been the end of it. With the sticky in 4chan's anime board in January of 2007, though, interest was suddenly sparked in the idea within, and the idea of creating this game came about. After months of brainstorming, but little progress, a core development team by the name of Four Leaf Studios was formed in April of the same year. With this, Katawa Shoujo was set on the path to its final creation.

Four Leaf Studios is a volunteer group of twenty-one developers from around the world, having come together for the sole purpose of developing Katawa Shoujo. Hailing from many different countries, backgrounds, and professions, Four Leaf Studios became committed to working towards Katawa Shoujo as an entirely free game, with no money involved in the project.

With that, the story of Four Leaf Studios is finished. As a single entity, we will not be producing another game. But even though our story has ended, you will now be able to experience a new story; the story that Four Leaf Studios existed to create.

We hope you enjoy Katawa Shoujo.

Contact Four Leaf Studios:

Email: fourleafstudios@gmail.com
WWW: http://katawa-shoujo.com/
IRC: irc://irc.irchhighway.net/#katawa-shoujo

Christmas Present: Katawa Shoujo Artbook PDFs

2011-12-23T19:30:00.001-10:00

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!

Four Leaf Studios, together with the Katawa Shoujo Japanese translation team, would like to give all our fans a christmas present this year. And that christmas present is .pdf versions of the currently released artbooks; the Katawa Shoujo Player Guide, and Fragments of Summer.

We plan to release a .pdf copy of Midwinter, the third Katawa Shoujo artbook, around mid-March. Those who buy Midwinter at Comiket will have the exclusivity of a physical copy, and be able to view it several months earlier than anyone else.

This was all made possible by the very hard work of the Japanese translation team, who were responsible for Comiket organisation, all physical printing and publishing work, and translation of the artist and writer comments contained in the artbooks. A big thank you from the 4LS team goes to all of you guys. And of course, a big thank you also goes out to all the artists who contributed, both developers and fanartists.

Without further ado, here are the artbooks. Have a very merry Christmas from Four Leaf Studios, and a happy new year!

Katawa Shoujo Player Guide (Japanese)
Fragments of Summer (Japanese)
Fragments of Summer (English)

- Suriko

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Katawa Shoujo Will be Released on January 4th

2011-12-15T10:57:00.000-10:00

Katawa Shoujo will release on January 4, 2012.

Of course, 2012 is not 2011, and we do apologise for that. The date of 4 January was selected in order to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the /a/ sticky that started this project, and will see the release of the full version of the game.

We thank you for your patience in waiting for the game to be completed, especially those who have contributed to the game's development. It's been a long ride, but the end is finally near.

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Katawa Shoujo Artbook at Comiket 81

2011-12-05T11:57:00.000-10:00

Hi all,

The Katawa Shoujo Japanese translation team got a desk in the coming Winter Comiket, Comiket 81. The location and dates are: Dec 31 (Sat - Day 3) East "Pe" (ペ） Block 15a (East-5 hall).

Our new doujinshi is a B5 sized artbook of 20 pages, just like the summer artbook. Artists from the development team as well as the Shimmie regulars contributed their masterpieces.

The book is titled "Midwinter", in contrast to the previous book, and will be distributed at 400 JPY.

They will be bringing additional stock of the summer artbook "Fragments of Summer" to Comiket as well.

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Shizooooon

2011-11-14T01:14:00.002-10:00

Hello this is Moekki and today I'm writing about Shizune. I have enjoyed drawing her alot and I think working on her design really helped me develop my style!
here is a diagram

Anyways, in chronological order:
A) Raita's initial design, coloured by some anonymous dude. Although many aspects of her design were drawn from this image, the teal coloured hair was scrapped almost immediately because it's ugly and only works on Miku.

B) 2007, the first game design adopted after the beginning of the project. This design was probably more influential on future designs than Raita's.

C) Wooooow what shitty art! This was after I first joined the project and it's completely horrible. However most of her design is set in stone now

D) I don't remember drawing this but I found it in my KS folder. This was during the intervening period before Kamifish kicked my ass, most of the artists were very dead for about 5 months. I think i tried to give her twin ahoge like hideaki but luckily it never came to fruition. I was still struggling to draw her hourglass figure

E) Her current design, I'm kind of impressed how much I improved that year! I didn't draw any concept art for this design and thus determined that concept art is useless for moeblob school girls. Zettai ryoiki has been discovered and things are good

THE FUTURE!) things are mostly the same but over time her bangs have slowly turned into cat ears

Guest art by VCR

Thankyou and good night
XOXO Moekki
(PS: This means the direction is done)

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Rin's Path Direction Complete

2011-10-26T15:25:00.000-10:00

Rin path direction is now complete, so it's time for second-last heroine art recap.

Rin's art has stayed fairly tethered to RAITA's original design, with her personality reflected in her relaxed posture and roughly-cut short hair visible most of the prototype designs that have been made for her as well as in her final in-game art. With Kamifish coming on board as Rin's path artist, her talent for very clean linework and sketching gave her designs a great amount of consistency very early on once she began work for KS.

The two most notable differences from RAITA's art are Rin's hairstyle being change from a bobcut to short and splayed-out, and a change from wearing a skirt to wearing trousers. The former change came after most of the current artists came on board at the same time in 2008 - Moekki, Weee, Gebyy, and Kamifish - and began working on new designs. It was at this time that Aura gave the artists a task to try and work out the best way to develop Rin's appearance; each artist would draw Rin sleeping against a tree. By showing her in what felt like a natural activity she would do, it could be worked out what design best fit the way she acted. The result of this was for some aspects of Weee's image to be incorporated into her look - namely, the back of her hair being splayed out slightly messily, and her front bangs being separated from the back of her hair to show her ears.

The second change, with Rin's uniform being switched from the blouse and skirt to the boy's uniform shirt and trousers, is primarily a matter of practicality for her. As Rin paints with her feet, wearing trousers simply allows her to do so without the chance of people catching a glance at her panties. The blouse being changed for the boy's shirt was mainly a matter of aesthetics to match the trousers. Relatedly, Rin typically wears sandals rather than shoes, in order to allow quick access to her feet to manipulate objects without getting them dirty through going entirely barefoot. And the answer to any question about clothing that starts with "But how does Rin..." is still "Emi."

And that's Rin's art. Look forward to the final heroine's recap, Shizune's, sometime soon!

- Suriko

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Big in Japan, part 4: Comiket 80 Report

2011-09-27T20:18:00.001-10:00

We had the honor of adding another page to the history of KS, attending the Summer Comiket and Comitia with the new KS illustration book titled "Fragments of Summer". This time the pics are all in full color for your eyes to enjoy. We sure made a serious jump in quality.

The book was made possible again by the KS devs along with the Shimmie regulars, plus 4 guest participants from Japan as well. This is a historical collaboration of KS fan artists around the globe.

- Himeno, a doujin artist who creates KS fan comics frequently. He has posted his works in the forum numerous times.
- Sukaponta, a doujin artist and an overseas cartoon enthusiast. He has been following KS development since its infancy.
- Yamada, who responded to our call for participation. You can find his arts in Pixiv.
- EEE boy, one of the translation team member, and shows very good skills in dot arts.

So the big day was August 13, the second day of Summer Comiket. We brought a few hundred copies of the new book and the remainders of the Act 1 CD / Players Guide combo from the previous Comitia.

This was how the desk looked like just before the event's opening.

The big surprise was that we sold out the Players Guide within the first hour. (The stock was low though.) The new illustration book was selling very fast. We almost saw lines forming in front of our desk. I've been doing doujin stuffs for about 10 years but I have never experienced anything like this in my life. It was astonishing. I never thought that KS became this popular in Japan.

In the end we sold more than 200 copies of the illustration book. A remarkable number. We saw lots of positive reactions afterwards on twitter.

On the following Sunday, August 21, we had another event which was Comitia 80, specializing in original doujin creations. We sold another 100 copies or so, proving the popularity of KS yet again. One person claiming he's from New York dropped by, and bought 10 copies in bulk so that he can distribute them back in US. It turns out that the person was Lansan1ty...hope he's doing ok.

We are aware that there are lots of requests for distributing the scanned data and all. We are seeking the possibility to fulfill these needs in one way or another. We appreciate if you can give some time for this.

We thank you for all the support from KS devs (especially Aura who coordinated the whole thing), the artists and all the fans out there in Japan and worldwide. There are new plans going on so please stay tuned to the dev blog for further development.

-hir

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The Five Stages of a KS Dev

2011-09-21T06:46:00.002-10:00

Stage 1: Enthusiasm

Making KS is a blast. Seriously, it's pretty damn fun. Applying yourself to something with other people is a great pastime, and all the side effects of it, like the great community that's built around KS, or getting our work in events like Comiket are just frosting on the cake. I like the people in 4LS, and talking and theorizing and working with them. I think they like me too, most of the time at least. Sometimes, simply taking a step back and realizing "holy crap we are actually doing this" is a big motivation booster.

Stage 2: Frustration

Making KS is hard. We've had to climb over a whole bunch of totally unreasonable hurdles to get stuff done along the way. The goals we have set for ourselves are completely unrealistic, and it's taken way too long to get there. The amount of stuff we've scrapped from KS could be bigger than the amount of stuff that is in the final product. The ways things can go to hell have surprised us time and time again. These kinds of things wear people out horribly, but this still is just the beginning of the descent to madness that is visual novel development.

Stage 3: Desperation

Making KS is suffering. The dumb shit we've had to go through with this project is unimaginable, a whole bunch of it self-inflicted. We aren't a well-oiled machine by any means, and sometimes some cogs don't work well at all. Getting the 4LS engine to work properly is a constant uphill battle including surprises, fights, begging, threats and bribery. The people who have to fight that battle go to some pretty ridiculous lengths sometimes. You wouldn't believe me if I told you.

Stage 4: Scorn

Making KS is the worst thing ever. Everyone has a point where they just can't take it anymore. The final straw will land on your back, and it will snap. Everyone reacts to this kind of stress differently. A22 rolls on the floor, delta yells a lot, and so forth. However, because we are professionals, we usually get over this pretty quickly and move on to...

Stage 5: Acceptance

Making KS is worth it. Because if it wasn't, we'd have called it quits years ago. To hell with the questionable artistic merits or a cripple porn visual novel, the adoration and wrath of all our fans, the massive though untapped potential that our project has built up and all that. There is worth in simply being together in this for so long and trying to reach that elusive goal. Once you realize that, you feel awesome, at least until the project kicks you in the nuts or ovaries the next time. Because rest assured, it will.

And I guess the kicker here is that once you reach stage 5, you don't stay in that blissful state. Nope, you go back to stage one, and the cycle goes on from there, again and again and again.

-Aura

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The Skill Gap

2011-09-17T08:39:00.002-10:00

First, as you can see there's not been much stuff on the blog lately, that's mostly because of me. Sorry. Nevertheless, it's not very nice to spam us just because I haven't been whining on the blog for a month or whatever. Keep calm and carry on, we are doing our best.

A perpetual problem with this blog is, I'm sometimes very unsure what I want it to be. Most of the posts I've written (in fact, most of the posts written period) are just sort of random musings with only nominal cohesion. The thing is, we do more than enough random musing on IRC already, so the drive to write on blog relies on the presumed willingness of someone wanting to read all those words. I am not all that convinced that we are doing this blogging thing right at all because the way we do it leads to very weird update schedule and topic spectrum. So a question to you, reader: what sort of stuff would you want to see on the blog? The obvious content, project progress, is out of bounds for reasons we've talked about before – unreliability and so forth.

Anyway, that's that.

What I actually wanted to talk about is in the post title. The skill gap is the difference between your outlook on what is "good creative work" and the quality of your actual output. The skill gap is always there, it's in the gnawing feeling that something in what you do is wrong, in the urge to throw out your hard work and start over, in the jealousness you might feel over someone more talented than yourself. If you are a creative person, you have to deal with it in one way or another.

The skill gap ebbs and flows as one evolves as a creator. The more you study, analyse and think, the more the top line rises, growing the gap. The more you practice, practice and practice, the more your output improves, shrinking the gap.

For me personally, acknowledging my skill gap leads to a very uncomfortable anxiety. Essentially, writing is about putting thoughts out into the real world, into words and phrases and idioms and references. Some are better at it than others, but I don't think anyone can match in writing what they have in their imagination. I certainly can't. None of you will ever read the real story I've imagined, of Rin and Hisao and all the things that happen between them, just the crude translation that I was able to vomit out onto my keyboard. I feel a little saddened by this realization. All things considered, my skill gap is wide, and the effect it has on me is equally vast. I tend to revise my text a lot, write iterations upon iterations, I'm prone to getting writer's blocks and so forth. Every word is a battle.

On the other end of the spectrum, delta has probably the narrowest skill gap in 4LS. He is not only extremely good at what he does, but the nature of his job allows him to stay very close to his potential. Whereas us writers and artists are limited only by our own capabilities, he has additional limits such as those of our engine and the quantity of assets our team can produce. Further, while there are millions of pieces of art and literature for us to compare to, there are not very many visual novels. The full extent of what delta could do might not even be a known factor here, but it shows that skill gap is not only an inner quality.

I'm not sure if there are better, or even any other ways to deal with the skill gap anxiety than trying to beat it into submission. You just have to keep trying to do your best every time you pick up your medium of choice, and not get discouraged by the fact that objectively, you are terrible. It's important especially when starting, but acknowledging your limits is always important. For any given work, you have to decide when it's pointless to try to improve it further. It's all right to tell yourself "this is enough". Don't be afraid to suck, because you always will suck, kind of (unless you are cheating yourself to believe unrealistic things). Acknowledging your shortcomings honestly and working hard to improve are the path to growing as a creator.

The final 4LS anecdote about this is about weee. Most people think she's pretty good at what she does, and she is. However, take a look at her older drawings. When we started out, she wasn't all that great. In fact she felt a bit disheartened at how much better especially moekki and kamifish were back then. But you know, she stuck with drawing, and with KS, and look where she's at just a couple of years later. Weee has shown true growth in what she does and along the way she's become a fantastic artist.

I think the bottom line here is that to be a good creative person, you have to understand yourself. If you can view yourself honestly (and not be discouraged by the truth about how bad you are), a whole ton of avenues for improvement open ahead of you.

- Aura

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THIS IS MEANT TO BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE

2011-09-16T05:53:00.002-10:00

—delta

Big in Japan, part 3

2011-07-13T08:57:00.001-10:00

Continuing their 2011 tour of Japanese doujin events, our translation team got a spot for attending Comitia 97 on 21st August at Tokyo Big Sight, just a week after Comiket 80. Exciting! If you are around Tokyo in mid-August, make sure to visit at least one of these events and say hello.

Speaking of the summer doujin events, we've been working on a new book:

夏の欠片, or Fragments of Summer, is a full-colour Katawa Shoujo illustration book with works from the 4LS staff and several prominent fan artists. You will be able to obtain it at either Comiket 80 or Comitia 97, along with the Act 1 hardcopy and KS Player's Guide book.

- Aura

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Hanako's Art Complete (Update: Also Rin's)

2011-06-12T14:21:00.003-10:00

All of Hanako's art assets are now complete. Congratulations to all the artists who've helped in this, especially to Weee who is Hanako's path artist.

Edit: Whoops! Forgot about another piece of news that didn't get announced when it was done...

Rin's art is also complete.

Congratulations to Kamifish, and the other artists who have helped with Rin's path.

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Katawa Shoujo in Comiket

2011-06-03T08:29:00.001-10:00

Our Japanese translation team was accepted for circle participation in Summer Comiket this year, you can meet them on Saturday August 13th at Tokyo Big Sight, in table Y01b of East Hall 2 . Stay tuned for more details, but naturally they'll at the very least have the Act 1 hard copy and Player's Guide set for sale, as in Comitia96. Congratulations for making the cut which is no small feat these days, and hope you'll have a great time!

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After Comitia

2011-05-07T08:44:00.003-10:00

So, Comitia 96 was today and as per the previous blog post, the Japanese translation team attended. Here's a translation of their post on their own blog:

We were at COMITIA!

This is the report blog post for attending Comitia 96 on May 5. Two from the Japanese TL team (hir and a-park) sat at the desk. It was amazing to see the work of over 1-2 years have actually materialized into actual CD. Being able to hold it in your hand makes it feel very special. Unexpectedly many people came by to pick up the booklet and Act 1 CD. That was very encouraging for us. Even some Comitia staff members purchased a copy. I guess KS is better known than we initially thought.

Box full of CDs (that's 100 copies per box)

This is how the desk looked like. We put some thoughts into making the display more attractive.

We aired the "SPIN" trailer on my laptop PC. The event goes on for about 5 hours so the battery wouldn't last... We used a-park's PC afterwards.

We tried to post live report on the blog from the venue but some trouble with the network connection prevented us from this. Bummer. There weren't many copies left over so we'll likely sell them out in the next summer Comiket. We may be able to think of other distribution methods after that. We don't have any further doujin plans as of yet, but it would be really cool if KS picks up some momentum in the Japanese doujin market.

We'll keep you updated on our activities so please stay tuned...

- hir

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Katawa Shoujo in Comitia 96

2011-04-19T07:21:00.002-10:00

On 5th of May, the Katawa Shoujo Japanese translation team will attend Comitia96 doujin event at Tokyo Big Sight, at table た12a. Their offerings for the day are:

1. Katawa Shoujo Act 1

A pressed CD of Katawa Shoujo Act1, including v4 installers for Windows, OS X and Linux. The disk is packaged in a DVD case along with a reversible jacket that has Japanese texts on top side and English ones on the reverse side.

2. Player's guide for Katawa Shoujo

From the beginning of the project and the foundation of Four Leaf Studios to the release of Act 1 and its Japanese translation, this doujinshi book will guide you through the brief history of Katawa Shoujo to date. In addition, the book features foreword by Aura, and illustrations of each of the heroines in the game, some drawn by the staff artists of Four Leaf Studios.

Greyscale with coloured covers, 20 pages, B5 size. The book and CD together will cost 500 yen.

"This venture is a promotion attempt in Japan by our team to utilize the time while we wait for the release of full version. The content may be too obvious for the folks eagerly following the dev blog. Please consider them as more of a memorabilia or fan item. Of course this would be a good starting point for anyone who comes across KS for the first time. If by any chance you're around in Tokyo then please drop by.

We've applied to Summer Comiket as well. If we're lucky we'll get a seat there. Will post updates on other progress.

We're kind of hoping to see some more KS doujin actions in Japan following our trail...we'll see about that on the way."

4LS is of course super excited about this as well, we hope the translation team will have a great deal of fun at the event and keep our fingers crossed for them to make the Comiket cutoff.

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Katawa Shoujo Act 1 v5 released!

2011-04-16T07:12:00.002-10:00

Have we ever mentioned how awesome the KS translation teams are?

Katawa Shoujo Act 1 v5 adds three new translations: Russian (courtesy of Honyaku-Subs), German and Hungarian. This brings the translation project success rate to a fairly respectable figure, and Act 1 to 9 different localizations of 8 different languages. That is pretty amazing.

The only additions to V5 are the three new localizations, so the release is not recommended to those who have played a previous version and can't speak one of the new languages. There are some typo and error fixes in the English and other language scripts, but they are not major. See the changelog for the full list over all versions. We hope everyone enjoys this release and warmly congratulate the three translation teams for their completed projects.

Download Act 1 v5 from one of these links:

DDL:

Torrent:

Like before this release supersedes the previous ones, so any help seeding the new torrents is appreciated. Also, big thanks goes to Davis for hosting help.

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Words of Gods

2011-04-10T10:41:00.004-10:00

People love canon. At least people invested enough in a work to argue about it on the Internet do; and sure enough, there's nothing better than to add to the content that is indisputably canon since it is source material, because if there's something better than a good thing, it's MORE of a good thing, and if this additional material is not canon it did not "really happen" and as such is sadly useless... right? Personally I happen to disagree (if you couldn't tell already), but this blog post is not about that.

More to the point, this thread on our forums, and especially my snarky impulse reply within, got me thinking - why does "Word of God" matter so much to people? Sure, I wasn't being nice*, but what does "we've (...) been known to troll, lie, change our mind, and make stuff up on the spot" actually mean?

