What the hell? Seriously? That’s extremely confusing…
Yeah, when I tried to look up the exact date in my original post, I came up with “the months of June, July, and August”. Apparently that is in fact not the exact date ¬¨_¬¨
So JAST is just free to take the latest date!
The anxiety of it coming out in summer or not may cause some kind of panic. I hope we get more news soon. Obviously, I’d prefer to have the game in summer, but if the news at the end of summer is that copies are being printed nothing can be done. Roughly three weeks to see what is up or around one week to hear copies are coming soon. I’d only be disappointed if they wait until the very last day of summer to say it is being delayed. I really wouldn’t mind if they need more time. I just hate uncertainty and really wished we’d get an update soon, preferably good news.
i hate uncertain also that is why i wish jast would give updates on twitter like mangagamer does
Panic? Because a PC game is delayed? Oh, come on. It’s pretty much the norm for PC games! Honestly. The delay of a PC game (or, in fact, a PC software) is usually proportional to how much people are looking forward to it being released! 
from what i heard the problem with
demonbane is steins gate and its problems
Yes, maybe not a full-blown panic for most. My anticipation is reaching critical overload levels. Al Azif is in limbo right now and she needs to be saved! Perhaps we are already in a happy ending route for it to be released.
Like OLF said: Delays are normal. Team Fortress 2 and Dragon Quest 9 are perfect examples of that. If it gets pushed back three or six months, it’s not the end of the world. That’s the software business.
JAST appears to perform certain tests if a prospective partner can input text into their game engine… that’s why we don’t have BCyc after all. So Demonbane should have passed whatever “we need to make sure this can be done first” kind of deals, long before they announced getting the contract.
I assume the process will go something like this: Nitro will input the English text and swap in the uncensored pics. Then Nitro will test everything to see if they broke anything. If it’s broke, they’ll fix it. After that, JAST will double check to make sure there’s nothing Nitro missed. If it’s broke, JAST will send it back to Nitro for fixing. Then more testing, until they don’t see anything broken.
The delays are for our benefit: to have a stable release. Their “Summer 2010” thing was likely a guestimate. Personally I think they shouldn’t make such guestimates, because when you fail to meet them, people get all panicky and angry of broken promises. I personally like Blizzard’s and Nintendo’s way of saying, “It’s done when it’s done.” But JAST isn’t multi-billion dollar like them, so they can’t be that arrogant with their customers.
I want Demonbane as badly as everyone else, but just because there’s a delay, doesn’t mean we’re getting screwed.
I’m sure there will be some sort of official announcement, if Demonbane will be yea or nay for Summer 2010, in the next few days.
and there is that nitro+ just released steins gate and is trying to do fixes on that
The actual wording of the Summer 2010 date from the Demonbane website:
So technically they DID say ‘when it’s ready’. They announced a summer date, they just also added their standard weasel clause … so it’s not even really wrong, just a kind of half-truth. I am kind of surprised they made the Summer announcement as firmly as they did; they don’t usually do that (since they got burned a long time ago). They must have been really confident it was just about done, and then there was a last-minute delay of some kind.
But it isn’t as if though they can’t at least formulate a reasonable plan of action and set some goals based on the content/engine of the game. I know they’ve set release dates before and failed, but JAST/GC/PP has had over ten years of experience localizing visual novels now, yet they still can’t form a realistic release date? I can understand that a game like Demonbane takes a long time to translate, but what is it about the process of implementing English into textboxes that makes it take so long to do and test? Is the process of implementing text into a visual novel really so complex and technical so as to make an open-ended release schedule necessary?
I can understand that they’re concerned about quality, but there’s only so much time that JAST or Nitro+ can take without looking like they’re wasting time, especially considering the fact that these games aren’t that much more complex than text adventure games.
I’m not sure if it’s because of problems with JAST or the Japanese companies, but personally speaking, I’d say that they may be having efficiency and management issues. It’s been like this for most of their releases, and the quality of their releases don’t always consistently reflect the time they poured into localizing them. Sometimes their releases are really good because they took their time, but some releases seem like they could’ve put more effort into localizing, even though they’ve been worked on for a long time. Look at Kazoku Keikaku as an example. They worked on that game for over two years, yet the localization was a mess, even when you take the censorship out of the equation; the script had a considerable amount of typos, grammatical errors, untranslated lines, and unnecessary script liberties (the overlooked “0VER 9000” line comes to mind). What happened?
The amount of time you take to do a task doesn’t always matter as much as what you’re actually doing to finish it. A delay doesn’t mean we’re getting screwed, but not being able to set or meet realistic goals doesn’t make people any more confident in their willingness to see to it that it’s released, either.
Fundamentally I can agree with you. In the console industry, a common practice is to announce a game after it’s finished and ready for release. That is to say, when CAPCOM announced they had a Rockman 9 for WiiWare, Rockman 9 was already done. They just made people wait several months until they actually released it. Generally that means the only thing a company has to worry about is advertising, pressing the disc/cards, and distribution.
