Loc Notes

Alright, so I'm back with a new project from the Playdate Community as I'm trying to be a bit more part of it even with my anti-socialness.

But before that I was pretty thrilled to be contacted by Intellikat with their Pulp projects, I have hear of Quest for the X in the forums so when they reached out I thought that was very cool.

So this was my first Pulp project and even though I did some tutorials and tests on it, I never really used much as I ended up vibing more with lua and the SDK. But I understood the basics and there's pretty good documentation and loads of tutorials and other's experiences with it that makes it quite straight forward to dive in.

It was very cool to dive in and see how they've done the game and used pulp logic. Plus all the tile art and things like that that I'm not very good or even focused on. That was a pretty nice learning curve for me to think about game design in that lense. 

But aye, let's talk about this localization. I feel first I need to get out of the way that even tho I called this Brazilian Portuguese I made a very concious decision from the game being set on 14th century France that I wanted to go a lot more medieval on the translation. Therefore the game have a European Portuguese feel to it. But is mostly me trying to remember grammar and using the 2nd person, and in a way speaking Portugal Portuguese with a Brazilian accent hehe. I felt that would definetely would bring the medieval tone and even european setting. So in a way this localization could be even more generic just Portuguese. 
The game itself have some older english tone and words, but not as heavy as I went. I think I just starting having a lot of fun with it and commited to the bit. Since these are personal projects for me too, I liked very much the way it turned out. Of course is not perfect medieval portuguese, and still have to make some choices based on fitting the text here and there to not brake the game. But the tone is there.

So with that decision made my main goal was to keep consistent with using the second person and going after words that would fit the context as much as I could. The other main thing I needed to get out of the way was adapting the font to have the brazilian acentuated characters like ã, á, à, ç, ê... on Pulp that was kinda easy in the sense there's a specific font editor in it but the main thing was that I had to substitute not used characters so my cheat sheet looked like this:
$ = ç 
# = é
% = á
& = ã
^ = ô
~ = õ
` = à
[ = ú
] = í
{ or | = ó
} or _ = ê
@ = â

If you notice there for ó and ê at first I was using { and }, but because of the way the code works in Pulp and the autosave/autocorrect sometimes using \{ wasn't working properly (as in "voc\{" in code should display as "você" in game) so I added on those extra chars while I was testing to make sure it wouldn't break.
So aye, I had a bunch of "n&o" and "v|s" in the code for example. My workflow for that was kinda simple I did the translation as normal and then good old find and replace to substitute in batches. And then the testing (both in game and in code tbf) afterwards was essential to find what I left behind/was breaking in game. 

Another minor setback on Pulp is that there's no easy way of having all the scripts open at the same time and finding/organising the text wasn't as straight forward as it has been on lua/SDK projects. But in the end was more of a minor setback, it was a case of getting in the groove, getting more comfortable with the engine, and understanding the code and design flow of the game. But I basically went script by script checking if it had any text to be translated. The biggest one which was the player script I did copy into a text editor to be able to do it faster and more consistently, and also did that one first to set me up as the base. 

So besides figuring out that structure I also realised that were a few images (transitions/flashbacks) I would have to change as the text was being drawed in them as tiles, that was pretty straight forward aswell. Most of the chars were already there, and I just needed to add a couple extra and manually change where needed. 

After that was mainly going through everything and translating having fun with the medieval tone and channeling my inner Luís de Camões lol. Made some funny choices like instead of checkpoint = Legado Preservado and things like that. Also other notes that instead of Sir, which I could've left as is, I went for Dom to give that portuguese crown feel. Plus thing like King Phillip to Rei Filipe and vellum I decided for velino instead of pergaminho, because I learned that word and I liked it. 

I feel that was basically my work here, and then testing with the game to see what I left behind, and see things in context, what was breaking/overlapping. Made some changes based on that and felt pretty happy with the end result.

To be honest the game does the heavy lifting here and I just added the portuguese flavour hehe. Is a pretty cool game and it's fun to try figure out the puzzles for yourself. I hope there's a chapter 2 coming soon!

Now I have some of my own projects to focus, but hopefully will be trying to do a Localization of Intellikat's other game: Pine and who knows mebbes chapter 2 of Quest for the X! 

For now that's it for me. x

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

love
mama