1. Trolling

The ability to play with the fanbase's expectation is one of the perks of what we do. In all honesty we think that the product will include everything it needs to, and any additional information will have to be taken with a grain of salt. As a side note, trolling is not effective if you're ALWAYS trolling or even just too often. So we try to not overdo it.

2. Lying

Now that's just mean, but I know I've done it before to protect actual information or just out of spite in response inane questions. In the end it mostly comes down to point #1 anyway.

3. Changing of mind

This does happen a lot, hopefully not so much in content that is actually already out (and as such has the "highest canonicity" if you care about such a thing). We don't intend to change Act 1 in any meaningful way, but we will if we think we have to. And in the unreleased part, well... I'll just say I'd be more than happy if we changed our mind less often. Thankfully it does not seem to happen as frequently as it used to at this point.

4. Making stuff up on the spot

If I get asked a question, or even if it just strikes me by accident, I may make a statement about some thing that is not relevant to the story at all. This will, for all intents and purposes, be "canon" until someone else on the dev team cares enough to contradict it; but does that matter? In fact, if it mattered, would it not be in the game narrative in the first place?

So to summarize, I see two big problems in here, apart from the (in my opinion, overblown) obsession with canonicity people have in general:

• It's not like Katawa Shoujo is an exercise in world building like other franchises. We don't really care whether there is a bigger universe outside the story we tell; if we did, we would surely have made said world more interesting. This is not Star Trek, or Lord of the Rings, or even Fate/stay night, it's just a little story. We do care about canon as far as consistency within the work is concerned, but not a lot beyond that.

• It's not like the story this supposed world is built around even exists in any meaningful capacity yet, so everything we say is subject to change.

For example, I have said before that Richter Bromont's depiction of the Yamaku principal as a Luchador wrestler is actually true. I know that there is nothing to contradict it in the game at this point (because he does not appear, and nor is mentioned in enough detail to make the call), so I'm not even outright lying. I just think it's funny, but does this make it "canon", an in-universe "truth"? I guess so, but I'm also aware that if we actually did decide to show him, he'd be something less... random. In fact, the principal did appear in an early draft, and in there she was a woman. Maybe THAT is more canonical than my offhand remark? But it's not in the game anymore either. The fact of the matter is that there is no objective reality beyond what is shown in fiction, and even for that you have to trust the writer. Seems obvious, but I've read Umineko no Naku Koro ni recently, and I've seen that fans of Umineko have a real problem realizing that even a universe designed at least with some degree of worldbuilding in mind is still made up and does not necessarily have to make sense in the way reality has to**. Whether that still constitutes good writing is up to the reader, of course. And even if something is not stated to be one way or the other, "undefined" can be perfectly canon. See the ending of Inception, and how a part of the audience refused to accept that as well.

Then there is the matter of fanon; Touhou is a franchise that is mostly fanon, and if enough people believe something is canon in that one, that definitely makes it "true" eventually. Fandom can take matters into their own hands, and if that is more enjoyable than the core narrative, who would argue against it? So, I will not condemn people pulling together various remarks and trying to build a bigger universe if they consider it fun; it's just we ourselves don't care enough to keep track of it because keeping track of actual core material is already stretching it. I am of the opinion that everything that matters is/will be in the game, and would take a small cheap laugh of the moment over building a greater universe than we need - It's not like we're forced to have sequel or spinoff hooks like a lot of commercial franchises. If we're lucky, all of these side ideas might in fact combine to one emergent fictional universe. But don't bet on it.

—delta

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* I find it slightly absurd to call writers "gods", yes I know it's a tvtropesism, but that doesn't make it any better, can't get into any decent discussion without tvtropes and their CamelCase puns infesting every single one these days, don't care if it was around before but tvtropes codified it into a nuisance, get off my lawn, I mad, etc.
** In fact, now that I think about it, Umineko made "trolling, lying, changes of mind and making stuff up on the spot" a core part of the narrative, and people seemed to actually like it specifically for that - I kind of did, to be honest. Not much else, but that's beyond the scope of a simple blog post.

April Fools: Announcement - Future Plans

2011-03-31T19:10:00.002-10:00

So now that we are getting closer to game release it's maybe a time to talk about some of the things we've kept secret so far.

As anyone who has followed our development process knows, we are committed to releasing the entire game free of charge, and this will never change, since it is one of the incorruptible philosophical foundations of our group. However, it has come to our attention that the modern internet environment offers many opportunities for monetization, and we would be foolish not to take advantage of this. So, we are proudly announcing a subscriber model for people who really take Katawa Shoujo seriously and want to enjoy it to its fullest.

Players who want to go beyond the ordinary can sign up for an account, which instantly gives them access to extra features and also makes them eligible for expansion content.

So what are these extra features the subscribers get? Here are some of the more prominent ones:

1. Access to expansion stories

This is the big one. In addition to scenes unlockable through the extra options (see point number 2), we will be making bigger stories that feature characters not seen elsewhere in the game. They won't be quite as long as the main character paths, but will feature things like romanceable characters with full plotlines and multiple endings, just like the 5 main paths. These stories will be offered as downloadable patches through the subscription system, likely going online some time after the release of the full game. There are four such stories under production, and we're going to reveal the main characters of two of them here:

Rika Katayama

A second year student at Yamaku, Rika has heart condition not completely unlike Hisao's, called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The condition is fatal if untreated, but Rika has gone through a reconstructive heart surgery as a toddler. Even so, she still left physically weak and at a constant danger of complications. A string of hospitalizations has made Rika a loner, but not a lonely person. She is sometimes hard to get through to, and tends to get lost in thought even in crowds. People sometimes mistake this for shyness, but in reality Rika does get along with most people, although she rarely actively seeks social contact. Hisao meets Rika by chance at the school infirmary and the two find something to reflect themselves from in the other. Rika's aloof attitude and ostensible comfort with her condition might challenge Hisao to grow as a person, but trouble arises when unpredictable circumstances take their relationship to a surprising direction...

Rika's story is written by Silentcook and her character artist is moekki.

Saki Enomoto

Saki suffers from Spinocerebellar ataxia, a degenerative disease that makes her gradually lose muscle control, amongst other issues. She uses a crutch to help her balance, but is going to lose the ability to walk and eventually, all daily tasks and even eating and breathing. Fated to die with no hope of a cure, Saki is a conflicting figure. She has to live with a horrific, degenerative condition every day, yet she is outgoing and fashionable just like any high school girl. Saki takes the clumsiness caused by her condition in stride, even going against it by taking up activites that require fine motor control such as joining the Yamaku art club, where Hisao meets her. He finds Saki an engaging but troublesome person to deal with, due to her incredibly frank and complex personality. One moment she might be giggling about the new spring fashion line, the next, stating her bitterness for her crippling illness, yet never dropping her dazzling smile. But even Saki, for all her openness, holds things inside she would never tell anyone else...

Saki's story is written by Aura and her character artist is weee.

2. Bonus content

Some of the choices in KS will have options that are exclusively available to subscribers for a minor one-time fee. The unlockable options usually provide small changes to scenes, often extra event CG, sometimes extra scenes or background information that would not otherwise come up. Of course, they have no bearing whatsoever on the main storyline and are entirely optional.

3. Exclusive Merchandise

Simultaneously with the subscriber system we will open the Four Leaf Studios webstore, providing fans with Katawa Shoujo and Four Leaf Studios merchandise such as shirts, hug pillows, posters and more. Subscribers gain faster processing and access to freebies and items not available to others.

4. Premium features

The basic game will no longer offer saving/loading functionality. Instead, you can jump to scenes via the "Library" option. Both saving and loading will be available exclusively to subscribers through a micropayment system. Additionally, rolling back a line will be available for minor charge per line (of course, readback will remain available free of charge).

5. No advertising

Premium customers will not see "sponsored lines" that are inserted into the game text in random intervals. They also get the privilege to block a subset of the in-game product placement.

The KSPremium account will be available at the time of KS full release for most regions of the world for a very competitive monthly or one-time pricing, at various subscription levels. Extra features and the merchandise at 4LS webstore will be charged with Katawa Points associated with your account, available separately or through an automatic monthly fee. 100 Katawa Points is equivalent to approximately $5 (depending on your subscription level and location). This will all be made possible thanks to the cooperation of Valve, with Katawa Shoujo releasing on the Steam platform.

You might be wondering why we are making an about face with the deal about money and KS. This is because we finally have a good use for it. Many of us have found themselves in a good place in life to do something big, something cool, and that's exactly what's going to happen. Four Leaf Studios is going to become an actual studio, continuing with our adventures in the world of visual novels beyond Katawa Shoujo. We are planning to get ourselves a physical studio office in Copenhagen, Denmark, found a real company and move most of the devs there to work on further projects once KS is completed. That is to say, we are taking the big step forward and really going to make a splash in the indie game world. Stay tuned for further developments on this, both before and after KS is released. We have some pretty neat ideas in store for the future.

Thanks for reading and hope you are as excited about these news as we are.

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1000000 blog hits!

2011-03-07T21:57:00.001-10:00

One million blog hits. That's actually kind of a scary realization.

Thank you for reading so far.

- Aura

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If You Want Something Done

2011-03-07T07:38:00.009-10:00

Sup guys, delta here. It's been a while since I wrote a blog post, so it's about time to get technical once more.

Visual novels, seen as computer programs, don't have a lot of "features" you really need to think about. There may be slight differences, but all in all they're really similar as far as user experience goes; and that is perfectly fine, since they are not wildly dissimilar things to begin with - "visual novel" already pretty much defines the experience. In fact, one reason you would use a pre-existing VN engine is that they come with the full feature set you would expect from the medium. VNs are not the most difficult things to program but in a field so narrow there is little reason to reinvent the wheel. However, that does not absolve a developer from thinking about what they are doing. A lot of design decisions in the VN user experience are like they are by convention, and convention are not necessarily right (or wrong) - if the developer decides that they don't want to live with the usual, they can and should do it the way they want regardless what the engine or convention says.

One of these features is "some way of rereading text you have already read". This has to be possible in some way, and there are indeed conventions about how to do that. The method I have seen in most VNs is to show a backlog in list form that you can scroll up or down, or page through. Ren'Py, the engine we are using, solves the problem in a different way, which is calls "rollback" (and the method described above is described as "readback" in contrast to that). Rollback lets you "roll back" the whole interpreter state to a previous point. This is definitely the technically superior method, and a lot harder to implement, and it's one of Ren'Py's selling points. The reader can not only read the prior text, but they also get context - the whole screen, with character expressions, sounds, animation, everything.

Now there is a problem with that - out of the box Ren'Py supports only this method, and developers want choices. The reason for this can be manifold; maybe they want an "authentic Japanese feel" to their game. Maybe there is some narrative reason for doing it a different way. And more importantly (for me), Ren'Py rolls back the entire interpreter state, discarding any player input that happened prior, including choices. This is where a design decision comes in - what does read/rollback actually mean? Ren'Py assumes that the engine is just a tool to display the game to the player and leave as much choice open to the reader as possible - a "reader application" as opposed to a designed experience. An argument frequently brought up in favor of rollback is "the reader can just save and restore the game, you surely are not not going to forbid that too?" In my opinion, that is not a valid argument. For starters, yes, a game designer may decide to indeed forbid what is called "save scumming" in more general video games. KS does not do this, but there may be narrative or other reasons that nobody has yet thought of for it (As an aside, KS also includes a tweaked save/load system, because by default Ren'Py works with a "slot" system directly lifted from Japanese VNs, which in turn lifted it from battery-backed NES games. Not something entirely contemporary, so KS uses a system that Source games ca. 2004 use - hooray for at least living in this century)

What it comes down to is this: I consider the text backlog in KS a form of protagonist memory, and memory is immutable. When you roll back, you don't "roll back an interpreter", you retread what you have already seen. This implies not being able to redo choices. Sure, you can still save and reload, but saving and reloading is a far more conscious, weighty thing, a lot less casual than just scrolling your mouse wheel.

Whatever the reason is, there is no reason to restrict the game developer just because something is "inherently superior". It's like saying that you should not make a film in black and white when color is available. Restricting the player interaction can be a design goal, for whatever reason, and if the developer wants to do that they should be able to. And while Ren'Py does not offer any other method of backlogging, it is open and flexible enough to allow custom solutions.

Act 1 of KS included a custom implementation of readback of my own design. It still allowed rollback (because it is indeed a nice thing to have), but it blocked rollback after choice points, yo you could never roll back beyond a choice. That way, you could not change a choice you had previously made, and if you wanted to access the text displayed before rollback was blocked, you had readback available. I never found this completely satisfactory, because it was an obvious crutch. I felt that the version I want was full rollback without the ability to retake choices. So I went and did that.

The solution is slightly elaborate and I won't go into all details here. I'll just say that what makes this hard is that Ren'Py has no concept of a "per-playthrough" memory independent of rollback, which is exactly what this is all about. It just has the "store" (which stores per-playthrough data, but also gets completely rolled back), and "persistent" (which does not get rolled back, but is global for an installation of a game). I ended up generating a unique ID at the beginning of each playthrough and save it in the store, then using this ID as the index in a database of values that is stored in persistent. Not actually all that complicated, but it was still something I had to think up and implement. It may not even end up being the thing KS eventually ships with, but it had to be done to be evaluated. So the lesson here and the reason I am writing this up is, think about what you want and at least try it out. Don't let yourself be limited from the start by what the engine or convention says, even if it's just in a small way that may not matter to anyone but you. Don't do something because everyone's doing it, but be ready to pick and choose the best from conflicting approaches. And in the end, maybe you will come up with something that is "better" or at least more fitting than either.

At least until everyone dislikes it and it's back to the drawing board.

P.S. Aura was faster with the art but climatic wanted to be part of it as well. So here's his effort as a reward for reading all the way to the end.

— delta

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Hanako's Path Direction Complete

2011-03-06T12:19:00.001-10:00

A one, and a two, and a three: Hanako's script and path direction is now complete!

That means that it's also art recap time for Hanako's art.

Hanako's art has, compared to the other characters, remained relatively stable. Since joining our art team in January 2008 alongside Moekki and Kamifish, Weee has been Hanako's artist and worked on her sprites and CGs since then. As can be seen in the above image, Weee also did a sketch of Hanako before joining, during the time that the game was in its brainstorming phase on the original now-defunct forums. She's been around for quite a while, with her art constantly improving (to the point where she has been selected to illustrate part of a Touhou doujin at Reitaisai 8! Go Weee (aka raemz at the site)!).

When compared to Raita's original design, Hanako is not too different compared to characters like Lilly and Shizune. In Ke^4's sketches, a lock of hair was added to cover the scarred side of her face to give a little uniqueness to her design, and her hair was lengthened. These have since become staples of her design. Her stockings were decided upon to be black, both due to Raita's sketch and to create a ying-yang contrast with Lilly's white stockings.

This touches on one aspect of Hanako and Lilly's designs; a desire for contrast. Not only are Lilly and Hanako very different people in personality, but their looks are used to further present their contrasting lifestyles. While Hanako is somewhat tall with a vaguely Asian beauty of long, dark hair, dark clothing, and a light frame, Lilly is taller, and fits a more Western type of beauty with long, blonde hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. Their expression sets, poses, and clothing all reflect their personalities and lifestyles.

And so, that's Hanako. Thank god Crud and I can stop writing her path now, and good job Delta on finishing the direction. Please look forward to Rin and Shizune's updates in the future.

- Suriko

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Premature Nostalgia

2011-03-05T10:28:00.002-10:00

Is the journey more important than the destination?

I wrote the rather worn saying down, describing the development of KS. Then I started doubting its validity. KS has been a long and meandering journey, and we've done and come across a lot of stuff that's secondary to the development of the game itself. We have oekakis, fan arts, side projects a lively community that we try to participate in, plus our own insular circle in which we watch terrible movies over the internet or attempt to talk shop about the visual novel medium. What value can be placed to these secondary things, assuming that they don't directly bring KS closer to completion? Is it a waste of time to do KS-related things that are not developing KS, such as writing this blog?

As for the biggest secondary thing, I think the community, both 4LS's own and the greater KS community, are terribly empowering for the project itself. People often wonder how come the project hasn't died yet. It hasn't died because we are stubborn, but more importantly, it hasn't died because people care about it. Community is important.

Ultimately, the journey and destination are inseparable. Without that game release to aim for, we'd just be jerking around pointlessly, but after all the stuff that's going on, that release is a pretty sweet reward at the end of the road. One gives meaning to the other.

- Aura

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Your Children Are Not Yours

2011-02-28T23:58:00.003-10:00

I found this pretty strange rant about how fanfiction is an abominable thing, by a fairly popular author. I hadn't really thought about fan creations before, apart from whatever copyright issues we've had to handle. After thinking a while I found that it's actually a kinda strange phenomenon - but so is the whole fan phenomenon in the first place.

It's no secret that I am sort of bewildered by KS's popularity (and so are the rest of us) and that we tend to be sometimes uncomfortably - and maybe unwisely - honest about our uncomfortableness. But the fact remains: I absolutely did not expect to ever have to wonder about what I think about the fans of a work I created. I've never identified as a fan of anything and feel kind of distant from the phenomenon, but being in the receiving end is something really strange. I say that publically talking about this could be unwise because it could easily be interpreted as dislike of fans (which it is not, I like the fans more than the rest of 4LS, at least on weekends), especially combined with the notoriously short patience for stupidity many of us share.

Anyway, Hobb apparently is (or was, seeing as the rant is 5 years old and not up in the original location anymore) awfully hurt by the existence of fanfiction of her works. I can kinda see why, but I can't really agree with her position at all, plus I think the arguments she's refuting in the rant feel kinda handpicked. Fan creations have both pros - they engage fans more, creativity is never bad etc - and cons - they do violate copyright and whatnot. It all comes down to what weight one places on each of the effects and whether the sum comes up as net positive or net negative. So am I pro fanfiction or anti fanfiction? I suppose that's what I wanted to find out.

The first explanation is that fanfics are simply bad, and insulting to the original creator, or at least a majority are. I doubt the validity of this explanation but wanted to include it for later use. This blogpost counters the argument by presenting a huge list of acclaimed literature that could be classified as "fan fiction". Well, the definition has to be extremely broad, far more so than what I'm wlling to do, to call all of those "fan fics", but anyway. There is good fan fiction too, but it's true that fan fics do have a certain, somewhat negative general reputation surrounded by a thick coating of stereotypes.

A quick poll revealed that none of the irc regulars read KS fan fiction (okay one does but he is not straight in the head in many ways), but everyone visits our fanart imageboard more or less regularly. Why is this? The quality explanation is valid here, and most cited one: because most of the fan fics are bad. But so is most of anything, including fan art and non-fan fiction. Two things that fanfics have against them though: fan art takes a second or two to parse, reading a fanfic takes a long time and published fiction has a vetting system called "publishing". Anyone can post a fic they wrote on ff.net or our forums but to publish you need to meet the standards of your publisher. It's likelier that a book you bought is of greater quality than a random fic you are reading. Thus for the consumer, it's a simple risk/reward ratio analysis that makes them choose doing something else over reading fanfics, and also explains neatly why fanart gets an easier treatment than fan fiction.

But that still doesn't explain why Hobb is so angry, or why I am writing a stupidly huge blog post about this issue. I doubt Hobb cares whether fanfics are good or bad, and I don't read KS fanfics so the quality theory doesn't fit. Saying that fanfiction is bad because it breaches copyright is pretty weak in my opinion. Legislature only reflects morals, it doesn't dictate or explain them. From Hobb's rant I gather a sense of moral ownership that is breached when someone else uses (steals) her settings or characters. I guess that is a deeply subjective issue, how much a creator is attached to his or her creations probably greatly correlates with their opinion of this question. A creator feels that her work is something of her own, a personal aspect of herself, and gets offended at observed violation of that personal space. You can look, but you can't touch.

So the final question is, why does a creator care more about fan fiction than say, fan art? The quality argument, again, is false, and the sense of moral ownership should be as strong for both. I think it's because of the transformative characteristic of each. Art is generally only stylistically transforming of the original content, but fiction is by necessity a transformation of the content itself. As proof, delta suggested a hypothetical version of Katawa Shoujo's opening scenes, written by the great Kinoko Nasu. I thought the idea was awesome. He has a characteristic and... interesting writing style, I'd love to read that if it existed. Thus, a stylistically transforming fanfiction got my instant approval. So there's the answer to the art vs fiction question.

