Internal Struggles

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

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

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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

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

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

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!)

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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