June 3, 2009 at 7:22 pmLocalization. Start
I continue to express my thoughts from my small height ...
What is needed for a good licensed localization?
- Programmer, remove information from the Localization Kit and stuff it into the game
- Translator (s), actually translate
- Artists, draw letters in the style specified by the game
- Sound engineer, write everything that the actors will say
- Tester, basically read, sometimes listen, more less likely to play
- Manager, give everyone a good kick so that it works better, i.e. create motivation :)
And if you have nothing but a disc with a finished game?
- A tough hacker and specialist in reverse engineering, who in a short period of time will take everything apart, and then be able to collect everything back.
- A translator who knows what variables are, has good gaming experience, preferably knows what scripts are, i.e. will understand what needs to be translated and what not.
- An artist who can draw a font, redraw the text on the finished picture to the desired one.
The rest, in general, remain the same ... Unless the manager of the pirate team should be much more careful. If anything, we work for ourselves. Sell? What are you! We just wanted to ... :)
This also adds the unrealistic motivation of the translation team, without it in any way, because less money will be paid for such a transfer, and much more. Will crush the timing. Because pirated products should appear immediately after the release of the original, and if possible earlier.
In addition, you need to be what is called in the topic of the translated product, i.e. Know the context of the translation. And then it turns out that you play FIFA'xx for the Bayer (Munich) team. Although you can’t guess that this is the city of Munich, I don’t know ... I’m taking off my hat.
But one motivation is not enough, you need the guy who will take apart the game into pieces in one day and then be able to assemble it back. And this is in places oh how difficult ... It’s good when the game developer, a normal person and not lazy, took care of the translation capabilities. Even better if the game has several languages. Then one can be overwritten by Russians. Worse if this cool guy caught a line of code ... Then you get “EXIT.”, “START GAME” and similar costs of turning 33 Russian letters into 26 pre-Russian ones. See the mikeSP article here .
I’m silent about the manager on purpose, because his work is beyond competition. Negotiating, knocking out, arguing with the customer is his job ... Like so much more. Gather such a team of different people and make them work. And work motivated. This is not such an easy task, as it seemed to me then. One thing is bad, I still don’t know how to deal with greed ... in my own case or in any of the team members. After all, claims cannot be made.
I'll start the story from the end. From how localization died for me.
Everything is simple. The market was saturated and every spread teenager began to translate. And three out of four were badly transferred. BUT! They translated cheaply, they agreed to work for a penny ...
When I was told that they would pay $ 1 per kilobyte of text, I felt sad. I remembered the same “wall”, remembered all the games that I had translated ... And quit. I did not want to hack. I wanted to do it qualitatively. And I could not do everything well for that kind of money ... I wanted more money, but in my opinion this hard labor deserved a much better payment than I was offered. But bad luck, there were people who agreed to translate for less money. Yes, and did not want to spoil the game. It was disgusting to look at the next few translations of the team, where I left ... not at all, of course ... But it was only later, at first it was cool, very fun and informative.
It all started with the fact that they gave us an ALIENS game for testing, such an old one, 199x, I find it difficult to give an exact name ... sorry. Lost for centuries.
It was said that as soon as we break, they are waiting for a visit. They broke it for a very long time, about 2 weeks ... Let's go repent. And in response they heard: “Wow! Previous guys broke a month and a half and then not everything was broken ... Cool guys! Let's work. ”
The first game was WarWind .
A kind of strategy, a clone of WarCraft-II from DreamForge. With good graphics, voice acting and other delights of the product made by a large studio. There was nothing particularly remarkable in the translation, everything was quite simple, as far as I remember. I remember that during the assembly almost a day was killed by jumping letters in the Russian font. Those. each letter was printed not beautifully under the ruler, but jumped like a preschooler in a notebook :)
At that time, when DirectX was just starting its countdown ... each developer, as he wanted, organized the display of text on the screen. I created the texture with fonts as I wanted ... If the texture was created beautifully, in clear sections - everything went without problems. But if he wanted to show off and save space ... His brain began to draw insidious schemes for placing letters on the texture ... :( A dream for a programmer who will then place Russian characters. Fortunately, everything was simple. One large texture per line for each font, which easily expanded Russian characters, you just had to follow the numbering of the characters, that is, put the Russian characters in the appropriate places in the ruler. However, not everything turned out to be so simple. The height of each letter and symbol was stored in a different place and by default was tical, which was not acceptable to some Russian letters.
Separately, it should be noted the wonderful, awesome work of the pro-sound engineer who agreed to help us. He created the voice with which the announcer speaks in the game, he is synthesized electronically.