One thing where I think Hobb is absolutely on the money is that writing fanfics is a terrible way to learn to write. By writing a fanfic you bypass one of the most critical aspects of storytelling: making the reader give a fuck about your story. For a short story it might be convenient and you get an audience for free, but it teaches you awful habits and is NOT a stepping stone for becoming a "real" writer. Like copying artwork, you do learn some things though, so it's not like I'm saying that writing fanfics is a waste of time. But you are not gonna learn to build a house by thinking up new furniture. At any rate, creating fan works is most definitely leagues better than doing nothing at all, so by all means, do it.

As for myself, do I believe I have a moral ownership of the words I write? Maybe, but my words are not only mine. I read and hear things, ask for commentary, and find ways to put down words that I might've not thought of by myself. I reparse, reflect, repurpose and refer, I collect influences, I take what I can from the canon of writers before me, so it's only prudent to be willing to do my share of giving too. Besides, what do you care what I think?

- Aura

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In case of trolls, read this post

2011-02-28T22:48:00.001-10:00

Since it's the second time someone comes on our IRC, links a 4chan thread with posts from someone claiming to be one of 4LS and revealing "tidbits" about KS and asks whether it really is us holding a question and answer session, I thought I'd make some sort of pre-emptive reply you can refer to in the future:

If you believe anything said about the game or the project without verification, especially in a place like 4chan, you totally deserve to get fooled by a clever troll. We don't talk about KS or 4LS outside of our own blog/forums/irc.

Could Be So Much More

2011-02-28T01:15:00.004-10:00

This post was originally a reply to a forum thread with OP that I felt was very thought-provoking. You can access the thread itself from the bottom of the post.

The topic of portayal of sex has been subject to a lot of discussion, speculation, prejudice and expectations ever since this project was created. Though there are forces pulling to different directions, all of us have had to pick their stance a long ago.

Generally speaking, I think that KS is not trying to make a statement about disability. Sure, the angle we chose is that disability does not define a person, and we think a lot about how we portray disability, but there is no moral in KS, apart from a subjective one a reader might find.

While the fact is that there are things that are inappropriate for youngsters, there is a bigger issue behind it. Does the inclusion of sex, possibly explicit, possibly even something one might call "porn", into something that might be called a "serious" work devalue the latter? While this depends on a lot of factors, I think the answer is more likely to be "yes" than "no". It's simply a part of a more universal issue. Just like a heartwrenching drama might be ruined by an inappropriate slapstick comedy moment, a work can be ruined by an inappropriate sex scene (and it's harder to not make sex scene feel inappropriate). A concrete example that comes into mind is Saya no Uta, a decent horror visual novel that was completely ruined for me by the explicit porn and rape scenes it had. Notable is that the fact it had sex or even rape didn't spoil it, the way those scenes were handled did. From this I conjecture that it would've been possible to display those events in a way that would've felt appropriate to me, and to extend, appropriate to most mature audiences. The leagues of movies that have sex scenes support this observation. Speaking of movies, another example I think about often when I think about portrayal of sex in visual media is the lovemaking scene in Zack Snyder's movie 300. It's basically as close to porn as you can get in a Hollywood movie, but I don't think it necessarily devalues the rest of the movie for me. I admit though, considering how often I wonder about that scene it very well might've ruined the entire movie for me. Still, it seems that there is some invisible, intangible line where "sex" turns into "porn" (here I use "sex" as shorthand for acceptable portrayal of sex and "porn" as shorthand for unacceptable or distracting, devaluing portrayal). If we go to Katawa Shoujo from here I'd say that the sex (not porn!) scenes that I made for KS do not devalue it for me, because I took EXTREME care that the scenes and their visualization would not cross the line of acceptability for me. I expect that others disagree, after all this kind of thing is awfully subjective. My developer colleagues have different opinions as well, and they have made their points of view come alive in the parts of the game they made. However, my stance is that just like I try to portray disability in a humane and compassionate way, so do I try to portray sex and sexuality too. I do encourage you to give me a chance to show it.

There are some things here that I can't talk about now, when the game is not released. After everyone has had a chance to read the sex scenes and see the stylistic choices, I might write something about the thoughtwork that has gone into making them.

As for younger audiences, the problem is a bit difficult. That KS appeals to you (and you are not the first) as an instrument to instruct or communicate acceptance of disability speaks to me of the sad, sad state of portrayal of disability in our culture. And for once, I'm not being self-deprecating. It's evident that KS, or at least Act 1, somehow managed to do at least something right with the topic, however it is greatly lacking in its treatment of the themes, because it's really about something else. To create a haphazard analogue with a reference already used before, it's like using the movie 300 to communicate appreciation of ancient Greek history. While the movie might've gotten some things done right and because it's less boring than a history text book, it feels appealing for the purpose. It is quite possible that someone, having seen the movie, is inspired to read about the real history of the city state of Sparta, maybe even all of Greece, but that's not what the movie is for. Similar line of thought goes for KS. That aside, I do understand that the inclusion of sex closes the door for KS from having parents recommend it to children, teachers to students or even just simply anyone to their friends. Still, with the exception of the sex scene toggle, KS is made with no considerations for the reader's sensibilities, be they due to young age, cultural background or moral norm set. That is because we can't decide what we should conform with and what not. To illuminate the issue further, let's say we made a version with the sex scenes completely removed. Now, some parents might feel concerned that the swearwords KS has cross the line for their kids, so we have to make a version with no sex scenes and no cussing. Enter the people who are offended by Kenji's rampant misogyny and antifeminism. So, we have to make a version with... See? Sex is the obvious big one and we made that toggle, but that is where it ends (unless we decide otherwise). KS comes as it is, if you can't handle some of the content we can't bend backwards to make it palatable especially for you. While it's possible that sex is the only issue that is big enough that people start drawing lines, I'm not at the moment inclined to go down that path. Further, even if we made a "clean" version of the game, it would only take one Google search for an industrious youngster to find out that they are getting a censored version from their parent/teacher/whoever.

From your choice of words, especially "it could be so much more", I interpret that this aspect strongly devalues KS for you, and I think that is very unfortunate. Someone thinking that a work I made is good is wonderful, but to consider recommending it to another person is a great honor for me, and I feel sorry that KS outgrew for you the box it is in. Similarly, the prejudices surrounding the visual novel medium (and to some extent the entire otaku subculture) close some doors from KS. I guess, in a world devoid of compassion for disabled people, maybe KS could be more than a simple love story, a story that speaks of humanity and the world of disabled, of the grief of otherness and exclusion. But a bit idealistically (you can laugh), I object: KS is exactly what it is, nothing more. It is the world that should be more openminded and accepting.

- Aura

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Happy Valentine's Day

2011-02-13T12:04:00.000-10:00

In a romance game setting, Valentine's is kind of a big deal. Emi and Rin know what the most important thing is: sweets for sweethearts.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Lilly Path Direction Complete

2011-02-05T21:47:00.000-10:00

Lilly path's script and direction are now complete and final. Hooray!

To round out the blog post, it's time for another character art recap, with Lilly being the one covered in this installment.

Lilly's design is somewhat divorced from Raita's original sketch, which depicted her as young and quite frail, with the tagline "a bit cliched". For some reason this was forgotten almost immediately, in liue of a reserved and motherly personality. This change was primarily seen in the early written character concepts for her, but would also all but set how she would be visually depicted in the future.

Time passed, and Ke^4 became our artist. His version of Lilly drew its colour scheme from the anonymously coloured version of Raita's sketches; blonde-haired and blue-eyed, in very typical "anime foreigner" tradition. Her hair was simplified, becoming wavy rather than having many loose strands, and her black ribbon became a staple of her design thereafter.

Gebyy-Terar, Lilly's next artist after Ke^4's leaving, produced the second set of Lilly sprites. These used the new version of the Yamaku uniform, switched her to wearing white stockings, set Lilly's front lock of hair, and also made her bangs somewhat thinner.

Finally, Raide was hired to take up the mantle of Lilly's artist after Gebyy left. Through extensive discussion, Lilly's bangs were simplified into their current form, her hair was lengthened, her proportions fixed to fitting her 171cm height, and her skirt lengthened to accentuate her reserved nature. It was not until now that her poses and expression set were finalised, her walking cane added, and her alternate outfits decided upon and drawn.

So that's the evolution of Lilly's art, and the state of where her path is at.

- Suriko

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A Big Genesis Fan

2011-01-26T01:04:00.000-10:00

Hey guys, it's been a while.

I realized there hasn't been much public talk about the music of KS, so I thought I'd take the time to give you a brief run down.

When I joined the project back in 2007, the soundtrack was basically nonexistent. The earliest devs made a handful of concept tracks that floated around the old forums for a bit, but they never really got off the ground. I ended up writing something like 20-25 tracks from scratch from between 2007-2008. I left the project for personal reasons, and Blue came just in time to take over for me. After about two years of being away from the project, I rejoined again in September of 2010.

With most of the soundtrack already done, my job switched over from being a composer to being a janitor. My old work just wasn't good enough anymore: it was just too far below the standards I had built up while being away from the project, so I remade it (you ever see Gundam 0079? it's like that part in Gundam 0079 where Amuro has become more powerful and his gundam is holding him back, so they customize it for him. I am Amuro. I am gundam). Believe it or not, I've been paying attention to the feedback we've been getting on the soundtrack. I addressed a lot of the issues people have been bringing up, in addition to completely rewriting several tracks. On top of that, there are several new tracks that weren't part of the Act 1 soundtrack. The end result is -- hopefully -- a soundtrack that meets the standards the rest of the game has set up.

I've always been a firm believer that, if you're releasing something to the public, you need to take them into consideration -- at least a bit -- rather than just throwing something at them and expecting them to like it. Thankfully, a lot of people seemed to enjoy the Act 1 soundtrack, but this made it a bit tough for me when I had to clean it up. In the end, I made a lot of big changes, but I'm certain you'll all enjoy it even more than the original (and if you didn't enjoy the original, hopefully you'll like this one).

Thanks for all the support you guys have been giving me and the rest of the team, and watch Gundam.

- Nicol

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Reach for the Stars

2011-01-18T10:54:00.003-10:00

As so often, people with interesting opinions spurred conversation on IRC, which inspired me to collect my (and our) thoughts into a blog post. Basically, various people seem to be unhappy with the state of western-developed Visual Novels. They are not good enough and what's more, they are not even as good as the originally Japanese ones are. Being a group of non-Japanese people who are making a VN, we of course feel somewhat interested in the topic, but the subsequent discussion pretty fast derailed away from that because none of us really is keeping a finger on the pulse of OELVN scene anymore. Instead we talked about what could be done better. It occurs to me that unlike my usual subject of the kinks of KS development, this time I'm not a sovereign expert of the topic. I've gone through a certain arc as a consumer of culture, just like anyone. People who have had radically different experiences from mine might not agree with my views at all. I've read a lot of VNs. Less than some, more than others. I've read great many of the ones often cited as the cream of the crop. I've liked some VNs I've read. I've found some VNs really good. These experiences shaped my view of the visual novel medium, and from what I have seen and learned about this niche of this subculture is the following:

VNs, such as they are, don't actualize the immense potential of the medium. They don't come even close. In fact, even the top tenth percentile predicted by Sturgeon's Law are awfully bad when you compare them with other storytelling media. And this goes not only for OELVNs as decried in that discussion thread but for all of them. Here's a fun fact: out of the fifteen or so of us, I can name only one 4LS member who is still actively interested in newly released visual novel translations. A couple of the artists follow new Japanese releases but only for the art they contain. We do take note of new releases every now and then, Japanese, western and translations alike, but it's always with this certain kind of apathy. Yet we all love the medium itself very much. We can imagine a VN we'd love to read.

Broad and generalizing conclusion: the VNs that get made are a gret deal worse than the VNs that could be made. Much more so than plays, novels or movies. Now, the immediate argument that kindasorta tries to defend VNs is that it is a young medium: people have been writing books, doing theatre, even comics, movies and animation for a long long time compared to the short decade and change that VNs have. There is definitely some truth in that, I believe, on the basis of comparison to the evolution of other relatively recent media like video games or comics. To reach a greater height, VNs have to grow out of the cave of lameness they're stuck in (and from what I can see, only descending deeper into). Here's four points that I think are pretty important in that:

1. Get rid of the dependence on genre conventions
This is the biggest issue, so big that it could be cut into like four or five bullet points by itself, but that'd bore the crap out of anyone reading this and I'm not writing an academic paper. Visual novel is a medium, but just about every single one of them falls into some sort of anime type genre, both story- and artwise. Conventions of that subculture, or tropes I suppose I should say, are the cancer that are killing visual novels (as they say). Portraying sex pornographically, hyperadolescent themes, archetypal characterization and so on keep VNs tightly locked as a niche that has no hope of ever appealing to anyone outside the incredibly tiny number of diehard anime fans that basically shape the limits of the potential audience current VNs have. Comics have grown up a bit already and broadened their horizons, arguably even video games have. VNs could try, too.

2. Stop with the word diarrhea
With a couple of exceptions, every VN I've read has had completely inadequate story for its wordcount. Writing longwindedly can be justifiable, but it seems to be more of a rule to drown your sparse good ideas into a swamp of forgettable dialogue or templated events. Visualization (proper kind, the one I'm talking about in point 4.) makes a lot of words even more unnecessary than they would be in an equivalent non-visual novel. Consider the difference in wordcount of an average visual novel and an average theatre play script. Nowadays VNs seem to be overtly long mostly because they are expected to be so, but what started this trend? Maybe VN writers are paid by the word? Maybe competent editors are too expensive to hire? Who knows. Either way, artificially extending the script beyond what it has to offer makes for a terribly boring reading experience.

3. Develop the theory of interactive storytelling
This is the single hardest part to do well when writing a VN, and the one that sets them apart from other storytelling media most clearly. I have never seen a VN that does branching/interactivity in a way that'd satisfy me, and I feel that this is only because there hasn't been enough time and thought put into developing the way interactive stories should work. For a really satisfactory interactivity the choices the player has to make lead to such different directions that the sheer amount of content gets out of hand very fast. Notable is that western video games have had their parallel path of progression in interactivity, and while some of them have attained the broadness I like, it's unfortunately often at the cost of narrative coherence (I'm talking about stuff like Mass Effect where the weight of any given dialogue choice is miniscule and ultimately pointless sidetracks are lurking behind every corner). At any rate, this is the only area where western game developers (but not western VN developers) would actually make better VNs than their Japanese counterparts. There are some video games that tell their stories very nicely and inject the interactivity equally well.

4. Up the visualization
This is a tough one. Though delta sort of disagreed, I feel it's a vital point. Like in other visual storytelling media, the writing is much more important than the visual part, but only through the visuals you justify using a visual medium at all. With the current trends, even the best visual novel will be the rough equivalent of Dinosaur Comics. It's funnily written at best, but very pointless as a comic. Delta used video game cutscenes as a demonstration of the opposite, specifically this which I hadn't seen before but immediately liked. Even if the opening is (sparsely) animated, it's not really all that far from the basic structure of a visual novel. Pictures and narrative, that's all they are. So that's what a VN at its best could be like, all the way. Imagine the best video game cutscene you've seen, cut it into still frames in your mind and insert the story. Blows this sprites + bg + hentai CGs standard out of the water. Now this is something where I actually see constant evolution even now. The most innovative VNs are becoming more and more impressive visually, and I don't mean that the plastic moeblobs are drawn better, I mean that they use the visual aspect of a VN better. For a recent-ish example, Eden* by Minori comes to mind. Minori's visualization team has always been top notch, but Eden*, in my mind, marks a somewhat more concrete step forward. There's still a long way to go though. At the other end of the spectrum, the best OELVN I can think off the top of my head, The Dreaming, would've been better if the branching (good idea, horrible execution) and art (terribly unfit of the game) were stripped off, the story rewritten as a novella and read while listening to the soundtrack. That sort of defeats the point of it being a visual novel.

So that's what I think is needed. Now some of this stuff means you need a budget to make a high quality VN, and a budget is something current VNs don't have. Because the thing is, VNs are not all that popular, and the audience they have is very narrow. The visual novel I'd want to see is not really the kind of visual novel most of the audience would want to see, likely for a wide variety of reasons. VNs are a very tiny niche market, getting tinier every year but that has nothing to do with the medium itself. Obvious solution is that VNs would need to invent a new audience, but evolving from a delivery platform for cartoon porn and adolescent fantasies to a serious form of art is a thorny path (as proven by all the forms of art that have managed the feat, my hat's off to them).

Finally, to get in the personal aspect into this story, I guess I'll think about where KS stands. Or maybe not. I do have a set of opinions about how KS performs in each of the categories outlined above but I'll leave specific talking about that for after we release the game. Let's just say that my general sentiment is "not so good". And unlike with the scene as a whole, I know exactly why I think so. KS is totally an offender in all of the above, for the fundamental reason that we are terribly amateur - often outright bad - at this. Nobody had any clue about any of this stuff four years ago when we started. The project is a hodgepodge of experimental things, constantly evolving development paradigm and learning creators trying to live with the consequences of their bad decisions. It's pretty safe to say that about half to two thirds of 4LS don't like KS much at all. That's not to say that we aren't proud or happy about what we do when we get together, just that if we had known in the beginning what we know now, KS would be very different, probably not as approachable as it is and likely released a year ago already. I do like KS for what it is on some level too, but for me the actual merits of the game, if any, will be that it's made at all, the community that surrounds it and the, dare I say it, epic journey that is its birthstory. Now if we were to continue as a team, trying to find our own voice and way to do these things, we might eventually manage to get something actually cool out. However, making even a single VN is a huge investment, which is why evolving as a creator is kinda hard. We aren't likely to stay together for a decade or two, just to see where we can go. Neither is any current OELVN team. Japanese commercial teams are somewhat more likely to, I think, but their innovative drive might be bound in other ways. I don't know. For VNs to evolve as a medium, it'd need a lot of creators that are in for the long term, interact and strive to extend their boundaries. For these creators to emerge, they'd need an audience for their creations, to reflect and learn from them.

Eggs are not going to start spontaneously appearing, so what the scene needs is some chickens.

- Aura

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State of the Shoujo, 2011

2010-12-31T14:06:00.000-10:00

Greetings to one and all, and happy new year from everyone at Four Leaf Studios.

Well, it's a new year. I liked the sound of "twenty-ten" better, but maybe "twenty-eleven" will grow on me as the year progresses. And progress it will, just as the game has been. It would be nice to say the year was rosy and friendly and we all got along and hummed lighthearted tunes while happily working away on KS... but I don't think any staff member could say that with a straight face. But despite the fights, the bitching, and the tantrums, we've managed to stick together and make steady progress.

As far as notable events during 2010 go, we've lost developers, regained developers, were extremely lucky to meet a certain person who's been working with us on some special surprises for the game, and Crud and I did a KS convention panel (which some reading this may have even attended). Things have happened in every developer's life outide of KS, some good, some bad, but KS itself has more or less kept trundling along with more writing, more art, more music, more editing and more direction being done nearly every day.

But all that pales in comparison to what this new year will bring, if only for one reason:

Ten years ago, almost to the day, Schuppen Harnische was released by RAITA at Comiket 59 on the 30th of December, 2000.

Four years ago, in January 2007, a post was stickied on 4chan's /a/ imageboard with the idea of making a game out of the concept on one of its omake pages.

Six months hence, in June 2007, Four Leaf Studios first arose as a named entity and work on the game began in earnest.

Almost two years ago, in April 2009, the Act 1 preview was released.

And within months from today, after four years in development, Katawa Shoujo will be released.

It feels somewhat strange to think about the game being released, from a personal perspective. It's been a part of my life for such a long period, it's certainly something I will never forget, and I would imagine that much the same is true of most of the other developers. Nor will I ever forget some of those who I've worked with closely during its development. Time marches on though; word by word, line by line, and argument by argument, the game is progressing towards its final state and the eventual release.

