Monday, November 12, 2007

Developer Diaries, Chapter Eight! (The Revenge of the Developer)

So crud came back from Japan, mostly healthy, I think...We'll wait for the lab results to be 100% sure. Shu said she'll buy a new fancy tablet (Yay!) and start drawing sprites with that in the coming weeks. One of her first sketches for a sprite was judged to be too sexy to be in the game, how gay (I call BS!). I guess it's better to save that kind of thing for..er those kinds of scenes *cough*. I'm busily wading through the endless marsh of act1 and Nicol ran out of music to compose. Suggestions? Our editors seem to be rather competitive, so we may or may not need a few more. I was wondering if some kind of numeric updates would be entertaining, progress bars and percentages and whatnot. I probably couldn't be arsed to update them, though.

That's that for the interesting topics, now for something completely different.

Anime physics is a concept that isn't intuitive for most people with an eye for detail. A while ago, someone, I can't remember whom, but he obviously didn't like catgirls, complained that the premise of KS is completely unrealistic and stupid. The problem with this logic, as it has been pointed out over and over again, is that fiction is not supposed to be realistic. KS is based on the fact that Yamaku High exists, just like Tsukihime is based on the fact that vampires and Mystic Eyes of Death Perception exist. Maybe we are in the uncanny valley between realism and fantasy where almost everything in the gameworld could be the everyday life of someone, somewhere. Except the slight implausibility of the setting, which then jumps straight to the face of an intelligent observer. Hisao's disability too, is a variant of anime magic aids, a condition that has only minor consequences to the life of the character except when the plot calls for sudden heart attacks...

Well, at least two of the paths in game actually deal with his illness from different perspectives, so all is not lost.

Of course, one could argue if the existence of Yamaku High is possible in any setting that tries to be logically consistent, much like one could argue the plausibility of any fictional institution. One could also consider if characters like Hisao and Hanako even should be there, if such a place existed.

At any rate, the picture Raita drew back then was the source and the inspiration that was chosen to be the foundation of the game, and that set a lot of things that are the groundwork for our own little world.