That kind of model cuts out the uncertainty of testing and debugging causing delays (since they’re already over): which appears to be a major issue JAST and MG share.
On the flip side though, many companies get away with having major delays for testing and debugging: Bioware, Blizzard, and Valve as examples.
I don’t even think they have to be 100% done to announce a relatively short yet reasonable release date. If they announced that they licensed a game after they’re done translating all the dialogue, they could also announce a release date that’s only 3~5 months away. That should be more than enough time for implementing text, fixing bugs, marketing the game, producing the discs, and distributing them.
Eroge companies definitely don’t wait until they are 100% done, but the vast majority* manage to deliver on time. The problems JAST have are with the interactions with other organisations that are in the way on the critical path. This is not unique to translation; eroge needs to wait for seiyuu to do their voice acting etc. The difference is that there is a well established model for recording voice acting; it is predictable enough to schedule around. Waiting for Nitroplus to perform undefined modifications to their core engine as well as ‘reinserting’ (whatever that involves in this case; I was under the impression those translators were working directly with the original .nss but maybe not) is not going to be anything remotely predictable. I’d say the solution is to work out a system where all of this can be done without the original company. In this particular case, the Nitroplus engine is rather well understood-- I don’t see why they couldn’t simply get the appropriate development tools from Nitroplus necessary. Hard to tell, though
*of course, the most notable examples are the famous ones. Hoshizora e Kakaru Hashi has been delayed, what, 8 times now? Let’s not even mention Sakura no Uta, which doesn’t even bother setting a release date any more because nobody would believe it if it did.
Wow, I didn’t even realize they were that heavily reliant on the Japanese companies. There’s your problem right there–Even if JAST is being as efficient as possible, if the Japanese companies aren’t managing their schedules as efficiently or effectively (which I’m pretty sure is a MAJOR problem in the eroge industry), then JAST pretty much has their hands tied.
Does JAST even have their own programmers to begin with? I can’t imagine why they even need to rely on the eroge companies outside of providing them the appropriate materials/tools needed for localization (the license, the script, the SDKs, the de-mosaiced images), other than the fact that JAST doesn’t have the staff capable of writing code. :?
I suspect the companies in question may not want to provide JAST USA with the source code.
As far as I know, Jast indeed has no programmers on staff. All engine changes go to the original Japanese staff. One, I remember that the memory leak in Brave Soul … could not be fixed, because the game’s original programmer had left Crowd (since it had been so long getting the game ready for release) so it would have been too difficult for them to fix it. Two, there was one specific game where they DID hire programmers - Transfer Student. Because Jast Japan died in the middle of the process, Peter eventually hired programmers to redo the whole game engine from scratch. And it took forever. (The game came out a few years after Jast USA was retired and Peach Princess replaced it.)
I can understand this, kind of: the eroge company is probably not going to want to give up their game engine. Game engines are valuable property, and one of the few barriers to entry into the eroge market. I can understand the Japanese game companies not wanting their game engine to get outside of their control. After all, Jast USA isn’t a subsidiary of them, or even part-owned by them. Sure, the contract might specify that they can’t re-sell the engine (or other such shenanigans) but Jast USA is overseas. What control does the original firm really have once the data has left? As B173 M3 is fond of pointing out, the Japanese firms lack the capacity to really follow thru on any lawsuit threats.
Besides, even if the company was willing to give up the source code, in practice, it’s probably much easier for the original creators to modify it, than to have new guys try to make the change. New guys lose a lot of time (and thus money) familiarizing themselves with the code. Especially in this case. Either the engine is undocumented (in which case, the original devs are far more prepared to cope) or the documentation is in Japanese.
If you’re trying to use the Japanese documentation, then you either get Japanese programmers (which still has the same problem of those making the changes not knowing English and being in Japan), or you get bilingual programmers in the States, or you have to hire a translator to translate all the technical information (which is very difficult to translate). The last two options in particular are going to cost significantly more than just getting the Japanese company to do it for you.
It’s actually somewhat worse than that. Efficiently managing their schedules probably means putting all the engine changes, etc. for the foreign market at the bottom of the to-do pile. When the foreign language edition of a game is going to sell for half the price and move far fewer copies, it is most economical to focus on your bread-and-butter first.
If Bob the programmer doesn’t have enough time this month to do the changes for your new Japanese-market game, and the changes for Demonbane … You have to decide which of these two tasks to let slip. Which one are you going to pick?
If Demonbane or Koihime sells a hundred thousand copies in English, then the Japanese companies will put a lot more priority on the foreign market. Until then, we’re much more of an afterthought. (I’m convinced that some of these companies are in it not for the money it’s making them now, but as a market-development exercise, because of the money that might be there in the future.)
If there is no other alternative to expidite the localization process after translating the dialogue, then I don’t understand why JAST can’t announce the license of a game until everthing is almost done, that way they can announce a relatively short date that can be realistically met. At least then we won’t have to wait 1~2 years after an announcement for a game to be released, and we won’t have to worry about numerous delays.
Even if there is no way to make things go faster, they could at least wait a little more before making anything public so it can feel a lot faster to us.