We've have a lot of progress status requests over the past year (and the year before that, and the year before that), and unfortunately, we've had to knock them back for quite a number of reasons. For those that asked reasonably, we did at least try to state why. With the new year though, it feels pertinent to give a good rundown of where the project is to the best of our ability. As such, here is a more detailed status update than the usual, including direction status. This is included because it's the best indicator of "final" portions of the game; that is, a directed act will be subject to no further changes. It's because of this that direction only takes place after all writing for an act has been completed (first draft -> second draft -> editing by editors -> direction).

Emi path:
Writing: Path script is finalised.
Direction: Path direction is completed.

Lilly path:
Writing: Path script is finalised.
Direction: Act 3 out of 4 complete.

Hanako path:
Writing: Path script second draft finished, Act 4 in editing.
Direction: Act 2 out of 4 complete.

Rin path:
Writing: Act 4 second draft in progress.
Direction: Act 3 out of 4 complete.

Shizune path:
Writing: Act 4 second draft in progress, Act 3 in editing.
Direction: Act 2 out of 4 complete.

Overall:
Direction of Act 1 and Act 2 is complete, and Act 3 is most of the way towards completion as well. Emi path is now finalised as far as script and direction goes, aside from small-scale edits and direction tweaks to account for specifics of the art assets as they're done. The current hope is that with the game assets being in the position that they are, direction should hopefully be able to continue without stopping and waiting for acts to be written and/or edited. Art is, as usual, largely under wraps as far as progress goes. All sprites are complete for every character (barring the odd expression or two that's sometimes needed during direction), so the artists are working on completing the remaining CGs and cutins. On the CG side, there are very few CGs that require drawing from scratch, with most of those remaining requiring colouring before completion.

So that's where the project currently stands. The coming months are going to be a busy time in preparation for release, but rest assured that Katawa Shoujo will be released in 2011.

To celebrate the new year, here is a picture from Weee. We at Four Leaf Studios wish to thank everyone who's remained patient throughout the game's development, and hope that everyone will have a safe and happy year ahead.

- Suriko

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Merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T01:28:00.000-10:00

The Four Leaf Studios wishes all a wonderfully merry Christmas!

The Making of Mishabot

2010-12-11T00:32:00.001-10:00

If you follow our twitter you'll have noticed this already, but Mishimmie has its own twitter account now to direct all the automatically generated spam tweets out of the main account. Mishimmie's twitter will be Mishabot-generated tweets only, so follow it only if you want to stay up to date with what's going on with Mishimmie specifically. We haven't been all that active on twitter otherwise, but Delta said he might tweet a bit more actively now, maybe I'll do too. We'll see.

- Aura

Secret Santa 2010

2010-12-09T22:04:00.000-10:00

It's that time of the year again. For the third time, 4LS (plus a few irc regulars) ease into Christmas by getting together for the Katawa Shoujo Secret Santa. Like in the previous years, each participant got to make one gift request and had to complete one randomly assigned gift request. Us writers get to embarrass ourselves this year too with the "visual art only" rule, but it's all in the spirit of the holiday.

This year it was moekki's turn to organize the thing with (^ω^)-faces aplenty and delta gets extra special credit as Santa's little helper for building a new Secret Santa minisite. The gifts will be revealed on the minisite one at a time, once a day at 8am GMT until Christmas. Hope everyone has a nice time with this year's event.

- Aura

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Internal Struggles

2010-11-24T12:23:00.006-10:00

Making a visual novel is a battle. Here at 4LS, it often is true both literally and figuratively. We have three contesting factions that constantly get into fights with each other when trying to cooperate: writing, art and directing. That's because making a VN is a game of resource control, and the only way to not lose is to not play. A VN is essentially a collection of pieces that we usually call "assets", assembled into a whole by the magic of code. Due to it being the most "expensive" asset to produce, art is treated as the finite resource. VNs are most often built around the idea of conserving art resources, reusing them where possible and cheating when you can. Everyone has to take into account the finiteness of art when working.

Thus, the bread and butter of any VN of KS's type are Two (or more) People Talking™ and the inner monologue of the protagonist. These are cheap to visualize: character sprites, backgrounds, you're done. However, whenever anything else than one of these happens (say, two characters kissing), there is a problem that has to be solved. Every line of the game script needs to be visualized, so it's up to the director to figure out the specific solution. The director can either bypass the issue, leaving the kiss to the reader's imagination (lame), or he could try to manipulate the existing art resources to create a passable representation of a kiss (uncanny), request a piece of art of the kiss drawn by the artists (expensive), or ask the writer to consider whether the kiss is really needed (problematic).

The necessity of resource-conservative visualization creates interesting problems to VN writers. We have to hold back ourselves with certain kinda of narrative description and place much more emphasis on dialogue and the protagonist's "inner monologue". As an inexperienced writer, I find this constraint very challenging to maneuver around and often end up making myself, our director, our artists or all three unhappy.

Now, directing emphasizes function over intrigue. An example from the development of KS: certain alternative outfit sprites that some characters get are drawn alternate poses as well, instead of drawing the outfit over the old sprite base. This was because drawing a new pose altogether was appealing to the artists. However, it made delta fly off the handle. The entire expression/pose palette, the "language" he had accustomed to using to the communicate the atmosphere, body language and mood of the characters was now unusable when they were in the alternate outfits. Similarly, artists might like to draw pictures of scenes or events that don't necessarily need them (in the opinion of the writers or director). This is always time not spent on drawing pictures that would be needed. And of course, sometimes the artists are just asked to do the impossible.

So, it's a battle. Writers want to do all kinds of quirky stuff, but then the director who wants to do all sorts of cool things with that will request bazillion pieces of art from the artists who want to draw altogether different quirky stuff and sooner or later, someone is driven to a panic attack, cursing everyone to the ninth hell or a week of heavy drinking. Essentially, this inherently conflicting setup solves itself in accordance to the attitudes and personalities of the creators, and their willingness to cause suffering to themselves and each others. Someone has to yield, either the writer who has to kill his brainchild, the artist who has to slave away more hours, the director who has to come up with alternative visualization or all three, when visualization is bypassed. I think we, when making KS, have a fairly high standard of visual representation, that is, we try to get as much stuff visualized as humanly possible (and often more). We also have a certain setup of personalities that amplifies this, leading us to often solve our own struggles in the way we do. We rarely lower the bar of our visualization standard, and usually prefer to either alter the script or get more art assets instead.

Now, this is not the only, and in my opinion, ultimately not even a very good way to go about making a VN. As with so many other things in this project, it just is the production model we ended up with and are sticking with. I think that a more experienced, a more functional team could have a better handle on how to deal with the problems I described. Meanwhile, we make do, and grind day after day with this project. At least when one of these arguments happen, it doesn't anymore lead to a catastrophic shitstorm like it used to. What do you know, even we learn.

- Aura

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Traduttore = traditore

2010-10-26T14:36:00.000-10:00

That is, "translator = traitor". Hi everybody. It's Silentcook at the keyboard again, blogposting instead of editing. Forgive me for using this as an occasion to take a breather and avoid burnout: I'll get back to the grind right after, I swear.

We see an awful lot of translation lately in the VN scene. I was going to say "VN community" instead, but I changed my mind after remembering that the community, such as it is, has no requirements whatsoever for joining beyond "do related stuff". I mean, they let ME in.

Here are some of my thoughts on this somewhat prickly subject, then.

"Translation" means "you're going to fail".

No, I'm not kidding, get yourself in this frame of mind.

There are as many ways to translate a line of writing as there are people. You've decided on going literal, idiomatic, or free-form on a sentence? Regardless of which way you picked, there are two people out there who chose the other two ways and will in no uncertain terms inform you that you're wrong.

Then there are the readers who likewise prefer one style over another. Then the people who think as you do, but still not in quite the exact same way... then, you're gonna hit a line spoken by Rin, and you're going to start weeping.

This before we take into account actual translator skill. For sanity's sake, I'm going to assume the translator speaks one of the two languages - either source or target, preferably the latter - natively. If this is not the case, I don't wanna talk about it.

Even so, consider the possibility that while the translator is quite good, the source text is a translation itself, thus adding an extra filter to the whole mess.

While you're at it, add two - I've read some interesting things about writing being the attempt of the writer at "translating" the picture in his mind. Considering the amount of pain I've witnessed over this during the last few years of the project, I'd call it an imperfect process.

By the way, I'm blessed by being able to work with and ask questions of the original writers, as long as we're talking about translating KS, but getting access to, say, a Nasu or a Tanaka might prove a tiny bit problematic.

(Oi, you. You in the sidelines, saying I'm "cursed" - shush. I'll get to that... eventually.)

Long story short, you're setting out to grope around in pitch-black darkness, and disappoint a majority with the quality of your efforts in the bargain. Why even bother with translating VNs, then?

I only have two answers to this, and forgive me if they seem obvious: first, because you want to. Second, because you're going to expand an audience.

Wanting to is the more egoistic reason, but the most important for the VN translator. If I take the time and bother to translate something, I had better LIKE it. I'm not translating for a job, so if I end up feeling like unpaid slave work, the odds of me doing it well, or even finishing, drop sharply.

Expanding the audience happens whenever you translate anything, no matter how obscure. The default is for people to not know more than their native language, even in today's age of "connectivity" and information everywhere.

Every time something gets released, someone somewhere has a wider choice available - which could well be taken as the point of translating, all by itself. The other meaning "translator" originates from - "guide" - comes to the fore.

Notice how all this ALSO results in more people getting to try out your favorite stuff. My, my, what a fortunate coincidence.

And you know what, I think it all works out into a pretty okay deal for all involved in the end! I plan on perpetrating many of the sins I mentioned above in the future, one way or another.

Doing work knowing you'll fail, striving every time for an impossible perfection.

Guess that's all for the moment. Now then, that one path is done; back to work for me.

- Silentcook

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The Crucible

2010-10-10T06:16:00.003-10:00

Click here for full size

Over the weekend a DeviantArt-originated meme swept over Four Leaf Studios: influence map. The concept is simple: fill a 5x6 chart with things you are influenced by, so that bigger influences also take up bigger space. We had 12 4LS members fill out the map and then compiled it into one huge megamap. It's not specific to KS project at all, but we discussed and thought about what things KS is separately influenced by too. It could fill another map of this size, easily.

At any rate, this was an extremely interesting exercise. It really made us think and learn about ourselves and each other. Especially a couple of the non-artists had a hilariously hard time getting this done. In a way, putting all our influences together like this is quite fitting, after all KS is a melting pot where we all chip in with our share of work, influencing each other in the progress too (as proof of that, you can find our studio logo somewhere in the map as well). There were definitely some surprises, as well as things we've talked about before. For fun and entertainment you can try to figure out which of the influences belong to whom.

A few friends over at IRC filled their own maps too, and I was genuinely surprised and awestruck to find "Katawa Shoujo" happily nudged between other things our friends draw inspiration from. Amazing. I think it was moekki or kamifish who wondered to me about the recursion of influences, how the things we're influenced by (and the things they have been influenced by in their time) are a second-hand influence to other people who in turn might make something that touches yet other people somewhere, sometime. This connectedness gave me a short pause, but then somehow, the strange feeling was as suddenly gone as it had come. I went back to considering the proposal to introduce motivational shock collars to 4LS as a means of improving productivity, faintly smiling just to myself.

What are you influenced by?

- Aura

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In the Case of Emi Ibarazaki

2010-09-30T22:26:00.000-10:00

We've neglected the blog for quite a while, thanks to most of us grinding the tasks we have to do, so this makes the first blog post in a while. This time, it's about Emi and her associated art.

To illustrate the progression in Emi's design, here is a timeline of her changes from Raita's original sketch (Originally black and white, coloured by Syureria) to Ke^4's design, then Ambi's design, and finally, Emi's current in-game sprite:

As you can see, Emi's design has stayed relatively close to the original, with the exception of her prosthetics. Those shown in Raita's original page are rough adaptations of running blades, which are used mainly by disabled athletes for running. This being the case, running blades referenced from those used in the real world are used for her gym sprites, with Emi opting to use something a little less overt in her day to day life. Her gym outfit design and colour scheme were also decided on early in the development cycle, being designed by Ke^4 and modified only much later on.

Ambi, Emi's original artist, did the initial redesign and basic sprites somewhere around February 2008, which is why the style she was drawn in is somewhat different to the other girls and also the reason for her uniform having some minor discrepancies. Ambi decided to change her "pageboy" bangs into something more modern, as well as generally sprucing her up.

With Ambi leaving the project in mid 2009, there were major difficulties in keeping consistency with his established artstyle when drawing the CGs and other art assets, so another redesign took place in December of 2009. While differences from her previous design remained at a minimum, her hairstyle was slightly edited towards something a little easier for Pimmy and I to draw. The end result of this redesign can be seen in Act 1 V4.

Finally, as an extra, here is Emi's character sheet for her current design:

We're also looking to do these kinds of posts for the other characters in due time, so stay tuned.

- Moekki

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Manifest Panel Transcript

2010-08-28T21:15:00.001-10:00

Lawls from our IRC channel made a transcript of the Manifest katawa Shoujo Panel, and I (Suriko) edited it. Many, many, many hours later, it's finally done.

Edit: And it's on the forums. Way too long to post here.

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The Sorrows of Young Climatic

2010-08-28T15:25:00.007-10:00

Since the release of Act 1, we've added a new class of visualization to KS, called "cutin CGs". They are basically images somewhere between sprites and CGs, not full screen CGs but also not a part of the bg + sprites system. Artists like doing small, focused pics and they are useful to stick here and there, where script describes an object of particular interest, or something apart from "two people talking to each other" happens.

However, the fascination with these small flavourful pictures has its downsides too. Just because something can be a cutin CG, it doesn't mean it should be. Sometimes the cutin CGs end up causing conflicts with script or direction. Sometimes they are too superfluous. And sometimes... producing art can just become an unexpectedly difficult task, truly the opposite of the nice and refreshing breather that they are supposed to be for the artists. To showcase, here's the woeful story of that one time when Suriko asked climatic to draw a cutin CG. Delta had made a note in the script of a scene where Hanako plays chess against Lilly that it could be nice to have the chessboard depicted, so Suriko goes to climatic for it.

"I note that the chessboard they're using has holes in the middle of each square and pegs on the bottom of the pieces, and has each dark square slightly raised."

That's the description, from game script. It's the kind of chessboard that makes playing easier for blind people, something you'd expect to find at Yamaku. Climatic says "yeah sure, I'll do it", the five words he regrets saying the most this year, and sets out to work. This task proves to less simple than what it would seem to be. In fact, turns out it's very complex, one could even describe the effort required to make a chessboard that meets climatic's own standards "colossal" or perhaps "gargantuan". First, climatic quickly models the board in 3d because the raised squares make its geometry a bitch at the angle he's drawing.

<climatic> asdfasdga
<climatic> agfakfhgadrgra

However, once he moves to the painting phase, every single one of those raised squares still has to be drawn individually, and despite having the model helping, it's excruciatingly detailed and exhausting work.

<climatic> AAAAAAA

After the board is complete, it needs the set of pieces. 32 pieces of 12 different kinds, each has to be drawn individually. And now, every single of those pieces and every single one of those raised squares needs to be lighted (individually) and shaded, you guessed it, individually.

<climatic> there is no end in sight
<climatic> for this fucing cg
<climatic> askdjkj

All in all completing the chessboard takes almost three months (mostly because massive lack of motivation, understandably), and it's only completed because climatic finally gets so frustrated that he refuses to finish it.

<climatic> goddamn
<climatic> ahsdd
<climatic> adsnkljlgf
<climatic> I do not care anymore

Luckily the board itself is fine by now and moekki quickly adds some effect layers on it to finalize it and it's ready to be inserted in the game. However! At this stage we find out that there's been several critical communication breaks and incomplete information relayed to climatic. Turns out delta has meanwhile directed the scene so that the cutin is not really needed, but never removed the request. Also, not only the chessboard doesn't fit the description (it's missing the holes) but also is heavily inconsistent with another pic of the same chessboard that already is in the game. So now climatic has spent three months drawing a picture that doesn't fit its description in the game and doesn't fit the second image of it in the game. Also it doesn't fit in the game. This hopefully teaches you to check and doublecheck with everyone involved before you even cough in the direction of game files.

<climatic> thank you for wasting several hours of my life, suriko
<climatic> I need to go stick my head in an oven

Not to worry! Moekki edits the second image of the chessboard to fit climatic's cutin CG (she has to redo it twice because she forgets to save), weee adds the holes in the cutin itself and delta tweaks the scene direction so that everything plays more or less together.

And the end result after all this blood, sweat and tears?

Wow! All that effort paid off tenfold. There's a bunch of other cut in CGs in the game, such as this cute plushie Hisao wins for Shizune at the school festival (I call it the Eggplant Cat)...

... or this mysterious box!

...I guess if development always went smoothly there would be nothing to blog about.

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Katawa Shoujo Panel at Manifest (Now in TechniAudio!)

2010-08-23T17:13:00.008-10:00

As most of you probably know by now Suriko and I attended the Manifest Anime Convention this weekend, where Cemex asked us to come and do a panel.

I'll admit, judging on previous panels that I've been on, I wasn't expecting much. Considering that KS is a niche market of a niche market of a niche market I figured that there would be all of about 3 people that were going to show up.

So when people started piling IN to the panels room as Suriko and I were setting up I was just a little surprised (Suriko edit: And all the more surprised when a good 90% of people there already knew about KS).

Full Disclosure: Neither Suriko or I really bothered practicing for the panel. Well, at least I didn't (Suriko edit: I didn't either). Thankfully a good half of the audience knew what I was talking about from the get-go, and that made it easy.

I won't go into the details of the panel too much; all of that is there in cold, hard, MP3-encoded 1's and 0's, however I would like to say a couple of things.

Firstly, thanks to Manifest for inviting and hosting us. They even went to the trouble of getting the presentation past the Australian Censorship Board (quite possibly the strictest Board outside of China). We were rated "MA" (15 years) but were told that we were "Quite Tame". Woot.

The number of people was quite inspiring, really. And thanks to you all too; it was good to see a couple of you getting vocal and no-one falling asleep. One thing that threw me was a couple of questions about the game that were a bit further reaching than "What's Misha's Disability?" (although I had an answer for that prepared).

To the guys that wanted copies of the game I will get those out to you next week. To the guys that gave us thumbs-up, that's cool too.

All in all it was fun. Actually meeting a couple of you has inspired me a little, and hopefully the other devs that are listening will be a little inspired (and entertained). And for those of you that listen to this online I hope it gives you a bit of an insight to the way we work (as if the blog post up to today weren't enough).

In addition to listening the recording here, you can also download it for your iPod or whatever.

Here's the presentation. Please note it's in Powerpoint 2007 format (if you don't have Office 2007, you can download a free Powerpoint Viewer 2007 from Microsoft's site).

- Crud (and Suriko)

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Katawa Shoujo Manifest Trailer: Spin

2010-08-22T00:13:00.001-10:00

Crud and Suriko held their KS panel at the Manifest anime convention in Melbourne, Australia today. First impressions were that it went "all right, I guess", good job! A part of the panel was this snazzy video trailer, and there's an audio recording incoming later along with the panel report. Enjoy.

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What exactly are we making here?

2010-08-08T10:14:00.002-10:00

I don't remember who brought it up first yesterday, but we were discussing the tricky problem of immersion in the dev channel yesterday which led into a bigger discussion about what exactly we'd classify a visual novel as. This came from one of our favorite topics of conversation, which is what in the world is wrong with visual novels--or rather, why they can't seem to become a pop culture sensation (spoilers: they will probably never be a pop culture sensation).

The problem is that Visual Novels seem to be caught between being games and being novels. Looking at some of the debates surrounding other developments on the VN scene (specifically some of the commentary about that novelstream thing that I refuse to have an opinion on) you can see would-be developers listing things they want their VNs to do while remaining blissfully ignorant that what they're describing isn't a VN at all and is more like an RPG. Part of the problem comes, I think, from not having a definition of a VN, so let's lay that one on the table right now:

Presenting The Hivemind's Definition of Visual Novel: A standalone form of electronic literature (that is, not requiring the internet), characterized by a combination of text and sprites, photographs, or animation to tell stories (i.e. a visual element combined with text to tell a story).

