# need another event cg here —δ

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

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.

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)

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

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

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

=> 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