I wrote an essay called My Katawa Shoujo Manifesto that is 7500 words of talking about our creative goals and philosophies.
If that sounds at all interesting to you, please check it out here http://somewhere-far.com
What we’re working on now fits into a genre that we've come to call dreamlike romance. We estimate the length will end up being roughly 1-2 hours.
Synopsis: A boy and a girl meet as prospective students at a Japanese university. Over the course of a single evening that unintentionally stretches to very early the next morning, they get to know each other and form a strong connection, revealing far more about themselves than they ever thought they would.
Some of the features that make this romance dreamlike are:
1. It takes place over the course of a single evening
2. Ostensibly, there is no guarantee that the two people will ever see each other again (neither live in Japan or have committed to attending the university)
3. The setting/world supports the characters quest for intimacy and plays a prominent part in facilitating their connection. It is unknown to both of them, giving the sense that they are exploring it together. The world can bring them together both with obstacles they have to face together, but also by helping them in unexpected ways.
4. The characters achieve deep connection which, although it escalates over the course of the story, escalates beyond the awkward or superficial jokey phase quite quickly.
5. One of the main drivers of their connection is self-disclosure. That is, a kind of personal honesty that they never would have expected to have with someone they just met.
We decided to start with a character/dialogue-driven concept like this because it gives us a largely blank canvas and demands that we create connection between the characters using the most basic and important tools of character and dialogue. We don't want to be able to hide any shortcomings in our characters or dialogue behind plot. In future projects, we'll be able to join what we learn about character and dialogue during this project to more plot-driven concepts. This concept could never sustain a VN the length of KS, but it certainly can and has been shown to work for stories under 2 hours.
If you want to have a look at the current outline for this project, join our channel on discord: https://discord.gg/MztW9UHmxj or add me Arcadia#0032
If this particular idea doesn't interest you, then I'm happy to talk about the bigger projects we have planned for the near future, or any projects/ideas you are interested in or working on.