This is a pretty wide definition, and leaves a lot of how the story is told up for interpretation. The problem with narrowing it down would be to sacrifice room for innovation. It also would introduce a bias--I had to say 'not requiring' the internet because while there are web-based VNs out there, they aren't the only VNs. You might also notice I said nothing about any sort of reader control over the narrative, because that is also not a part of what is necessary. The only two core components of the medium are right there in the name: the visual aspect has to be there, and the textual aspect has to be there. Adding game elements makes it something else, not a visual novel, but maybe a different form of electronic literature.

While I'm defining things I guess I should define electronic literature--I'm gonna actually cheat and just use some other academic's definition (although they call it 'digital fiction' the definition works for electronic literature so I'm using it here): 'fiction written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium.' Visual Novels would lose the movement of sprites, or the addition of music--some VNs wouldn't lose anything at all if they were presented as a book with pictures, but the fact that some would is enough.

Right. That's got our definitions sorted out, so let's go a little deeper. Let's examine what happens when we read something like Katawa Shoujo.

What are we presented with? Well, KS is a story told in first person. Not only that, but the reader is able to choose how they want Hisao to respond to particular situations, which in turn will result in different stories being told--just like a CYOA novel (remember the Apollo 13 CYOA? Anyone?). Does this make KS a 'game?' Again, it comes down to definitions. Games generally have conditions for something they define as 'victory.' The player achieves victory by acting within the rules that the game has set out. KS has no such victory condition--some endings are 'happy' endings and some are 'sad,' but we do not define any one such ending as the 'right' ending. Hisao either winds up with a girl or he doesn't. The 'sad' endings in KS are no more than the bad endings in a CYOA. You go back and make a different choice and see where that gets you. However, the first-person narration coupled with the ability to choose some of Hisao's responses makes a reader of Katawa Shoujo feel more like they are Hisao (an effect that climatic refers to as the 'IT'S LIKE I'M REALLY _______' effect). This does not make KS a dating simulation, however, because you don't actually have to work within any set of rules to get the girls to like you beyond choosing the branches of the story that we as developers have decided will lead to a happy ending rather than a sad ending.

So VNs are not games--and those that market themselves as such are either not actually visual novels or are misrepresenting themselves. Furthermore, VNs (and I feel like this is stating the painfully obvious) do not have to be romantic at all. It is a more story-heavy bit of electronic literature rather than game-heavy. Game-heavy examples of electronic literature would be something like Mass Effect, which also tells a branching narrative (this is a bit of an oversimplification but to really get into things would make this even longer than it already is) while also having skill-based challenges for the player to overcome (as well as all the character building and equipment selection that has no effect on the story but does make the skill-based challenges easier or harder). Personally I'd love to see more VNs told in the third person, or VNs that tell stories that aren't in some way romantic. The thing that is holding back VNs (apart from the stubborn insistence that they are games, which they are not) is a lack of experimentation with the stories. We're still finding our feet--and I lump KS in with a rather ignoble list of derivative VNs that rely too heavily on romance and anime cliches (we have tried very hard to avoid this, but the setting itself is so heavily played out that the chances of it being original were crippled from the get-go).

I'm not saying such VNs don't already exist--I can think of a few off the top of my head, and I'm sure that you all can come up with a hell of a lot more than I can--but certainly they don't appear to be the norm. Until then, VNs are doomed to be little more than occasional curiosities, eclipsed by stories that take more advantage of their formats. The strength of a VN is that it can tell a complex narrative as well as blend it with impressive art. Unfortunately, the format has so much baggage attached to it that it can really only thrive by making a clean break with its roots and spinning itself as something else. 'Electronic novel' has a ring to it, don't you think?

--The Hivemind

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A Day in the Life

2010-08-01T11:19:00.007-10:00

This is kind of a sequel to the previous blog post. I'm going to record one full day of KS development and make a blog post of it. I'm going to present it in a single timeline, intertwining the events in different channels (colour coded for your convenience). All times are my local time and the timeline goes from 0:00am to 11:59pm on August 1st, 2010.

0:00am: The date changes. It's now August!
0:12am IRC: delta ran into a problem with directing scene L20. It's supposed to be visualized with a single CG ("ltrni.png"), but the image assets we have are completely inadequate for the scene (it has too much dialogue for a static image direction). The situation is a clusterfuck and he's miffed that nobody foresaw the problem. He and I discuss briefly about possible solutions and Silentcook joins as he logs on IRC in the middle of it. We have three options: requesting more art, moving the dialogue to another scene or trying to get a new background so delta can use sprite directing in the scene. SC comes up with a fourth idea about outsourcing pseudoCGs to a friend of his but as it's highly uncharacteristical of KS it would probably not be used and the idea is dropped. We end up with a creative mix of the first option and some sleight of hand.
0:46am SVN: Katawa Shoujo revision 2100 by delta: Delta edited "ltrni.png" to fit a daytime version of the same image better. Part of the solution mentioned above.
0:49am IRC: delta expresses satisfaction at the asset status of Lilly path Act 3, and hustles climatic to complete a CG he was supposed to be working on. Climatic claims that delta approved a version of it already (he says he did not). We laugh at a certain CG that has been in production for two and a half months and the discussion segues into a more general commentary about the asset situation, with frowns all around at the Emi path (it's a bit of a problem).
0:56am IRC: While I'm reading through the script of scene L20 trying to get a grasp of delta's dire situation, delta mentions a certain word choice and challenges its usage (<Delta_Kurshiva> does anyone ever say "perverted" IRL?).
1:05am IRC: I ask for a round of feedback for [classified information] because it's close to being completed and because of its curious nature it's very important that nobody comes up with a critical clusterfuck flaw AFTER it's called final. Delta and climatic give feedback and I make note of it.
1:20am IRC: I, being the writingminded person I am, latch onto delta's earlier remark about "perverted" and open a discussion about the general word choice paradigm, specifically the usage of phrases that are easy to latch onto and instantly recognizable to people marinated in the anime subculture. All four people active on the channel participate. Delta is heavily on the side of getting rid of any "animeisms" as he calls them, climatic kind of agrees, and considers them pandering of fanbase (after SC brings up the point that they are more satisfactory to the reader than the writer) and I just can't decide (<Aura-> the artist in me tells me to destroy everything, but at the same time I like it if people are entertained). Everyone tells me the best line I've wrote for KS I wrote 2 years and 4 months ago so I become depressed and go to sleep, leaving delta to wrestle with directing and Silentcook with editing.
2:31am SVN: Katawa Shoujo revision 2101 by delta: In the past two hours moekki had drawn some additional upgrades to "ltrni.png" so delta uploads the fix and 11 H CG variations for Lilly path that he had lying around.
2:32am IRC: Suriko logs on, and obviously being sweettalked into it by the artist girls, asks delta about installing an oekaki application on our server. Delta tells him to go fuck himself, refusing to have anything to do with the idea, then asks why on earth we even need an oekaki application. Not daunted by the mildly negative response, Suriko goes on to install it himself.
3:44am SVN: Katawa Shoujo revision 2102 by Silentcook: SC has edited a part of scene R18 so he uploads the changes for the other editors and me to see.
4:12am IRC: delta is horrified at the huge filesize "ltrni.png" and wants to compress it to make it more sensible. He also tells Suriko that two lines in his text make no sense when you add directing and is told to just remove the offending lines.
4:37am SVN: Katawa Shoujo revision 2103 by delta: Delta directed scene L20 and uploads the script cues plus the related event CG variations of "ltrni.png" for everyone to see. A completed scene direction is a pretty big event, because it basically makes the scene "final", and you will see something very much like what delta committed here in the final game.
4:40am IRC: commentary on the direction of L20 from the devs active on IRC.
4:42am SVN: Katawa Shoujo revision 2104 by delta: Delta uploads a version of "ltrni.png" compressed with pngcrush for L20. It's not really that much smaller and he's not satisfied.
8:23am IRC: A22 and Suriko discuss about getting a third dev to work harder
11:58am forum: Suriko makes a thread about the oekaki application
0:23pm IRC: Suriko finishes installing the oekaki application. A22 asks why on earth we got one.
0:32pm forum: Suriko makes a public thread about the oekaki application
2:32pm IRC: I log on and ask why on earth we got an oekaki application now.
2:38pm IRC: While I've been away, [classified information] first version is completed. I think it's pretty great and discuss it briefly with Suriko. While rummaging through our ftp, I find our server logs. The numbers in there seem too big to be real. Throughout the afternoon I try to make sense of them, to some success. Apparently KS website is a great deal busier than we thought, and the game has gotten a lot more downloads than we thought.
2:42pm shimmie: Shimmie image 1758 uploaded by Aura. I received a fanart picture in a forum PM, apparently from a 4chan original art thread. It's a crossover picture of Emi and Poplar from Working!!
3:09 pm forum: I make a post in the development thread for [classified information].
3:10pm IRC: Three discussions intertwine: A22 continues talking to Suriko about the dev they were discussing earlier, I realize I need to do some groundwork for [the son of classified information] and we discuss about [classified information], with feedback from Suriko and A22.
4:18pm IRC: I'm really struggling to get my work for [the son of classified information] done, but delta logs on conveniently and tells me he will help after he finishes an idea he got, a new way to compress "ltrni.png".
4:20pm forum: delta replies to my post about [classified information] and we exchange a few forum posts about it
4:42pm SVN: Katawa Shoujo revision 2105 by delta: Delta uploads the new version of "ltrni.png" now a great deal smaller filesize. Success!
4:43pm IRC: delta and me discuss [the son of classified information] at length, brainstorming a lot of stuff that I pick and compress further until I'm satisfied with what I got and write it up. I also check out the direction of L20 that delta finished last night after I went to sleep and tell him I like it.
5:37pm SVN: Katawa Shoujo revision 2106 by delta: Delta uploads a new sound effect file and its implementation in the script files. He was pestered into this by weee, apparently to his dislike (revision comment has the >: | emoticon)
5:43pm public IRC: Novelstream is mentioned and the public IRC channel starts a loose and lengthy discussion about VN distribution, various VN engines, alternative development models, development communities and shit flinging.
6:04pm IRC: climatic logs on and I ask him to paint a new artwork for Rin path. We briefly discuss the specifics (most of the time, climatic just does what he wants. It works really well) and he sets out to work.
7:38 public IRC: the discussion mentioned above finally ends.
8:26pm IRC: I float the idea for this blog post to general but unenthusiastic approval and start writing it.
9:20pm SVN: Katawa Shoujo revision 2107 by Silentcook: SC has finished editing scene R18.
10:45pm SVN: Katawa Shoujo revision 2108 by delta: delta prepares to direct a Lilly path H scene by sorting its art assets (the ones he uploaded in revision 2101) and making preliminary entries for them in script and code files.
10:56pm shimmie: Shimmie image 1759 uploaded by climatic. Instead of working on the artpiece I asked him to, it seems climatic was drawing boobs.
11:13pm IRC: [classified information] is going through finishing touches so we discuss it with delta and climatic as well as act title cards. Climatic reads the draft of this blog post and says its funny.
11:14pm forum: I make a post about the progress with [classified information], asking for comments to an issue from Pimmy.
11:38pm IRC: brief discussions about a variety of topics such as Rin act 2, Act title cards, cold hands and working harder. Climatic shows a work-in-progress of the artwork he started earlier, and moekki shows a work-in-progress of an Emi path event CG she's working on. There is a critical flaw in the CG and we ponder how to best fix it. The issue with [classified information] is left unresolved because Pimmy is not online, to my annoyance since I'd want to keep pushing it as hard as possible.
2nd Aug, 0:03am: I notice the date has changed, write this line and post this blog post.

There you have it. 24 hours of Katawa Shoujo time. I think it's pretty representative, although today was a somewhat more active day than average. Then again a dead day would've made for a super boring blog post. It was Sunday so no work/school for anyone, SVN was active because delta was directing today (it is the single biggest activity contributor), Suriko installed that oekaki thing and IRC was somewhat active as well. Public IRC channel had obviously a lot of offtopic conversation that was not worth recording here and if someone did work they didn't talk about, it doesn't show up either.

-Aura

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Katawa Shoujo at Babycastles indie game arcade

2010-07-28T05:46:00.003-10:00

Next month in New York City, the indie game arcade Babycastles will host Hardcore Feelings, a show featuring a selection of playable indie titles picked out by video games journalist Matt "Fort90" Hawkins. What makes this awesome is that Katawa Shoujo Act 1 has been chosen as one of the exhibits, so you definitely should go check it out if you live in the area.

Opening night party featuring the chiptune artist GLOMAG and the 3D puzzle game Super Hypercube is on 5th of August but the games except for Super Hypercube will be on display for all month for the slowpokes.

Featured titles:

SUPER HYPERCUBE
Kokoromi and Polytron

CALVIN & HELLEN'S BOGUS JOURNEY
Hellen Jo / Calvin Wong / Derek Yu

Untitled
Deth P Sun / Cactus

RESCUE THE BEAGLES
16 x 16

KATAWA SHOUJO
Four Leaf Studios

LOVE LOVE 2
TYO / Seitron & Art Inc

Location:
Silent Barn
915 Wyckoff Avenue
Queens, NY

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Four Leaf Studios, how does it work?

2010-07-15T06:35:00.009-10:00

How does KS actually get made? What is the everyday developement work like? I've tried to write about this topic before, but honestly, it's extremely difficult to concisely express the way our team works in this project. We are an extremely organic, dynamic and free-form group, while at the same time it often feels we are too stagnant, too ass-backwards, too carefree. It is a little bit paradoxal and I can't (and indeed, am not even going to try to) explore all the intricacies and quirks that we ourselves have grown to accept a fundamental part of this team. But will talk about some things, for you, and maybe for myself to better understand who we are. Here we go:

The two primary challenges with our work is the gigantic scope of our project, and managing the large amount of people working on it. I think we all freely admit that we are basically completely unqualified to handle something this big. Still, we manage to get things done, it's just not all that easy. Our method of working is mostly without strict hierarchy (maybe we just lack a dev of the type required for that). Everyone has very clearly defined assignments, and they work towards completing them largely by themselves. We have a few slavedriver types who do take more global responsibility, and periodically prod the lazybutts into working harder, but imposing hard deadlines is obviously not possible in a project like this. Without a concrete motivator, it's really tough to stay on target sometimes. Duty, camaraderie, passion and such are good things and they drive us, but in the middle of the sea of developement hell, the faraway shore sometimes feels too distant. Anyway, everyone has their own job and they work towards completing it at their own pace.

That is the theory. In reality we spend an awful lot of time discussing about KS, our ideas, methods, giving and taking feedback about various parts of the game and so on.

Ideas and theories are the most open discussions, often leading to unexpected insights and new approaches that improve the game a lot. They are also the most stress-free discussions and often pretty fun. At this stage we often put a lot more stress to practicality and feasibility than other values, regardless of how cool an idea someone comes up with. We basically have a very strong picture of what the finished game will be like. Discussing work in progress is optional and sporadic. Usually it happens when someone is uncertain of how to proceed, or there is a disagreement of ideas between two or more people. Often interested parties have a general discussion, and either a consensus is formed or the ones with most stake or most compelling arguments bend others to their will. We also have a couple of options to solve complete deadlock situations (they are rare). Because art is much easier to grasp even when incomplete, it gets discussed much more often in the WIP stage than other areas. When an asset (means an element of the game, such as a bit of writing, a production art piece, a bgm track, a directed scene) is completed, it goes through round of commentary from everyone who is interested. Sometimes you really have to force people to give feedback, especially the less vocal devs. This feedback ranges from appraisal and approval to nitpicking on details to full-blown, brutal critiquestorm, at worst from multiple people at the same time. More work is done and when everyone relevant feels happy, it's approved as final(nothing is actually ever approved, it just means that nobody disagrees anymore, at least not enough to raise an issue). Generally, nothing that ends up in game is done by a single person only, but everything gets touched on by others, such as artists doing colouring and tweaking for each other, editors editing all script, writers helping each other, direction affecting absolutely everything and so on. An important thing here is that nothing ever satisfies everyone. There is a very intricate pattern of what must be according to whose standards, but every one of us has learned that working on something like KS is a game of give and take. It's sometimes okay to accept that not everything has to be exactly like you want. Sometimes you have to understand that something you want done is, in practical terms, impossible. In general, everyone has equal creative freedom, and this creativity we try to direct into a collective direction through our developement discussions. We hope that KS will end up looking and feeling like a game made by 15 clearly separate people, who share one unified idea about the game.

So how does all of this get done? We have five primary developement "tools", basically just methods of managing game data, information and communication: forums, IRC, MSN, SVN and Trac.

Unlike the rather... free-form public IRC channel, the developement IRC channel is strictly business-only. Sometimes some discussions that are not directly related to KS are held, for example often we discuss VN developement in a general sense, and a lot of meta discussion is held as well, but random banter and derailing is not tolerated. From this it follows that the channel is completely dead unless someone has some issue they want to bring up, in which case everyone who is around usually activates to throw in their two cents. The IRC is easily the most brutal, the most honest, the most direct and the most useful tool this project has. Right this moment, as I'm writing this, I'm also idly following and occasionally participating in a 50-minute long discussion about Hisao's penis in one of the Lilly path H CGs.

Important issues, especially ones where it's important to have a permanent recording, are handled on forum. Our spread across timezones and the necessity to make the posts more formal and concise than a freely flowing dialogue on IRC make having actual discussion on forum very clunky. One could say that forum is for longevity and IRC is for dynamic discussion. Many one-on-one conversations are held with instant messenging over MSN, often mixed with bantering about unrelated things, as many of us like just chatting with each other too. A key thing to understand here is that we all are unique. Some devs are way more passive than others, some talk only about certain things, and everyone has their own unique personality. Over time, devs have managed more or less to learn the best ways to communicate with others, but I can't say that we have it perfect by any means. Often there are conflicts of personality, misunderstandings and friction. There are some devs who barely ever talk to some other devs. In short, the network we form is not a perfect one, where everyone is connected to everyone else, rather everyone is connected to the devs they need to be, and to the devs they want to be connected to (Perhaps someone should do a 4LS relationship chart, hahaha). This also is a case of organic growth, evolution and adaptation. Everyone has managed to find their own niche in the dev team.

SVN is a version control system that allows all 15+ of 4LS devs to work on the same project simultaneously. Basically, it holds the master version of KS (as well as a memory of all previous versions, called revisions) and makes sure that all devs are kept up to date when new work is done. We average around 60-80 revisions per month, which means that new material or improvements/fixes on the KS project happen about two or three times every day. Naturally this is not an even distribution, sometimes nothing is changed for a week or so, and on the other hand for instance the week before Act 1 was released we were working at around 15-20 revisions per day.

Trac is a tool that is used by far the least, but it's invaluable near releases. It's a tool that keeps track of assignments, bugs, issues and problems, basically a huge TO DO-list. We feed it with everything that bothers us and needs fixing, and it tells us what everyone has to do before KS is done and can be released. It also has a wiki, but we barely use it, because of an interesting (and totally horrible, never ever do this on your own project) aspect of KS project: its documentation. A vast, vast majority of information of how the setting, characters, working methods, how ANYTHING works is not written down anywhere, in some neat documentation files. Instead all of that knowledge is shared between us devs, in a hivemind of sorts that has been growing for years now. As an example, there is not a single character with an official, written biography, but the devs to whom that information is relevant have it memorized, somewhere in their heads.

I looked at what I just wrote, and heaved a sigh. Once again, I think I ended up just talking about the superficial aspects, the mechanical way of how everything happens, and completely failed to really grasp the essence of this group. Maybe it's just proper. In reality, every day is different, every week something new comes up, every month something goes wrong in a catastrophic and spectacular way. But we go with the flow in our own way, holding ourselves together, working together, laughing together, mocking each other, getting angry at each other, because this is the only way we know.

-Aura

» Discuss this post on the forums

Blog comments disabled for the time being

2010-07-12T10:43:00.001-10:00

Since there has been a streak of Chinese spam on this blog that I have grown very tired of deleting, I'm turning comments on the blog off. From now on, please refer to the forum. I hope all blog posters will start a thread in the new appropriate subforum.