Result, 7 days. Everyone is happy, including us.
To be continued must be ...
What is needed for a good licensed localization?
- Programmer, remove information from the Localization Kit and stuff it into the game
- Translator (s), actually translate
- Artists, draw letters in the style specified by the game
- Sound engineer, write everything that the actors will say
- Tester, basically read, sometimes listen, more less likely to play
- Manager, give everyone a good kick so that it works better, i.e. create motivation :)
And if you have nothing but a disc with a finished game?
- A tough hacker and specialist in reverse engineering, who in a short period of time will take everything apart, and then be able to collect everything back.
- A translator who knows what variables are, has good gaming experience, preferably knows what scripts are, i.e. will understand what needs to be translated and what not.
- An artist who can draw a font, redraw the text on the finished picture to the desired one.
The rest, in general, remain the same ... Unless the manager of the pirate team should be much more careful. If anything, we work for ourselves. Sell? What are you! We just wanted to ... :)
This also adds the unrealistic motivation of the translation team, without it in any way, because less money will be paid for such a transfer, and much more. Will crush the timing. Because pirated products should appear immediately after the release of the original, and if possible earlier.
In addition, you need to be what is called in the topic of the translated product, i.e. Know the context of the translation. And then it turns out that you play FIFA'xx for the Bayer (Munich) team. Although you can’t guess that this is the city of Munich, I don’t know ... I’m taking off my hat.
But one motivation is not enough, you need the guy who will take apart the game into pieces in one day and then be able to assemble it back. And this is in places oh how difficult ... It’s good when the game developer, a normal person and not lazy, took care of the translation capabilities. Even better if the game has several languages. Then one can be overwritten by Russians. Worse if this cool guy caught a line of code ... Then you get “EXIT.”, “START GAME” and similar costs of turning 33 Russian letters into 26 pre-Russian ones. See the mikeSP article here .
I’m silent about the manager on purpose, because his work is beyond competition. Negotiating, knocking out, arguing with the customer is his job ... Like so much more. Gather such a team of different people and make them work. And work motivated. This is not such an easy task, as it seemed to me then. One thing is bad, I still don’t know how to deal with greed ... in my own case or in any of the team members. After all, claims cannot be made.
I'll start the story from the end. From how localization died for me.
Everything is simple. The market was saturated and every spread teenager began to translate. And three out of four were badly transferred. BUT! They translated cheaply, they agreed to work for a penny ...
When I was told that they would pay $ 1 per kilobyte of text, I felt sad. I remembered the same “wall”, remembered all the games that I had translated ... And quit. I did not want to hack. I wanted to do it qualitatively. And I could not do everything well for that kind of money ... I wanted more money, but in my opinion this hard labor deserved a much better payment than I was offered. But bad luck, there were people who agreed to translate for less money. Yes, and did not want to spoil the game. It was disgusting to look at the next few translations of the team, where I left ... not at all, of course ... But it was only later, at first it was cool, very fun and informative.
It all started with the fact that they gave us an ALIENS game for testing, such an old one, 199x, I find it difficult to give an exact name ... sorry. Lost for centuries.
It was said that as soon as we break, they are waiting for a visit. They broke it for a very long time, about 2 weeks ... Let's go repent. And in response they heard: “Wow! Previous guys broke a month and a half and then not everything was broken ... Cool guys! Let's work. ”
The first game was WarWind .
A kind of strategy, a clone of WarCraft-II from DreamForge. With good graphics, voice acting and other delights of the product made by a large studio. There was nothing particularly remarkable in the translation, everything was quite simple, as far as I remember. I remember that during the assembly almost a day was killed by jumping letters in the Russian font. Those. each letter was printed not beautifully under the ruler, but jumped like a preschooler in a notebook :)
At that time, when DirectX was just starting its countdown ... each developer, as he wanted, organized the display of text on the screen. I created the texture with fonts as I wanted ... If the texture was created beautifully, in clear sections - everything went without problems. But if he wanted to show off and save space ... His brain began to draw insidious schemes for placing letters on the texture ... :( A dream for a programmer who will then place Russian characters. Fortunately, everything was simple. One large texture per line for each font, which easily expanded Russian characters, you just had to follow the numbering of the characters, that is, put the Russian characters in the appropriate places in the ruler. However, not everything turned out to be so simple. The height of each letter and symbol was stored in a different place and by default was tical, which was not acceptable to some Russian letters.
Separately, it should be noted the wonderful, awesome work of the pro-sound engineer who agreed to help us. He created the voice with which the announcer speaks in the game, he is synthesized electronically.
Result, 7 days. Everyone is happy, including us.
To be continued must be ...