What’s up, guys!
I`m Freon. My role as a part of a Cat’s paw mod team is writing Saki's route and creating her integrated personality. In one of my previous posts I wrote about process of Saki`s story conversion. And now - about me and all the other stuff.
«Memory tour»
ħomk: Zero of all, if we aren`t posting anything - it doesn`t mean, that we are goofing off or have disappeared completely. It means that I just have nothing to tell people that are waiting for the mod, except for «We`re working on it».
Freon: It`s difficult to fix someone else's work. Especially if it's a creative work. Initially we had two unfinished routes, five wry backgrounds, a few crooked sprites and a sea of ideas, desires and ambitions, as well as ardor, teen maximalism, graphomania, enthusiasm, and a couple of bottles of beer. Not that we needed all that for the work, but once you get locked into a serious mod developing, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
ħomk: During these... six months or so... we’ve gone through a series of writing and rewriting of the script. It is becoming better. I guess. Now we have 150K+ text characters (code not included, although everything that could be, has been rewritten into a script file). The text of the mod starts from Tuesday and continues smoothly until Sunday.
It's worth mentioning, that my idea (of not altering the original scenes) has failed. The story itself forces us to integrate the mod’s text into the existing plot. For example, we slightly changed the scene of Hisao meeting Lilly, and now Hisao mentions Rika in their dialogue. And there also will be a new background for school’s corridors. That alteration is made for several reasons, and one of them is the story line. It is mentioned that Hanako steps on the squares of a certain color, but there were no squares there. We noticed it and thought: why not fix that? And it also would be nice to go HD, but let’s leave that for now.
Freon: As Saki's and Rika's routes are being written by three different authors, it's difficult to smoothly integrate their stories. Of course, cooperation is good, but it's also very difficult to coordinate. Sometimes there were three or four different versions of the one scene simultaneously, which created a horrible confusion and butthurt. But we enjoy the process nonetheless. Recently the major changes in the story have occurred. We were joined by a new author, who offered us a new vision of the story, from the very beginning to the very end. Because of that we have to rewrite some parts of text. Thus we have delayed the date of release. And what also caused us to delay it, was the absence of productive artists.
«Multimedia»
ħomk: About the music: we don’t wanna add all of our good stuff into the first act. Well, maybe there'll be main themes of the heroines, but I can’t promise anything. We’ll see how everything comes out.Graphics. It's still complicated. Our neat authors are doing their job, but slowly, because a) there are not enough of them; b) it's difficult. I think that the BG’s and CG’s could be called the greatest bumps on the road. Sprites, for example, are ready, and those, that are not, could be completed within a week tops (according to cometodaddycome). Oh, and a wonderful artist has joined us recently, picrelated.
«Distant future»
Freon: I don't know neither our, nor mod’s fate. Perhaps we'll be shut down by 4ls's guile, and we'll abandon the mod or postpone the development for better times. Or we'll release mod, but only the first act. Or release the complete version. I don’t really know. But what I do know is the fact that for now we are not going to give up and are working hard on our offspring. When will we lift the veil? ASAP.
«P.S.»
ħomk: And I have an idea to make a package (.exe-file for Windows), that will sort out, which Katawa-related games/files user has installed and will add/remove mods on command.Right now there are original KatawaShoujo, ru-patch, CGainmated1227's patch, HD-patch, and soon there will be (or not) alpha, ru-version of it, and, finally, our mod. User is going to get insane in the process of installing everything.I would like to simplify this procedure. Procedure of installing, not going insane. But it’s going to happen in a distant future, when either our mod or alpha versions are be released. That’s it...