— delta

» Discuss this post on the forums

The (International) Katawa Conspiracy

2010-06-27T09:46:00.001-10:00

We seem to have gotten quite a few translations now, so it's probably time to talk about that for a moment (at least Aura has been prodding me to do so). Problem is, there isn't much to say - apart from the actual translation work being a lot of work, which is a given, the process itself is relatively painless. The KS engine extensions have been built from the start to make translations possible. The reason is that before I started working on KS, I was active in the VN translation scene and less than amused with how hard it can be to make Japanese engines work with non-Japanese text. So more or less out of spite (and because I don't just want Japanese-only thinking replaced with English-only thinking), I toyed with the idea of internationalizations from the beginning, and made it so that potential translators would at least have an easy time technology-wise. Of course, another reason for having an integrated multi-language engine is that we can keep closer to the translation effort and have at least some input on what happens, even though we obviously can't understand most of the actual translation. But at least translations don't depend on unauthorized patches, which we would have a hard time ignoring. It seems to have worked out alright, and I hope the French translation of Act 1 won't be the last. Of course, translation effort on the full game will be another thing entirely. But we'll tackle that problem when it's actually done.

By the way, besides Japan Expo in Paris, there is another con date that might be of interest: Our staffer pimmy and IRC/fanart regulars VCR and Doomfest have artist tables at Anime Expo from July 1st in Los Angeles. If you're there, say hello and maybe get one of VCR's limited edition pins. And get them signed by Nabeshin. Yeah, I really like the idea of KS-related things getting signed by completely unrelated Japanese nerd celebrities.

– delta

"Eh bien, eh bien" is the new "ara ara": A1v4 is out

2010-06-25T05:47:00.001-10:00

Katawa Shoujo Act 1 v4 has been released. The biggest change is the addition of a French localization, courtesy of Kawa Soft. Kawa Soft will be officially presenting this at their table at Japan Expo (Hall 5A, Z457) in Paris on July 1st. If you're in the vicinity you may want to pay them a visit, and also check out their French translation of the quite excellent True Remembrance, to be released at the same time. They will have hardcopies available, and if you want to make my day, get a KS CD signed by Hideo "2mnywrd" Kojima, who is at the con. Take photos if you do.

V4 has no other new game content so if you have played v3 and can't read French, it's not the most exciting thing. However, the patch 3.0.1 for Chinese is included as are several system/UI improvements. For a list see the Changelog.

If Paris seems a little far, download Act 1 v4 from one of these links:

DDL:

Torrent:

As always, this release supersedes the previous ones, so please help seed these new torrents if you can.

– delta

Katawa Shoujo Panel at Manifest

2010-06-10T03:14:00.004-10:00

Hey everyone. Crud and Suriko are going to be attending the Manifest anime convention, and will be doing a Katawa Shoujo panel there. We'd like to thank Cemex for inviting us to do the panel.

The convention will be held in Melbourne, Australia (at the Melbourne Showgrounds) on August the 20th to the 22nd, and the panel itself is on Sunday the 22nd of August.

Much more information about the convention can be found at their site, here: http://www.manifest.org.au

Loss and Loneliness

2010-06-07T05:22:00.002-10:00

An advice often given to a fledgling writer is "write what you know about". Well, I don't know disability. I am not disabled. Nobody I know is. Writing about disability is difficult. Even if I were to spend the rest of my life doing research on it, I can only approximately imagine what it might be like. So, it's easier to write about other things, and that's what I do. There are plenty of other things I write about when I write about Rin and Hisao, eventually even some things I actually do know. But still, I have to imagine loss, I have to imagine loneliness. I have to imagine disability.

Disability has certain characteristics. It's the lack of ability, the loss of limb, it categorizes of people whose bodies don't fill the qualifications of a complete human being. A harsh and unfair expression, sadly true yet not quite the truth. How big part of a human is defined by the body? It is an old problem.

Writing about how people experience this is a challenge. Even if they don't directly confront the issue, it slowly seeps out of the character. Entire time it's balancing on a rope. The characters certainly must be conscious about their disabilities, yet it seems too much if that's all they think about. The characters have extra trouble with various everyday things because of disabilities, but they should not prevent these activities completely. The characters are shaped by their disabilites, but not defined by them. Hisao lost something, but it's on a rather abstract level. You can't see his disability. He doesn't have much in the way of physical impediments as long as he remembers his limits. But he experiences great trouble adjusting to his new situation. He becomes depressed, anxious. His mood changes a lot as exhibited by some scenes that surprised a lot of readers in act 1. I also write one of the characters who have been disabled since birth. She never had arms or hands in the first place and doesn't seem to be particularly bothered about it. Her tranquility is an almost complete foil to Hisao. This is my problem: to what extent Rin experiences the loss of her limbs that never were there?

It's very hard to express the absence of something.

If I can't completely relate to my characters, could they possibly relate to each other? Technically that is a part of why the imaginary school our story takes place in exists. Is there loneliness in that place? I think there must be. And because our characters are teenagers, becuase they are human, there must also be weltschmerz, there must be the heaviness of existence. And this is something I can't avoid imagining: that these characters experience it in a more pure, stronger way than I do. I imagine the silence of dormitories of Yamaku at night. It's the absolute prime time to be melodramatically depressed by yourself. Moonlight illuminates a dorm room and its inhabitant, wrestling with dark thoughts and insomnia. In the next room, another watches the same moon, perhaps thinking about the same thoughts. In the room next to that, another. A hundred tiny rooms, a hundred tiny souls. All connected yet apart. It hits me that I might already have fallen off the rope with thoughts like these, and that maybe the true answer is that there was no rope at all. Maybe there are no disabilities. Maybe it's all a big metaphor of the hardships of life and the feeling of loneliness everyone experiences sooner or later.

"So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing thats's stolen from us - that's snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable loneliness."

- Aura

Miracle of the Universe II

2010-06-05T00:13:00.000-10:00

Emi path's second draft, like Lilly's, is now complete. As per Hivemind, the path's writer:

It took longer to do than I thought it would, but the end result is something that everyone ought to like, I hope. The path's not completely finished (revisions will doubtlessly occur), but it is nice to see a finished product of any sort. All downhill from here.

In other news, our Folding @ Home team has broken rank 250, being at rank 247 as of the writing of this post. Congratulations, guys.

As celebration for both, here is a sketch from Moekki of Emi folding:

Motivational Speech

2010-05-31T01:42:00.005-10:00

I read an interesting article in the newest issue of the Wired magazine. The article is available on their website as well (it might be slightly cut, or not. Didn't check). Go read it.

Ok, now that you're back, you can maybe figure why its relevant to us. These dudes are talking about stuff that pierces KS straight through its black and rotten heart. KS represents an insane amount of manhours, time that us devs have spent on making it. On a personal level, we can't expect to get much anything out of it, nor is there any negative consequence if we just one day would decide to call it quits. Í mean, at most I have become somewhat better at English, and collected some questionable e-fame. I might as well disappear into the depths of 'net, never to be seen again. So why on earth are we still here? What drives us on?

Obviously the answer is something like the two authors try to suggest in their dialogue. There is a third motivator, something that is neither carrot nor stick, nor anything in between. I don't really like reading visual novels. But I find making one fascinating. I find it satisfying. I find it absolutely exhilarating talking with 15 or so other people about our common vision, figuring out problems, trashing their work and getting mine trashed, beaming words straight from my brain to my fingertips and every word means something to someone out there. Even when we are down in the dumps and things are not going well, the electrifying feeling is somewhere under all that. The article is right, I wouldn't want to do this for money. I wouldn't want to do this as some sort of mandatory exercise either. I do it because it's interesting.

What motivates us for passive consumerism, of entertainment or otherwise? Nothing, really. That's what passive means, you don't need much to watch TV (culturally appropriate here would be to mention anime, manga and visual novels I guess?). Is there satisfaction? I guess some, but it might not be comparable. It sure feels good to beat a hard video game, or immerse into Buffyverse (not sure about the latter). But years from now, do you remember that time you beat your hiscore? Do you remember season four of that TV series you used to like? Media has a tendency of drowning under... more and more of the same. Active participation will always stay with you, be it administerating a website or editing your pet tvtropes article.

The Internet, as it is, is largely built on this third motivator. For every commercial site there are dozens that are free, from wiki to sourceforge to all the deep and invisible undercurrents where 5 people are quietly working on a full rebuild of a 15-year old classic videogame or a translating a love story about disabled kids into a language that less than 0.6% of the world's population speak. Of all our fans, the ones I love the most are the ones who have been inspired to create something of their own. Fanfiction, fanart, translation project (how crazy is that huh? I love the translators), trying your own hand at making a visual novel, cosplay, whatever. There is a connection there, something that does not emerge between a TV show producer and a couch potato with glazed eyes and a bag of chips (though arguably, I'm sure there are lots of steamy LOST fanfiction too). Everyone really should try to find their "thing", something that can hold their interest and open up a way to do something they enjoy more than watching reruns. At this point anyone who says "but I have no skills in anything" will get spankings, because that's too weakass for me to tolerate. Learn by doing. That's what we did. First attempt sucks? Throw it away, restart. That's what we did, too.

I remember when I started working on KS. There were no great visions. There was no fanbase. There was no concept of any kind of how a visual novel is made. In retrospect, there was no perceptible reason why I should pick that time, that project as something I'd spend a considerable chunk of my time on for the next howevermany years. I just thought it would be interesting. I traded a lot of time spent on consuming media to creating some, talking about it and getting yelled at by people whose names I don't know. Worth it? Yes. Because it's just too interesting to have missed any of this.

-Aura

There, I fixed it.

2010-05-15T15:18:00.001-10:00

In the released version of Act 1 v3, the Friday script for the Chinese translation is corrupted, which leads to English text being displayed instead. This can be fixed with a patch:

Windows
Mac OS X
Linux / people willing to change the files by hand on any platform

Once again, this only affects the Chinese translation; if you are not interested in that language or not a perfectionist, you don't need this. There will probably be a fixed complete release eventually.

In an attempt to mask our error with moe, here is some related art from moekki:

Katawa Shoujo Act 1 version 3 released!

2010-05-14T12:31:00.002-10:00

Four Leaf Studios is officially announcing the release of Katawa Shoujo Act1 version 3. This update adds two main items: a full translation to Japanese and new art sets for Emi and Yuuko, as well as a number of minor improvements and corrections.

You can download v3 as a standalone package from links below. Old savegames from v1 or v2 might not be functional after installing v3. As always, we are thankful for torrent seeding help, in lieu of earlier versions.

Linux torrent
Mac torrent
Windows torrent

Direct download from our mirror providers has been added to the download page.

Features:
-Japanese translation and manual
-New art set for Emi
-New art set for Yuuko
-New 4LS splash movie
-New act title card graphic
-several music tracks rerendered
-several script adjustments
-a choice clarification
-fixed a game flow bug

As with v2 release, this release is not recommended for those who have played an earlier version. You may want to check out the new art sets, but the changes to the English/Italian/Chinese scripts are very minor. Naturally, new players are recommended to choose v3 over older versions. We hope everyone will enjoy this release and looks forward to the full game, and extend our warm congratulations to the Japanese translation team for completing their project.

In a related note, the first anniversary of Katawa Shoujo Act1 release passed a while back. We would like to thank everyone who has become a part of this silly, funny, improbable project during this time. Everyone who has given feedback, participated in discussion on forum or IRC, written fanfiction or drawn art, fallen hopelessly in love with one of the girls, given a word of encouragement, laughed and cried when reading our words, dazed by our pictures and music, everyone who has jumped down the rabbit hole into our world: Thank you so much. We are very fortunate to have so many people support us in this project.

FANatics

2010-04-22T06:33:00.002-10:00

Even though it's a cliche by now, I'm perpetually astonished by not only the popularity of our release, but even more by some of the side effects. Specifically, fandom. Fans are awesome and scary and weird. Fans like to talk a lot, and think about stuff a lot. Where there are fans, there is speculation and truly, people are reading really deep into the story and the characters, even though there is only Act 1 to draw info from. On the other hand, the characters tend to get reduced to one-dimensional archetypes. Rin is random, Emi is childish, Hanako is reclusive, Lilly is refined and so on. Initially it made me feel depressed, that maybe we sucked terribly to make so simple characters, but then I realized that a lot of the depth comes from knowing all the stories and motivations and things that just are not present in Act 1. So, I thought a little about how I view the characters, and how the fans do (on average... but I don't want to generalize the fanbase any more than I want them to generalize the characters).

Emi and Rin:

Emi is not Rin's servant, nor does she need one. You'd be surprised what (real) people who've never had arms can do with their feet and toes. Rin can do the following things perfectly without any aid: dress up, take her clothes off, personal hygieny stuff, school work, eat (she prefers a fork or a spoon over chopsticks) and so on. I've actually had try hard to think what really is impossible or too impractical for her. Emi does stuff for Rin yes, but it's not because Rin needs it, it's because Emi likes doing things like that. Motherly instinct? Usually Emi is deemed childish rather than motherly but if you think about it for a moment, she is a very diligent and responsible person for her age.

Rin suffers pretty heavily from the reduction to her most obvious character trait, the rather spacy way she interacts with most other people. I think it's fun too, but I didn't really want her to be a comic relief character. She used to be even more random before though. I shall work hard to make her a bit more multidimensional.

Shizune, Misha and Hisao:

Misha is not Shizune's sole connection to people who don't know sign. Even though literacy is not a given for deafmute people just like some people can only speak their native language, Shizune can read and write. So, even if Hisao doesn't learn sign, it's somewhat silly to think that Misha would be required to be present in intimate situations (or at all).

Reader reaction to Shizune's behaviour and actions were something I was expecting with great anxiety before the release. It was me who decided to make her a very central character in Act 1 (something A22 didn't fancy that much) and also the closest that the act has to an antagonist (something he liked even less, but he wrote the scenes diligently anyway). The risk there was that people would be turned off by her strongwilled character, as it's portrayed rather controversially in several places. Luckily this didn't happen, and Shizune seems to be one of the more popular characters and many fans really seem to "get" her.

Hanako:

Is Hanako's disability really one? Does she "belong" to Yamaku? While the burns of her severity do have lasting consequences, it's always good to remember that Yamaku is not a hospital. Even non-disabled kids can attend, and Hanako probably is better off in an environment where she's less likely to strike out in a crowd. Hanako, along with Shizune, is a character where I feel we "got it right", and the reader response has been exactly what we anticipated and hoped for.

Ara ara ufufu:

Hahaha oh boy, Lilly. In her very first incarnation, she actually acted precisely as her character stereotype: a refined, cultured ojousama who is almost superhuman in her angelic glory. After a horrific realization that she was the most cliched Mary Sue character ever, Suriko has kept trying hard to drag Lilly away from that image.

Misha's Disability:

Yeah I bet you thought I was going to spill the beans. Sorry but no. I just wanted to give extra credit to the completely absurd speculation about her disability. People come up with these incredibly complex theories, based on some offhand remarks one of the writers has made in the script, or her general behaviour. It's amazing. Maybe everyone is just missing the real hints...

Speaking of offhand remarks, some of them have become really popular in ways we never expected. Hanako's jumping game is one, it really resonated in a huge amount of people, but to tell you the truth we just kinda threw it in there. I wonder why it is so popular? Another throwaway thing is the painting in one of the hallway backgrounds, which became somewhat of a meme. Also the cameos in the classroom CG, oh my god we did not expect everyone to latch onto that as if they've never seen a cameo before. Maybe a polite snicker in passing as you recognize a character or something, but not this. Not this.

Four Leaf Studios:

We are not heartless assholes, but in fact care a great deal about the fans of KS. I mean, how could we not? It's great to have so many people experience and talk and wonder about something we did. However, we'd still be making this game even if it was just the 20 of us who cared, and that's also the way we think about KS when we keep working on it.

-Aura

Progress

2010-04-19T14:14:00.000-10:00

Lilly path second draft is now complete. All scenes are now completely written for her. I had planned to write more here about it but damned if I can do it.

Now to go drink myself into a stupor. By which I mean go to work.

- Suriko

Raspberry Flavoured Popsicles

2010-04-16T12:54:00.000-10:00

"If one of the editors makes a fact check and comes telling me they don't sell raspberry flavoured popsicles in Japan, I swear I am going to come to your houses at night and stab you."

Hello all, Silentcook here. It's again time for me to bore everybody to death, except maybe for the two persons or so which actually read my previous blogpost, by actually talking a bit about the tribulations of editing this time around.

So, those raspberry flavoured popsicles. That's an actual quote, if a dead one, from one of our writers. It serves as a decent example of the extremes you may have to reach when you're editing other people's stuff, and research rears its ugly head.

I have the (dubious) honor of being the medical advisor for KS; it was the main reason why I was allowed into the project in the first place. I imagine when you're writing about a schoolful of kids where most everyone is afflicted by some gruesome condition or other, you can get a little nervous about contemporary medicine, its advances and capabilities, and the possibility of screwing up something somewhere in the plot.

So it does make perfect sense to find a professional and ask questions about stuff you want to write; you'll get steered away from glaring mistakes at least, and a little feedback will provide verisimilitude to your work.

Now guess: what happens when you get the exalted position of head editor in a VN?

Right the first time. You get to go over everybody's writing with a fine sieve, getting paranoid about every single little detail.

Aside from doing common spelling and grammar corrections, rearrangement of sentences so that narration sounds better, occasional liaison duty between writers artists and directors, ghost writing for interstitial script, continuity checks, and other various odd jobs, you get to try being an everythingologist. Thank God for Internet search engines.

Unfortunately, not everything is documented, or at least not in a way that can be accessed easily. And some things you just don't think about, until someone wanders by and lets you know some tidbit of information.

Did you know, for example, that Americans smile for passport photos, while Europeans don't? Or that in some cities in Japan, you have to show proof that you have a free parking space before you can own a car? Would you think to look for this kind of information, without knowing it exists?

Yeah paranoia, feel free to get comfortable: we'll keep company for a while.

Oh, about those popsicles? I asked a friend who was travelling to Japan to buy one, AND BRING BACK THE WRAPPER. Our writer didn't follow through with his threat (yet), so I guess I'm in the clear for now.

Next time I'll prattle on about translation, I think. Now, those Act 3 scripts...

- Silentcook

Katawa Shoujo Anime Officially Announced

2010-03-31T21:03:00.000-10:00

As per the title, we've been discussing this matter with a certain animation studio for some time, and now with their green light can finally give some details as to what's been going on behind the scenes.

Although they do say a picture says a thousand words, so I'll just post one of the letters we've recieved first:

As you can see, we were contacted by Studio DEEN with an expression of interest in licensing Katawa Shoujo for distribution as an animation , which all in the project agreed to in fairly short measure. In the months of negotiation that followed, we worked out a licensing scheme that suited both our interests and production of the first character sheets and scriptment material began.

We were all suitably impressed with Studio DEEN's artistic quality and style, and with a minimum of fuss production began on a short pilot preview to be used as advertising material. While we do not currently have permission to distribute this, here are some still frames we've gained permission to show.

We hope you'll all be as excited as we are to see a Katawa Shoujo anime produced, and while we work both on the game and with Studio DEEN to assure the very best quality anime that can be made, we'll continue to provide our usual updates and announcements.

Thank you.

- Suriko

Yuuko II: The Librarian Strikes Back

2010-03-20T13:45:00.002-10:00

I could repeat what was said in the Emi upgrade blog post here, but that would be redundant, so I'll just keep it short. Produced by Kamifish, these new sprites wholly replace the Yuuko art from Act 1 and have a few tweaks to her character design in addition to higher quality art in order for her to better suit the other sprites in the game stylistically. Some on IRC may have seen this thanks to a~~n accidental leak~~ sneak preview given at the time.

We hope you enjoy her new look.

Aside from the new Yuuko sprites, progress on the game has been progressing smoothly. Lilly and Hanako's Act 2s are complete in terms of writing, art, and now direction, and so are now complete. Emi's Act 2 is very nearly in the same boat. In addition to this, new scenes and art are being produced as always.

- Suriko

Edit: This is the last Act 1 character that will be recieving sprite changes.

