[v1.2 RELEASED!] New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)

[fafadou]

Love your work

[ateam]

I miss the days when games had cool bonuses like this. Its looking good.

Love your work

Thanks! I will be extremely proud when the team and I wrap this up and release it to the world.

[ateam]

A couple of quick updates, folks!

Me and the team are still tirelessly working at completing this awesome project. As of right now, our current stats look like this:

• • 80% of graphics/textures have been re-rendered in English (and re-inserted into the game), with the only things remaining being the closing credit sequence, as well as some character and voice actor biographies from the unlockable extras. This means that all of the hard stuff has already been done!
  
  • 44% of the script has been translated.
  
  • 30% of the script has been fully edited, re-inserted, and tested.
  
  • All mini-games have been translated, re-inserted, and tested, with the exception of the quizzes, which are 1/3rd complete.
  
  • Any and all occurrences of Japanese ANYWHERE in the game (outside of what’s left to do in the categories listed above) has been translated and re-inserted into the game, including things like save file metadata written to the VMU, menus, etc.
  
  • Any and all occurrences of spoken-only Japanese dialog with no on-screen text representation are now accompanied by English text.

I'm very, very proud of that last bullet point from the above list. What does that mean, exactly? Well, imagine you're playing a visual novel where each line of text on-screen is accompanied by an audio clip of a voice actor reciting that dialog. Now, imagine a moment in the game where a character is speaking, but it's outside the flow of the normal story text, and thus no textbox is present.

In "Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me", this occurs during mini-games. To remedy this, I have worked tirelessly to modify the game to insert new textboxes in areas they previously didn't exist. That way, English-speaking players will still understand what's going on.

Furthermore -- because I know how much we all care about box/disc art -- I have put together customized artwork that can be used with either GDMenu or the exciting new openMenu.

Main Game - Box Art


Main Game - Disc Art


Main Game - Disc Art (Alternative)


Bonus Disc - Box Art


Bonus Disc - Disc Art


The last thing I'll mention is the inclusion of a new italic font. This is now used whenever the protagonist of the game (Mikato) is speaking to the player with her inner voice. This font helps differentiate the two types of speech one sees during regular gameplay.





Well, that's it for now! Stay tuned, folks.

[fafadou]

What a titan job you are doing here !!
Each update is more fantastic than the past one.

Just a very small regret you still don't find the characters size, I guess in jap game there is only a IEEE value instead a vwf and/or a shift JIS table...
It takes me many years to find the value in resident evil code veronica X project in the 1ST_READ.BIN.

There is a discord page about translations, maybe it deserves a topic.

[ateam]

What a titan job you are doing here !!
Each update is more fantastic than the past one.

Just a very small regret you still don't find the characters size, I guess in jap game there is only a IEEE value instead a vwf and/or a shift JIS table...
It takes me many years to find the value in resident evil code veronica X project in the 1ST_READ.BIN.

There is a discord page about translations, maybe it deserves a topic.

Thanks!

Yeah, the font is a work in progress. It's two-bye Shift-JIS and using my own custom font sheet (obviously). It may get solved, it may not.

EDIT: Just for additional context, there are several .TIM files that hold the bitmap for each character tile. Yes, a .TIM in a Dreamcast game!

EDIT 2: Made some good progress today on the font-hacking front. Just have to keep at it!

[ateam]

So the assembly font-hacking is still ongoing and quite the undertaking...

HOWEVER, in the mean time, I decided that a new font was needed in the event that I'm stuck with the 22x22px tile size. It might look like a run-of-the-mill Courier or Console font, but it's been pixel-by-pixel optimized by me, based on a font that I hand-picked over the course of several days of tireless searching.

In my opinion, it's much cleaner and utilizes the horizontal tile space much more efficiently than the previous "thin" font I was using. This is now font version 3 (or maybe 4?).

In addition to the new font, I have also changed the dialog textboxes to display the speaker's name in orange, and in all caps, rather than...

[Character Name] This is my line of dialog.

...a big improvement, and looks really great (in my opinion)! The protagonist's inner-monologue is still presented with an italic font, by the way.

See previews below.

[fafadou]

Words missing, fabulous work !

[dubcity]

Looks great ateam. Phenomenal work.

[bingobongo]

Simply amazing! Thanks for all your hard work, I cannot wait to play this (and understand it!)

[ateam]

Just a quick update with some stats on main story script progress.

• • 65% of the story script has been translated.
  • 40% of the story script has been fully edited.
  • Images/textures are still 80% re-rendered, although at least half of the remaining 20% have been translated.

On another side note, I've managed to improve the overall look-and-feel of the lyrics/keyboard mini-game. I now have as much space as needed to store and display the English translation of the song lyrics. Additionally, I've managed to reaaaally cram some extra tiles into the font sheet so that those lyrics use the same stylized font found throughout the game's menus and title screens.

Other little QOL updates have been done, too, like modifying the width of buttons that originally contained two or three Japanese characters so that they're more appropriately sized for their English equivalents.

Outside of that, our team keeps on chugging away! I still feel that my summer 2022 release date estimate is realistic, although when it comes to hobbyist projects like this, you never know what may crop up. However, given the people I'm working with, I feel confident that we can stay on schedule.

Stay tuned, and as always, keep the Dream™ alive!