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In response to several requests for KS banners to put on websites, we've made these:


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Please use them however you wish.

Voice Acting and Katawa Shoujo

The question of voice acting with regards to Katawa Shoujo comes up every now and again, so the decision to not have voice acting in the game bears some explanation.

Many of the decisions taken during the development of the game can be ascribed to lack of forethought and planning, staff coming and going, and the script having been worked on during much of the time all other areas were stalled. This has led to multiple problems, not the least of which has been a huge backlog for any artist joining the team, as well as offers having to be refused for various things to be included in the game. One of those is voice acting.

Time limits, with us wanting to have release dictated by when the art is done instead of adding yet another delay is probably the largest of the problems that voice acting faces. There is also the need to find a good voice actor for each and every character, and any written dialogue that's been recorded having to go unchanged and therefore not allowing for dialogue edits during post-production, editor sweeps, and alpha/beta tester feedback.

Finally, for a project the size of KS, the logistics of voice acting just become too much to work with. With the cast having grown considerably from the five heroines and protagonist that were started with, communication with the voice actors for each and every character becomes extremely difficult - a problem that timezones would also exacerbate.

For a smaller project, or one that is better planned, voice acting may well be a possibility. But for Katawa Shoujo, the decision has been made that it simply isn't.

Merry Christmas!

Please have a very merry Christmas, from everyone on the Katawa Shoujo developer team.

『かたわ少女』について

当サークルの作品、『かたわ少女』は、商品として販売するのではなく、ボランティアによって作られた同人作品として無料で配布する予定です。

English: This is basically just a restatement of the fact that the game will be released for free, as some in the Japanese community had expected Katawa Shoujo to cost money - a normal practice for doujin games.

The State of Play, Christmas Edition

Hello everyone. It's been a long time since the last blog update, and a fair amount of things have been happening, so it's time for yet another update.

Writing:
Post-production is trundling along on all paths, with a particular focus on preparation of the demo. As we come to the final stages of development on it, alpha testing will begin with a demo release coming afterwards. The post-production phase has so far shown one of the greatest problems, but also one of the greatest strengths, of the development process of KS - that being the almost anarchic organisation structure. While small bursts of democracy, mob rule and dictatorship come and go, people largely do what they wish to via both negotiation and merit. At times this means he who has the largest mouth is most powerful, and at others it means very loose control over developers, but in the end it's fostered a friendship that's held the project together through many tough times.

Art:
The first finished CGs are starting to roll off the art-line now, with heroine sprites on the edge of completion. Thanks to everyone's hard work we've found, and finished altering, all the background shots required for the game. It was a long process given the number of backgrounds that had accumulated over the process of scriptwriting, but it's finally done. Thank you to all involved on that front, especially Yujovi for getting us a huge majority of the photos, and Delta for his image altering, with organisation and management of the process from Suriko.

On the staff front, we've welcomed Raide to the project as another artist, who will be working on both sprites and CGs. Being Indonesian, he joins our ranks as a developer of yet another nationality amongst a Finn, a German and an Italian, in addition to a handful of both Australians and Americans. Some of his fanart from before joining the project can be found on the forums, in the oekaki section.

Below is an updated heroine shot, showing the new Lilly art and another background, the exterior of the school dormitories.

The Name of the Game (Japanese version)

Below is basically a Japanese version of the post before it, about the title of the game, where it came from, and why we aren't going to change it.


私の悪い日本語をごめなさい。日本語で初心者です。

最近、「かたわ少女」の名前にはたくさん話をありました。

この名前はRaitaさんが書いった絵からなりました。このゲームの始めた時から、私達がこのゲームに「かたわ少女」を呼ばせている。( Raitaさんの絵　－ http://www.katawa-shoujo.com/res/source.jpg )

今になっては、タイトルを帰る事は出来ません。なぜかというと、

１）変えたとしても、「あ、例の「かたわ少女」ゲームか」と話題され続けるであろう
２）いい名前を思い当られません。


私達の目的は人を嫌がらせることではありません。このゲームは5人少女で人情話です。

初めての時、私達はRaitaさんの絵から名前の悪い意味を気が付きませんでした。でも今、この名前の意味を分かっています。本当にごめなさい。

あなたがたの支持することがありがとう。今から、私達が頑張ります。私達のゲームをお楽しみに。

The Name of the Game

KS pulsed through the web in the past week, and most interestingly the Japanese blogosphere and messageboards. As expected, the name of the project sparked controversy, but in an even larger proportion than what I thought it would. To explain what's all this about, the word "katawa" is quite degoratory in Japanese, perhaps comparable to English racial slurs like chink, spic and so on. As you can guess, if we were making a heart-warming visual novel about the hard life of jewish school kids in the WW2 Germany and name it "Kike Girls", it might raise a few eyebrows. Maybe a reasonable translation of Katawa Shoujo would be "Retard Girls", which is equally offensive though not exactly accurate. Anyway, it's a really really bad idea to name the game that, so why? Why?

It's not like we intentionally want to offend, and we did not come up with the name ourselves. The origin of the name is of course Japan itself, with Raita and his original concept picture of KS. Due to the name being readily available from the picture and the general idea of staying as true to it as possible, the name was adopted to the project without a second thought (and I don't think anyone with enough finesse in Japanese was around at the time to point out the problem with the name). Raita is not to blame though, he can name his doujin extras whatever he wants, the reason or blame is in the strange circumstances of the conception of this game.

So why not change the name? We have thought about changing the name for this very reason before (and also because an English game having a Japanese name felt odd to some), but gave up on it because it would be patently stupid. Due to our relatively high profile the project would just end up as "the game formerly known as Katawa Shoujo" and it would change absolutely nothing. So we kept the name, and we probably will even in the future.

Plus, the ideas we came up with for the name were even worse. No really.