500,000 Blog Hits

2010-03-01T18:09:00.005-10:00

Just a little while ago, the KS development blog reached the 500,000 hit mark. We'd like to thank all our fans for their patience with us, and we all hope that you'll enjoy the full game. In the meantime, we'll continue trucking on and giving you any notable updates as they come.

In celebration of this occasion is an image drawn by me of my dear Lilly, providing ample proof of why I am her writer and not her artist. You can thank the rest of the development team who was on IRC at the time for this.

- Suriko

Happy Birthday, Lilly!

2010-02-07T02:04:00.001-10:00

As February 7th is Lilly's birthday, here is a celebratory picture of Akira and Lilly, drawn by Weee.

There is also another announcement to make:

Pimmy, a talented fanartist many of you may have seen on the forums and on the Shimmie (and, for the attentive, the staff page of our website), has now joined the ranks of the developers as an artist. Congratulations, Pimmy.

Development of the game itself is still progressing, with scenes and CGs still being steadily produced and the paths directed. Once again, a big thank you goes out to all who are patiently waiting for the game's release.

- Suriko

Are you ronesome tonight~♪

2010-01-24T09:41:00.000-10:00

Not much to say about the KS development as usual (I am currently working on directing Lilly's Act 2, and if you think that this is any kind of progress indicator, you're wrong). But, there are a couple of other things worth mentioning that might be of interest to people not intimately familiar with what's going on.

Personas

Firefox 3.6 is out now (and if you're using Firefox, you should have gotten the update prompt by now), and with that, Personas have become standard. These are essentially wallpapers for your browser window chrome. Since they're easy to make, you can now now have your KS character of choice staring at you all the time. Cool, right? In fact it's not cool at all, but anyway, here they are:

Misha
Emi
Hanako
Lilly
~~Rin~~
Shizune
SD Girls

Rin is missing because her Persona contained the mural, hence boobies, hence it was not approved. (if you are curious or want to stick it to The Man by making your own, it looked like this). IT'S ART YOU PHILISTINES! I made a new one but it's stuck in the approval pipeline. Once it's through you'll find it along with the rest at my account page. There are also a couple of tweaks to the existing ones based on feedback submitted, but they'll hopefully have the same ID.

Dakimakura

In case you haven't been paying attention, there's been a trend in the KS fanartist scene to draw hug pillows. So far, pretty much every major character but Hanako has been (un)covered, a fact that amuses me to no end. Even though these are technically not unsafe for work, you'll probably not want to be caught looking at scantily clad disabled girls (or men) at work in any case, so proceed with caution. The exception to this is of course Lilly, which is not safe for work in any definition of the term.

by pimmy:
Misha
Emi
Rin
Shizune

by climatic:
Lilly (double NSFW)

by konflikti (DO NOT VIEW WHILE DRIVING OR OPERATING HEAVY MACHINERY):
Nomiya
Nurse

by VCR:
Hideaki

Twitter

We have a Twitter now, for things that are too unimportant, irrelevant or vapid to warrant a blog post. In case you don't like unimportant, irrelevant or vapid things... well, then you are probably not using Twitter anyway. If nothing else, it's a decent way to keep up with Mishimmie uploads. Also, in keeping with the theme of this post, it will be like you really have friends.
FOLLOW US ON TWITTER!

–delta

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T19:21:00.000-10:00

1990 was 20 years ago.

Am I Going to Be Popular Now?

2009-12-26T11:06:00.000-10:00

Hello and hope you all had a great Christmas. Here at 4LS, we love to redo old work and throw dozens of manhours worth of production material away, if it's for the sake of art and ultimately, a better game. A lot of that stuff doesn't really strike the eye because you never see the old versions that have been discarded. However, one change is definitely going to make some waves, so I thought I'd announce the fruits of a couple of weeks of hard toiling by moekki and delta:

We upgraded your loli.

The new Emi has a bit more mature air than her earlier design, perhaps more appropriate of a teenaged girl rather than a REALLY 18 YEAR OLD pseudo-loli. She grew almost 3 inches, but is still the shortest of the characters (so we can make bad jokes about it) and still of the same general build and shape. The reasons for redesigning a main character had mostly to do with stylistic consistency, we felt keeping the old design drove her too far away from rest of the art that features her (as you can see from the 100% completion CG in Act 1). Anyway, apart from maybe promo pictures and such you won't see more of her until full releases, any further Act 1 versions, released mostly for various translation projects, will retain the old sprites.

-Aura

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T01:14:00.001-10:00

Reimu wears red and white, that makes this a Christmas image.

Act 1 V2 Release

2009-12-13T03:09:00.005-10:00

Four Leaf Studios would like to announce the official release of Act 1 V2.

Torrents:
Windows Act 1 V2
Linux Act 1 V2
Mac Act 1 V2
Help in seeding these would be greatly appreciated, in lieu of the previous Act 1 torrent.

Direct Download:
~~Links will come later if/when we find volunteers.~~
UPDATE: Thanks to Eksopl and magz, DDLs are now available from the download page.

This updated version of the previous Act 1 game preview includes:

Additions:
* Traditional Chinese localization
* Simplified Chinese localization
* Italian manual
* New Windows installer, KS now by default starts up in the language the installer was run in

Fixes:
* No longer raises DEP errors under Vista
* Should now at least start on low-resolution displays
* Various typo and grammar fixes
* Flow fixes, all scenes should now unlock properly

This release is not recommended for those who already played the initial Act 1 release - the changes to the English part are minimal. However, for archival or new players, this effectively replaces the old release.

We hope that everyone, especially Chinese speakers, enjoy this updated release and will be looking forward to the full game.

Status and Backgrounds

2009-12-05T19:51:00.005-10:00

Hello, everyone. Blog post time.

As far as general status goes, there isn't a lot to report; paths are still being written, scenes are being directed, art is being drawn, and music is being composed. And vitriol is still being flung, but nobody really cares about that.

So I guess to give this blog post some point other than "we're still alive, and still working", I'll prattle on about backgrounds.

Artist's rendition of Delta working on a game background. Image by Moekki.

Here is an example of one of our backgrounds, for context:

This is the result of a somewhat longwinded process that came about due to many experiments in different styles, varied and vitriolic arguments, and tears. But in the end, it all finally coalesced into the result above which we were all happy with.

It all started with... it not starting. As people began to write and the first of our artists began to produce sprites, one large omission was made. Expecting that, in the fullness of time, they would be done.

That said, a few months saw some movement. To be precise, a very basic tech demo.

The less is said about this, the better.

After a while, with the game proper in development, the first batch of actual game backgrounds were produced. Created largely as placeholders, they were inserted into the early prototype of what would become Act 1.

Pretty simple - an oil effect and colour wash on a monochrome image. These backgrounds were grabbed from around the internet and therefore generally lacked any consistency, and were also taken from a variety of heights and angles. These held us over while we waited for a background artist.

Which, as you can see from our current backgrounds, never materialised.

Well, they did, but not for a long time. Backgrounds were for months entirely passed off as a future consideration as writing progressed on every path, which seemed to be fine. Until we took stock of what would be needed after we were done writing. What had happened is a complete explosion in the sheer amount of art assets required, especially in terms of backgrounds. A certain amount of rewriting has helped, but the fact remained that we suddenly found ourselves requiring a ton of backgrounds we simply didn't have.

It was then that we made the hard call to give up on the prospect of drawn backgrounds, and have a hard look at how we could accomplish our needs via modified photos. This lead to a couple of blog posts you may remember.

This decision wasn't made lightly. Everybody on the developer team wanted drawn backgrounds. The problems though were many; we needed over one hundred backgrounds, which were going to be an absolute hell to get even with photography, it would have meant growing the developer team even more when communication was already an issue, going back and changing things is simply not really possible for drawn backgrounds, we wanted an artist (or artists) that could make relatively good looking backgrounds, rather than accepting drawings of any quality just so we could say "we have drawn backgrounds!", and there was the simple fact that we didn't have any offers until far too late.

Even then, after deciding on photographic backgrounds, we were in despair about the sheer number of backgrounds needed, some of which would be quite hard to get. That is, until the heavens parted and a dedicated photographer joined our development team: Yujovi.

While a number of public domain photos from the internet and photos from developer's trips to Japan helped supplement our needs, Yujovi took a large majority of the photos we used for backgrounds. For the first time in a long time, the background situation seemed solvable.

But one question remained: How to modify the photos to suit Katawa Shoujo's art style the best?

This lead to a few weeks of experimentation, arguments, and general fuss. In the end, the decision came down to two candidates:

Crosshatch Hell:

We decided that these were too dark, the enhanced object outlines didn't really bring out the sprites very well, and that the crosshatch effect just didn't look very good in general. Vibrating trees: not so good.

12-Step-Recipe:

Proposed by Moekki, this was the general process we decided on using (albeit with some tweaks). It gave the backgrounds a flatter, more simplified look whilst keeping the eye directed towards the sprites. Note that wasn't a game background, just a general example image.

Several other ideas were proposed, and thrown out in quick measure; A simple cutout filter messed up the background outlines too badly, and made expanses of colour (such as skies) look awful, while paint daubs and other such single-step filters looked 'cheap'.

But filtering is not the end of it, as there were a number of other obstacles to overcome.

The next step in the saga of backgrounds was the fact that, despite having a bunch of photos and a modification process, backgrounds still needed to be selected. For this, some standards were put forth.
* All images must be at least 1000x600, to allow horizontal panning and background manipulation.
* All images had to be taken at a close to horizontal angle, from normal eye height. This is pretty much common sense, as the backgrounds and sprites, at least within KS, simulate seeing the world through the protagonist's eyes.
* All images had to be reasonably clean, without too much blurring or distortion. Some of this can be covered over during the BG-ification process, but too much and the background will simply look bad.

And so, selection began. After a few weeks, most of the required backgrounds that had popped up during writing were selected from the available pool, and a naming scheme was devised - location_place_time.jpg (for example, school_dormhisao_ni.jpg).

With that sorted, the modification of each photo began to take place. With Delta and Moekki's skillful work, the images were not only filtered, but also prepared beforehand to look the best they could (via adjusting saturation, brightness, removing people, fixing image tilts, changing and removing signs, fixing of vertical lines, etc), and had variants made for different times of day. This often took much more time than making the photos into backgrounds, as many photos required quite heavy photo manipulation.

The conveyor belt of background requesting -> photo taking -> selection -> image preparation -> background-ification -> game insertion cranked to life, and soon we were in business.

And that's the story of how Katawa Shoujo's backgrounds are made, and the history of how they came to be this way. Thanks for listening, chiiiiiildren.

Oh, and Dragon Age: Origins is a great game.

- Suriko

# need another event cg here —δ

2009-11-10T15:47:00.003-10:00

One of the big realizations during the work on this game was that while consuming a lot of a particular media does help, it does not actually give you the experience in creating it. While this seems painfully obvious, it's also disheartening, and even if you try not to think about it it will hit you eventually. And it's not like you can go around and ask professionals or read an authoritative book on the topic of VN creation. So all of us are just trying things and hoping that they will work out for the best. I'm not even talking about the big things — it's obvious that a good story needs to adhere to a few well-known ground rules like pacing, and what kind of art is pleasant to look at, because those are pretty intuitive. The devil is in the details.

So today I'm writing a bit about event CG. But you can't start talking about event CG without considering what the alternative to event CG is, and that is almost always sprites in front of backgrounds. These are the foundation of virtually all VNs, because they "only" require initial effort, and then can be used for the rest of the game. Sprites and backgrounds will, in a long, not ridiculously-budgeted game, always be your basic bread and butter.

Of course, when everything is the same sprites and backgrounds over and over again, it's hardly exciting. That's where event CG comes into play. Basically, an event CG is something that is specifically created for an event in the game, something that is not universally usable or modular. But as we found out, determining when to use and when not to use an event CG is not as easy as it sounds.

We had two lines of thinking in the dev team: One saying that event CG should be less specific and more universally usable, and one saying that it should be very specific to get maximum impact from them when they happen. Much discussion was spent on this, and we ended up trying both. As always, it became apparent that both had their downsides as well - the real "bulky" scenes in the game are dialog scenes, and spending event CG on those seems less than ideal, because you could have done them with sprites. However, the other way, making an event CG for every "non-generic" happening, is just not possible — Ideally, you would do the entire game with nothing but event CG, and it would always fit without ever getting boring (and some games indeed do just that). But event CGs are "expensive", if not in money, at least in effort. So you will never have as many as you would like.

Basically, there are two types of scenes that are even considered for event CGs: Important ones that deserve the additional visual impact, and ones that just cannot be visualized otherwise. If those were always the same, it would be easier. However, the smaller the amount of CG you want to spend, the more they drift apart, to the point where you have to cut corners for the sake of feasibility. So some kind of abstraction, instances where something in the text is just impossible to visualize, will definitely happen. And sadly, eventually you have the choice between doing something that "deserves" an event CG but could be done without it and something that will have problems with the visual representation but isn't really important enough - and in this case, the latter will probably be the one that gets chosen.

Now, what did we end up with? We did not even have the (not that deep, to be honest) realizations above early on, so what we decided on was to let the writers decide where they want event CG. Which sometimes worked, sometimes didn't. But what can you do? Basically you only really realize you need an event CG when you try directing a scene with sprites and it just doesn't work. Then again, directing only happens when the scene is written, and the artists should already be working on the event CG. And sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and even drop text, as good as it may have been, just because it's not feasible in a visual novel. Of course, an experienced VN director could see those things coming (and an experienced writer would not write scenes that lead to the dilemma above), but I think all of us are more than ready to admit that we're just barely entering a level of experience that makes this possible. This is, in fact, a big part of the reason why the development process seems unrealistically slow sometimes.

But it's the way it is. We're still learning and trying new things every day. Not thinking in absolutes and theories, but in the compromises and realities of actually creating something. It's not always easy or fun, but it's what makes this project so interesting in the first place.

Today's blog art by our man to go to for emergency event CGs, climatic.

— delta

開発ブログ日本語版　開設のお知らせ

2009-10-21T16:37:00.001-10:00

開発ブログ記事の日本語訳を掲載するため、別途ブログを立ち上げました。

http://katawashoujo-ja.blogspot.com/

日本からご覧の方は、こちらも参照いただければ幸いです。
（今後は翻訳記事は日本語版ブログにのみ掲載します。）

よろしくお願いします。

----
En translation
title: We now have Dev blog in Japanese

We created a new blog dedicated to Japanese translation of the Dev blog posts.

Japanese viewers can refer to this blog as well.
(Future translated articles will only be posted in JA blog.)

Cheers.

Up your Date.

2009-10-17T03:41:00.002-10:00

ince you're all still checking here daily, and since we haven't bothered posting anything here in the recent past, I thought I'd do what all of you are dying to hear and do a LOL status update.

Two of the five paths have their second drafts written, and have had low-level critique from the editors and other writers. There will be minor additions to them from the writers and then they will start the long churn of the editing process.

A third path is well on its way to completion of the second draft, and a forth is starting to pick up the pace.

On the art side of things there are now a number of new CGs that have been made, however as we head into the exam season for a number of the artists we are expecting a slow down until December. This should then, hopefully, result in a rebound once the shackles of education are released from their heels.

I wish that I could add more, but in reality, that is about all the progress we have made. Sure, to us it's a lot more dramatic. I can say "two parts are finished" here, but that equates to about 200,000 words worth of keyboard bashing on our side of the fence.

Since this has been woefully short, I'll mention something that I noticed the other night.

Due to various, unforseen consequences, I have been away from the project proper for about 3 weeks. When I came back there were a number of scenes for review, and a couple of comments on a couple of my scenes.

One of the biggest complaints that we've had internally (especially with the first drafts) was that Hisao was a bit of a non-entity. There were debates about just how much attention we should pay to him taking pills, their side effects (you would not believe how many "nightmare" scenes we threw out) and so on.

There were also attempts at making Hisao more of a reflection of the player. At one stage the first decision in Act 1 was "You are about to enter the door to Yamaku Academy. How do you feel?" This failed on a level never seen before, and that is why you now introduce yourself or have Mutou introduce you.

But with this new wave of scenes, it's like everything has changed. One of the comments on my scene was that it was "Hisao-centric – you're writing the Hanako path, not the Hisao path". In the other scenes that I was reviewing I felt a similar effect; Hisao was no longer a penis attached to the psyche of the player; he was a character. And, not only that, he was a different character in each path that shared commonalities at his base level.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that we have, at least partially, forged a character out of Hisao.

Either that or the lack of sleep and KS was playing tricks on my mind. I suppose both are plausible. Toda'y Blog Art comes from Doomfest (albeit a little late).

- Crud

命名秘話 (Behind the Name - Japanese)

2009-10-05T01:28:00.004-10:00

This is a translation of the "Behind the Name" blog post for our Japanese readers.

=> http://katawashoujo-ja.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-post_5657.html

Behind the Name

2009-09-12T12:31:00.008-10:00

It's always fun to talk about names with Katawa Shoujo. Why, even the name of the game itself is the source of quite a lot of controversy. What about the rest of the names? In accordance with the spirit of chronicling the history of our project, I'll shed some light to the origins of some of the names in KS. Most of these names were given before 4LS existed, when the project was still taking its first steps because character names are one of the most important things in a visual novel, and because people were tired of calling everyone {insert disability}-tan. In fact, the names were one of the first issues that was decided upon.

The character names of the main cast were decided by the best method known to man: a poll. As a result of clueless weeaboos with no fact check throwing in their suggestions, we were stuck with some stuff that has since caused quite a bit of headache. As an aside, crud also fucked up a great amount of the names given afterwards (and nobody else thought of fact checking after him either). Names like Iwanako and Yamaku are from his beautiful imagination. Anyway, names that don't really exist were not a big deal as long as they could be written with kanji, but impossible names or terrible names were a much bigger problem. In some cases, we have retconned stuff, in some we've succumbed to the fact that the characters were known by the names they were originally given.

Hisao Nakai

There was a grand battle over our protagonist's name. Many people wanted to leave him anonymous as a homage to, well, the Anonymous who were the driving force of the project while others wanted to give him a fixed name and personality. The end result is a schizophrenic combination of the two extremes, a fixed character with a fairly substandard personality. We later found out that a famous psychologist has the same name as Hisao.

Rin Tezuka

In the name poll, Rin was contending against suggestions such as Moe and Samori, but prevailed in the end. Her last name is a homage to the grand master Ozamu Tezuka, and it contains the kanji sign for "hand" as well, as a reference to both her disability and artistic ability. Because Rin is such an uncommon person, her name is written in a somewhat uncommon way as well. The sign for her name means "jewel" instead of the usual "cold" and when said aloud, it does sound a little like the tinkle of jewelry.

Lilly Satou

Lilly was given a foreigner background (all blondes are foreigners; black, blue, green and red are the only natural hair colours in Japan) so her first name is foreign. Lily, or yuri is the symbol of lesbian romance in manga/anime subculture and a lot of people wanted to make her nomen an omen. Lilly's last name is very commonplace, much like Smith or something in English.

Shizune Hakamichi

Shizune's first name is written with the symbols for "silent" and "sound". Nuff said. However, she was originally name Rosa, as in the flower rose and a silly pun for the japanese word for deafness, rousha. We decided that one girl with a flower's name and a foreign name is enough, so Shizune became Shizune. Her last name is annoying, because it's not a "real" last name, but it also is naturally written in a somewhat morbid way so we had to come up with an unnatural writing that wouldn't sound as stupid.

Iwanako

This is a very unusual name, it's written with the signs for "char", a fish relative to salmon and "child". Interpret that as you will.

Nurse

The school nurse was originally referred to as Nurse-kun, a reference to a series of threads on 4chan that were about the experiences of a real, nameless nurse who was in charge of a then 7-year old multiamputee car crash victim. The story that those threads wove was considered very human and touching (apart from that special 4chan flavour any thread there has; the initial post starting the story ponders whether he should rape his patient or not). To this day, Nurse's and Emi's relationship still reflects the relationship of the channer nurse and his patient in some ways.

The origin of the name for Yamaku High School is alluded to in this forum thread. Tea house Shanghai (which is actually more like a cafe) almost became another Higurashi reference, but a timely intervention made it a Touhou reference instead. So much better, yes? The city our game is set in will remain nameless, but it's loosely based on a real, existing city in northern Japan. Crud even has taken a photo from the approximate place where the main building would exist.

