Loc Notes

And so I'm back, with another playdate game.

Excited that this was my first non SquidGod game too.

Since I'm trying to do more games and create this base to be more freelance, I try posting in the Playdate forum if anybody would be interested in having their games localized for Brazilian Portuguese. And then came Raphaël Calabro. And his game Poker Poker Magic.

A lot of it was already showing great signs for me. The game looked fun and took me back from playing Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on the emulator a looong time ago.

The game itself was already in 3 languages (EN, JP, FR) which is something I think is very cool! And that the translation part was mainly dialogs without me having to worry much about overlaps and cut offs.

At first felt like my job at my present company but with the freedom of organising how I want and having a direct communication with the Dev. Which just makes the process way nicer and easier. Made all the difference and was just great!

Even without me asking he sent me the text files for the dialogs and character names plus a wee familiarization doc with the characters names, pronouns, and explanations for references of their naming and brief who they are in game. Oh and all the 3 languages files. Perfect for me.

Very kindly send me a code for me to get the game on the catalog, but since my playdate didn't arrived by then I couldn't play it yet.

But before asking for a build, I thought on doing a direct translation from the text files first to get the bulk out of the way. This time also I was working just on the files without the code because the game is made in C which don't really know. Even tho I can work my way around a little bit, is not something I was as confident as doing the lua alterations on the past games.

Anyway, So I started just by using the files I had and going through the story and game by translating the dialogs and understanding what the game was. Was pretty fun. I kinda established in my head some formality and informality to work best, based on the characters and who they were. And the interactions they were having.

I talk more about my specific choices in the Portuguese notes as usual, because it makes more sense there.

But here is also nice to note that by having also the french and japanese files I could browse and make more informed choices to keep the game consistent whitin translations, and even where and how I could have more freedom. Even if I used english as the base language, there are things portuguese will be similar to french from also being a romance language. And funny enough somethings makes more sense guiding by the use of how japanese was translating, for my own personal choices. But also what was katakana and what wasn't, and a few things in japanese that helped me anyway. It was fun and good reference to have more languages. It both gave me boundaries and freedoms. I enjoyed. And made me not have to ask as many questions to the dev, although he was such a nice person to work with that I don't think he would have mind lol.

In this time of finishing the first treatment and sending to Daeke. He sent me a build for testing in the simulator for me to do my own LQA and see more of everything in context. Also confirming some of the UI graphic that could be translated too. With a very helpful save that had the whole game that I could go through every dialog easily, without having to beat every stage (the game gets harrrd).

So with all that in hand I could do an LQA version of the files, that I did some alterations based on the flow and the story and get another build back to do a last sanity check of everything. Which prompted me to have some final overlap and consistency tweaks that I go more in depth why in the ptbr other notes.

And that was it! Now just really waiting for my playdate that should arrive this week to actually test the game hehe!

The work was really nice, communication was so easy and efficient with the Dev. Didn't missed the big games with all the bureaucracies and middle managements at all. The fact that Raphaël is such a nice person helped a lot to make everything simpler!

So aye, that's me done one more for here. Now I keep trying to find other games to do and using my time to keep learning and trying to do my own wee games too!! Soon to be put out there in their on itch page.

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Any comments, suggestions, questions or anything just give me a wee shout on marcelo.terreiro@gmail.com

love
mama