The rest of the names have mundane and/or uncontroversial origins, or I just couldn't come up with anything funny to say. Ask if something interests you and I might explain it.

-Aura

A Thousand Paper Cranes

2009-09-08T22:48:00.008-10:00

The Katawa Shoujo Folding@Home team is now in the top 1000 of all teams. This is quite remarkable, since it only began little over two months ago. It's also comfortably inside the top 200 by daily progress, with a rising tendency. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Here is a picture for the occasion, drawn by pimmy:

— delta

日本語訳の進捗について

2009-08-27T00:26:00.007-10:00

=> http://katawashoujo-ja.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-post_4758.html

Update on Japanese Translation

This is a progress update from KS Japanese translation team.

We have 4 stages in the translation process.

1. Initial translation
2. Translation check (to correct translation errors)
3. Editing (to make the translated text look more natural)
4. Proofreading (to correct spelling and other errors)

The translated scripts will be submitted to the development team after proofreading is done.

We have recently completed the initial translation of entire Act1 script after 4 months of its release. We think this is our first major milestone.

In the meanwhile, we are performing translation checks on already translated scripts. 20% completed, 60% in progress, and the remaining 20% are still to be examined.

We are still not able to give a concrete schedule, but we will keep you posted on this blog.

-hir

A View from the Gallery (Season 5, Episode 4)

2009-08-17T00:02:00.017-10:00

Because the whole dev team is currently living the big life in the glamorous OELVN jet set and all the cocaine snorted off the breasts of high-class hookers has severely addled our brains, we find ourselves unable to come up with good blog posts at the moment. This is why I decided to give the word to one of our more persistent IRC lurkers, name redacted:

Oh no you don't, this blog post sucked. Enjoy your Shizune, who does not suck, courtesy of Weee.

— Name redacted (Mood: quixotic, now playing: Peter Gabriel - Big Time)

I Am Cooler Than Climatic

2009-08-09T10:58:00.008-10:00

This blog has been getting too preachy lately, so today, I'm going to talk about how I am cooler than Climatic. We were having a debate about this the other day, when I said that he was not cool. He countered with the claim that I am far less cool than him.

buckingham> I have drawn since then anyway
buckingham> it's not my fault
NicolArmarfi> upload some
buckingham> if you don't remember
buckingham> no
NicolArmarfi> why not?
buckingham> I am too lazy to upload something
buckingham> just to satisfy your weird compulsion
NicolArmarfi> oh i see, so you didn't draw
buckingham> you are free to believe it
NicolArmarfi> what happened to you, man
NicolArmarfi> you used to be cool
buckingham> you are the one
buckingham> who became uncool
NicolArmarfi> explain
buckingham> why don't you ask a psychiatrist
buckingham> why you are uncool
buckingham> the problem is probably in your head
NicolArmarfi> they would just say i am as cool as i believe i am
buckingham> how cool is that
NicolArmarfi> somewhat cool
NicolArmarfi> but not really
NicolArmarfi> cooler than you though
buckingham> terrible
buckingham> what
buckingham> no way
buckingham> you play videogames
NicolArmarfi> yeah i'll ask weee
NicolArmarfi> which one of us is cooler
NicolArmarfi> just admit i am cooler
buckingham> no
buckingham> you are not
buckingham> maybe you should make a poll
NicolArmarfi> g4 video game awards were today
NicolArmarfi> best strategy game = halo wars
buckingham> don't care
buckingham> see
buckingham> this is why you are uncool
buckingham> you care about shit like this
NicolArmarfi> i am not saying i care
NicolArmarfi> it's just weird
buckingham> so did you ask weee
buckingham> who is cooler
buckingham> so did weee tell you who is cooler
buckingham> sup dawg?
NicolArmarfi> i asked her again on MSN
NicolArmarfi> and she dodged the subject and went away
buckingham> [04:03] a22 is cooler
NicolArmarfi> yessssssssssssssssss
NicolArmarfi> how does it feel nigga?
NicolArmarfi> suck it down
buckingham> I don't mind
buckingham> it is cooler not to worry about this stuff
NicolArmarfi> bullshit
NicolArmarfi> you cared

Some might say that this is not conclusive enough to decide who is cooler, so I have taken the liberty of compiling a list of other reasons why I am cooler than Climatic:

1) He eats quiche. Not even just Lorraine quiche either, but artisan quiche with goat cheese and fruit marmalades. wtf?

2) He wears a brown sweater. Seriously, a brown sweater? It's unacceptable to wear a brown sweater unless you're in elementary school.

3) Climatic does not know where da hood is at.

4) I am a baseball fan, and there is nothing cooler or more American than a game where 18 men run in a diamond on artificial grass. All Climatic has is the lowly cricket, a game that was only cool in the smash Bollywood hit "Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India." In contrast there are many more great baseball films... like Major League.

5) He does not like hypotheticals. Hypothetical questions are the high point of human cultural advancement. This shows that he is a plebe.

- A22

Concerning Self Satisfaction

2009-08-08T03:08:00.004-10:00

Having ventured through various depths of the sick, depraved amateur video game making crowd on the internet, I've come to realize something. Now, one might assume that it is a good event when he puts out the final product of a days or weeks, or months labor. This is total bullshit.

Having written soundtracks for several visual novels (very, very few of which I enjoyed), it astonishes me that I ever allowed myself to release those tunes which have been haunting me for months, and even years. Only on looking back to I realize the great flaws of my work; the cause of this is spending an amount of time writing something out from start to finish, believing that the end was the end, when in reality it was just the beginning of a long phase of kicking myself in the ass.

When writing any sort of story, music or drawing any picture, it is important to realize that it is not only your initial perception of your art that matters, but the opinions of others, as well. Before releasing anything, one must pass it off to several others and edit it according to their respective opinions, combining them with your own outlook on it. After that is put together, you must edit it even more, tempering it into the most solid, unbreakable alloy within your abilities.

This process can take a while. Depending on the volume of work your putting out, it could take months, years, or so long that you no longer give a shit and pass it off to someone else. But in the end, it must be done, and this is where I, and many of my contemporaries, failed.

This is not the case with Katawa Shoujo. This game appears to be taking an incredibly long time, putting out very little active content and etc., but in reality it is being taken at that careful, calculated pace that few others have the balls to work at. I left the project in the beginning of this year, and things that appeared to have been done then are still, months later, being fervently edited and discussed. Not to mention, the testing stage for the demo alone: the first act itself was subject to several edits, and entire rewrites, before going through another few months of extensive editing, by a team specifically assigned to this task. I find this quite admirable; it gives me the utmost confidence that KS will be a universally enjoyable game of the ballinest degree, and it should for you, too.

Unless you're a dick. Now, I'm going to go finish watching The Debt Collector.

-Nicol Armarfi

Contexts

2009-07-26T22:36:00.009-10:00

When you submerge into the viscous, milky translucent ocean of cripple porn for a year or two, the question of social acceptability tends to fade away. "Cripple porn" (I really like that phrase) raises eyebrows even amongst people accustomed to the trends and oddities of modern Japanese or Japan-derived media, but in a context where showing 13 year old school girl's panties is actually not a standard practice, the concept of KS (when put in crudest possible terms, like I did) seems like an equivalent to shock image sites or something. That's why it's cool when people who are almost completely outside of the anime/manga subculture meet Katawa Shoujo.

So the thing I've been wondering about is how a person with practically no exposure to our subculture would receive KS. The odd thing here is that it even happens, but the explosive popularity of Act 1 almost guarantees that it actually does happen (a mindboggling thing in itself). In fact, I even know of one case, because one of the devs gave Act 1 to his father so he could see what his son's been up to lately. I haven't heard back what dad thought about it yet though, so maybe he is now disowned or something. As for the rest, I think almost everyone on the planet is aware of Japan's reputation as some kind of a horn of plenty of weird and creepy things. Similarly, a lot of people on the internet are aware of 4chan's reputation as some kind of a horn of plenty of depravity and mindless comedy. So when "people from 4chan" make a "japanese style porn game" about disabled people, the ingredients for a catastrophe seem to have been thrown in one pot. What does it taste like to you, normal person?

What made me write something about this was a bunch of (in this context) normal people meeting KS, in other words a quick post about KS on contexts.org (an American sociology publication) "sociological images" blog. From what I gather, people stick labels on KS very quickly (having not played the game, obviously), though do not condemn it at all or anything like that. Still it hit me that the labels and preconceptions are almost solely negative, or at least cautious. "4chan", "fetisistic", "exploitative", "ridiculing" and so on. It's sad that KS does have a glass ceiling that it will never be able to break through because of what it is, but that is the road we chose. Anyway, the big question is whether KS is abusive of disabled people or not. Unsurprisingly, the question arises from the fact that the game focuses on portraying disabled people, and that there is graphic sex in the (full) game with said disabled people.

The portrayal of disabled people and their sexuality is a tough nut to crack. Apart from Hanako, the KS girls don't really pander to the "protect me" -moeblob category and are hopefully a bit more than just their disabilities. As for the sex, expectations vary wildly. KS is expected to be both a fetisistic porn fantasy game, and a story that feels true, with romantic feelings and tender, if a tad awkward teenager sex. Can't both have the cake and eat it too, so we have to place ourselves somewhere in the rainbow of the sex-spectrum between these two extremities. It's quite well known that we are gravitating away from the "porn" angle, and KS never was a true fetish project (as in, abusing the disabilities in a sexual way). The reasons for that are weird and tangled, but basically what can be said is that porn is terribly bland, boring and out of place in your average visual novel. Thus, not obliged by a sales department, we are free to try to do things in a way that feels more natural to us. Mind, being exposed to visual novels probably has brainwashed us at least partially to abide by the convetions of the medium, even without realising it. Still I do think we at the very least keep from abusing the disability aspect in the sexual scenes.

Meanwhile in the deep end of the pool, what if all sexual themes would be dropped from KS? Would it still be fetisistic, ridiculing or exploitative? Some people say that the mere fact that KS focuses on disabled people, spotlighting them as "others" can be interpreted as fetisistic and disabled people as subjects to ridicule. Sure, there might've been ways to deal with the disability theme better and lift it into central role through something else than a cripple school, twist threads of sharpest social critique inside the text and all that jazz. But you know, we are really making a romance game here, a story about a guy and few girls and their emotions and happiness and sadness during one summer of their life. For a long time now, I've thought it doesn't matter one bit whether they are disabled or not.

-Aura, art by Doomfest

Something Missing

2009-07-24T07:32:00.010-10:00

Boys in visual novels are boring.

Writers tend to overshadow these beings with their main star – the love interests. The female always gets the attention in order to doll her up to make her appealing to the audience, while the protagonist, his best friend and any other form of testosterone gets the short end of character development.

If a male just so happens to get some personality, it is always a gimmick or some other cop-out.

Perhaps this is so that the player can imagine himself as the main character, but why do this when everything else is essentially spoon-fed.

Take our Hisao and Kenji. Hisao has been long defined as the generic male protagonist only with a kick with his heart and defined only as well as the audience wants him to be. There have been discussions to make him something more, but ultimately little was done in the long run.

Kenji was originally supposed to be the basic loser who dreams of a girl to sweep him off his feet. In hopes of breathing life into the boy and flesh him out, I wanted to write a Kenji path, but was shot down due to technical issues. Soon, though, the other members saw some potential in what to do with him.

Perhaps Kenji could become something more than the best friend who gives moral support. Instead of using a concept of making him serious or giving him real plot relevance, he turned into a joke character just like many other men before him.

Males can have much more potential in visual novels without sacrificing the properties or interaction with the girls. However, doing that requires craft on writer and an open-mind on the audience. Perhaps one day, visual novels will see the value of strong male characters who could breathe a little life into the industry.

- Losstarot (Guest Art by Kamifish)

No Bullshit

2009-07-22T16:12:00.003-10:00

I find myself pleased in belatedly realizing that during Katawa Shoujo's development, we managed to completely avoid bullshit so far.

...Well now, let me clarify that before my fellow devs, random strangers from the Web and probably people off the street that happen to be walking by me all start pointing and laughing, with good reason too.

KS doesn't contain any entirely fictional element in its makeup. Oh sure, there are some amazing coincidences in there, but we don't have bridge trolls, little green men from Mars, psychic powers, anthropomorphs, ghosts, intelligent self-aware computers, talking animals, drop bears, therianthropes, FTL engines... the list can go on and on.
Considering our chosen setting that might look like a given, but I think it's really not. It's a very large trend in VNs to introduce one or more elements wholly born of the writer's or of humanity's imagination, and to worldbuild around those, exploring the "what if". No points for guessing whether I'm talking about your favorite author, software house, or title - odds overwhelmingly favor that I am, nowadays.
So is that a bad thing, or a good one? Neither, really, as long as it's done well. We're all writing fiction, not documentary - as long as the tale gets its point across, is enjoyable, and keeps the reader engrossed until the end, I'm not going to sneer at "fairytale hacks" or "unimaginative slicey bores". I reserve the right to quibble about the category a piece belongs in, but that's another story.
I do, however, draw the line at bullshitting the reader out of nowhere. When the author pulls out what is politely called "deus ex machina", or more commonly "plothax", it's time to raise eyebrows. And with completely made-up story elements, there is a constant temptation to just up the ante, up the stakes, step on the pedal, and call it a day.

"Because I made up my mind that reality worked that way, and since it's my fantasy, nobody can say otherwise."
I mean, who'd complain, or even notice, right?

If the response to KS is anything to go by, YOU would. The amount of details in the demo that got reported to us as feeling odd, pushing hard on coincidence, or being just plain wrong was staggering. Some of those we knew about and couldn't/wouldn't correct (the dreaded "artistic license"), some of them were false positives, but some made me facepalm and wonder why I never thought of THAT before.
Which brings me to the flip side of the coin: having to do your homework. If you can just decide how things work, you save yourself a whole lot of trouble, because you don't have to check if your idea is actually possible in the day and age you set your story in.
Like raspberry flavoured popsicles in Japan. No, I'm not kidding. But that's a story for next time.

-SilentCook

The Little Function That Could

2009-07-18T08:47:00.006-10:00

KS operates on a couple of design principles. One of those is that all movements should seem natural. This means that they should accelerate and decelerate smoothly; thankfully, Ren'Py has built-in support for so-called "time warp" functions. These are Python functions that, over the course of a movement, receive a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how far along the movement is, and returns an adjusted number in that range that the display system uses to actually determine the new position. In a basic linear move, in and out value are the same, but for more natural moves, the Ren'Py standard is the "ease" type, which works like this:

def _ease_time_warp(x):
    import math
    return .5 - math.cos(math.pi * x) / 2.0

This is a rather simple cosine wave section, normalized so the peaks are at 0 and 1. KS uses this kind of movement for almost everything.

However, only almost; there is a small set of very slow-moving, long-range pans. And if the moves take very long, the above function becomes a bit undesirable; the speed is never constant. What would actually be perfect here is a function that accelerates, then stays constant for a time, then decelerates at the end. So, I set out to write my own.

The problem is, I'm no good at mathematics. With only a vague idea of how this would work, I added bits to my function until it did what I wanted it to do. And the result is... not exactly an example of elegance. To the point where I don't think I actually really understand what it does anymore.

def acdc_warp(x):
    import math
    n = 10.0
    if (x < (1.0 / n)):
        res = (((2.0 / n) * (0.5 - math.cos(math.pi * (x * (n / 2.0))) / 2.0)) / 2.0) * (n / (n - 1.0))
    elif (x > (1.0 - (1.0 / n))):
        res = (((2.0 / n) * (0.5 - math.cos(math.pi * (1.0 - (((x - 1.0) * n) / 2.0))) / 2.0) / 2.0) + (1.0 - (2.0 / n))) * (n / (n - 1.0))
    else:
        res = (x - (0.5 / n)) * (n / (n - 1.0))
    return res

100% organically grown code, warts and all. But hey, it works. This governs the movement of all slow pans, like the one over the classroom CG. Frankly, I've come to quite like this disfigured little function. It may be terminally ugly, but you can almost imagine it struggling to do its best every time it's called. And that is quite moé.

— delta

No, We Cant: The Power and Necessity of Doubt

2009-07-17T05:13:00.005-10:00

A while ago, I joked that my next blog post could be an essay on the power of doubt. Lately, there's almost been a resurgence of this gung-ho, can-do spirit that would put Rosie the Riveter to shame, and it made me think about how this game would never have gotten this far without doubt.
Aura was the first to point out that doubt is almost the credo of KS. And it's true.

The point of all this is that doubt, for lack of a better word, is good.
Doubt is right. Doubt works. Doubt clarifies, captures the essence of evolutionary spirit. Doubt in all of it's forms, doubt for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind, and greed, mark my words, will continue to play a large part in the production of this game.

All of that seems like it runs contrary to the definition of what doubt is, but I can assure you that doubt, properly applied, is the best shit ever.

When this game was first being brainstormed it was an absolute mess of ideas, some good, some bad. Over time, these ideas were pared down, eliminated, and refined, according to the amount of doubt that was had as to how they could work or if they were workable at all.
At first, this game seemed like it would be ludicrously enormous. It was made shorter, tighter, and better as a narrative because of the doubt that in it's current form it would be enjoyable to read. Lilly's dog was removed because of doubt that he would contribute anything. Rin is not a mafia princess because of doubt that that could be made not fucking retarded.

The current Act 1 would not exist without doubt. The old Grid 1 was long, convoluted, and sloppy. Aura doubted that it could stand on it's own, and it took three months to do it, but the current demo is the product of reworking Act 1 until there could be no more doubt to be had about it.

Some people might say "I disagree, people should be confident about what they do." This is wrong. There is confidence, and there is arrogance. Confidence is fire and passion, arrogance is being a dumbass.
If you want to get anything done, you have to doubt yourself, or you'll end up screwing yourself. In writing you should be thinking, am I being too overambitious? Can this be done? Is it bloated? This is a healthy amount of doubt.
In art, you should constantly be reflecting on whether the proportions are right, the coloring and shading natural, the pose and movement fluid.
Of course there has to be a point when you say "this is as good as it gets," but unless you doubt yourself as to whether you're doing something that works well as a whole you're effectively running blind into everything. At that point you might as well be jacking off.

Doubt has saved the world. During the Cold War, Stanislav Petrov awakened to alarm bells ringing and saying that a nuclear missile had just been launched from the United States and was speeding towards Russia.
Instead of pressing the panic button and causing World War 3 as we know it, Petrov doubted that the US would launch a missile for no good reason and would stop at only one if they did. He was right.
There is no reason to ever not doubt yourself, because 9 times out of 10 it will be for the greater good.

I say 9 times out of 10 because I doubt it will always be the case. This should prove that doubt will always be a part of this project, which works out better for everyone, because it ensures that in the end the product that we end up with will be something we can be proud of.

I love Blazblue.

- ~~Climatic~~ A22

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

2009-07-12T15:28:00.003-10:00

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

2009-07-09T21:45:00.004-10:00

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

2009-07-07T15:19:00.003-10:00

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.

- Suriko

Waldo World Arena

2009-07-04T04:23:00.007-10:00

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

2009-07-02T04:32:00.004-10:00

"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

2009-06-18T03:46:00.004-10:00

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

2009-06-02T15:40:00.002-10:00

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.

I HAVE THIS REALLY GOOD IDEA FOR A CG!

2009-06-02T13:25:00.003-10:00

"Listen up guys! I have this great idea!"
"Go on."
"You know how in anime when there is an epic moment of clashing wills, they always put some fierce animals in the background? Like tigers and dragons."
"It symbolizes their killing intent and ferocity, and their personalities. The clever guy is always the dragon, and the rough one is the tiger. The retard sidekick is the monkey."
"Go on."
"Yeah, so I thought, since we have a moment like that in Act 1, with Shizu and Lils fighting, we should do that too."
"So we'd put a tiger in the background? Are you sure?"
"Yeah, except we should put some animals that are appropriate in context. You know, something that would fit the girls better."
"Oh, okay. So what animals would symbolize Shizune and Lilly?"

Sometimes ideas just don't work out the way you think they would. The idea was funny and the picture is really cool, but it just didn't work out.