does anyone have a guess or idea when this will release?
now i understand that peach princess does not do this.
when i call my gamestop for my xbox 360, or ds games i usually
get a release date. i just don’t understand why pp doesn’t do this?
Because of the hordes of anguished screams that would be produced when they missed their target dates?
Until the point that a game is actually finished, it’s tough to know for certain when it will be done. Big-name companies often end up releasing games that are full of bugs because they wanted to hit their target release date (with a patch later to fix the worst of it). I don’t think anyone really wants that here.
For that matter, just look at the mess MangaGamer makes by setting release dates. 
What papillon said. However I think it’s safe to assume it will release in 2009 and probably in the next few months.
Yea… but then it makes people upset when the release date is wrong.
Harvest Moon or Rune Factory come to mind. No one knows when Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 are slatted. MMO like City of Heroes will delay giving a target date on expansions, until they’re in the last week of beta testing (and it’s anyone’s guess when that happens).
my guess is in time for one of the major anime cons
Ahhhh, well it does bother me a bit. I mean If they gave us a broad idea, say Fall 2009 or like would be great. I would like however to get a good game without bugs. Companies who try to ship products on time usually end up releasing poorly finished/tested games. So
The closest thing to a release date we can expect is when they announce golden master, and even then it’s still just a guess on how many weeks.
I’m completely fine with not having a definitive release date. However, more frequent short posts about progress would be nice (as long as it doesn’t interfere with work on the games).
guys, just a taaaaaaaaad longer, please be patient 
Once upon a time, PP used to give release dates. Then they announced a game and said “hopefully it will be out in a couple months!” – and opened preorders. Several years later, the game (Little My Maid) was eventually released. Even better, some of the games announced around that time were delayed for an almost equally long time, then ultimately cancelled. Some of us here are still bitter. Me, for example
After that debacle, they said 'we’re never announcing a timeframe for a game ever again until it’s actually done and ready to go gold master". (I’m giving the executive summary here …)
Maybe you should go ask Blizzard ;p
For me it’s definately enough what they are sharing already, give or take a few months I couldn’t care less… It’s in both our intrest to get the game out as soon as possible, but neither of us want to see an unfinished product considering it’s just a hassle for both parts. Might help that I’ve never suffered much for impatience thoughout my life, could be a character flaw or actually a good thing I don’t know :roll:
I don’t think that we can compare the bishoujo games with normal games which are much more complex and push the computer to its limit. The bishoujo games are only translated versions of Japanese games and they don’t require a top gaming computer to work. Therefore it should be fairly easy to predict roughly when they will be released.
Big complex games (which require a top gaming computer to run) are nearly impossible to release without a need for a patch at a later time. If they should do that the game would be delayed for years and they would have to pay a lot of people to test the game until there finally would be a chance that they had corrected all errors and compatibility problems with all types of gaming hardware.
I think that the problem with the bishoujo game is that they are made by a small company which don’t have enough employees to make so many games at the same time. Therefore some of the games are delayed for years. They probably develop so many games at the same time because they get more pre-orders that way. And they probably delay those games which don’t have enough pre-orders (maybe even canceling them in the end).
As I understand it though, while the games are fairly simple programing wise and don’t require that powerful of a machine, it has complications unlike top of the line PC or console games. First off, you have the task of translation, which isn’t quite as straight forward as you might think (as any of us who have taken up the challenge of learning Japanese, or probably any second language, can easily attest). Take Family Project for instance. It was once thought that the game would come out late last year or early this year, but after looking over the translation they had drafted, they didn’t like what they saw. So here we are approaching the middle of 2009, and it is finally looking like we may get the game this summer. The next issue is the game assets. For instance, as I understand it, sometimes it takes quite some time to find the original art assets (e.g. scenes without mosaics applied). As Nandemonai hinted at, sometimes game assets are completely lost and the game has to be canceled. Lastly, there is the programming and beta testing. While these games are fairly simple compared to Crysis for instance, I have personal experience with how much time debugging a “simple” program can take. (I have only dabbled in extremely simple programming; self-instructed BASIC in middle school and a semester of C++ in high school are pretty much as complex as I have gotten. My pride and joy was a Tic-Tac-Toe game for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator with pseudo-AI that consisted of a long series of If-Then cases. :lol: ) As you can see from some of the first games Mangagamer put out, a task as “simple” as converting the game to display roman characters in a way that looks proper to western eyes can be quite a challenge. (Did they ever completely eliminate the spacing issues in Edelweiss?)
I don’t think they would begin translating the game before they know if they have the original art assets without the mosaics. If the original art assets don’t exist anymore then they would just consider not to use time and money beginning the translation at all.
The translation is only a technical problem if they haven’t done it before and/or don’t know the best technique. Otherwise it is rather easy to do technically.
But there are some other problems in the translation because they can’t always obtain exactly the same meaning in English. Jokes are nearly always impossible to translate from one language to another. So they will most often have to change them to other similar jokes.
Another problem is that the English text could become longer than the Japanese text if they want to keep the exact same meaning. This may give problems. So they will often consider to shorten such text.
And then there may be dialogues which work for the Japanese but might give even legal problems in the US or at least wouldn’t be liked very much. Such dialogues should be removed or they could even stop the game from being released.
I know a lot about programming but even though programming isn’t always easy the bishoujo games are not big challenges in this area compared to other types of games. The worst problems are about making the English text work correctly on all computers and be displayed at the right time in the game. All other programming can probably just be copied from the Japanese version of the games.
Debugging big programs (like other types of games) is very time consuming and not at all to my liking. Therefore I don’t work as a programmer.
And who are you, to make such an assertion? Do you have first-hand experience in this area, or are you speculating (and if so, based on what experience are you speculating?) Because it seems to me, as someone who maintains several applications for a living, that this statement is wrong. Just because two applications do the same thing does NOT mean they are implemented in the same way. Both of the applications I spend most of my time on do approximately the same work – but one works pretty well, has been well maintained, and even been rewritten twice to make it run better. The other sucks, hardcore (there is a method named ‘dunnowhytakethisout’ in the code, which is actively being used) and has not received proper maintenance in so long that it is using middleware that isn’t even supported anymore. They are night and day, yet they both do the same thing.
These games are not being converted to a single universal engine. Each one is modified to display the English text. In effect, this means work is done to port each game that is brought over. While it might be desirable to reuse engines, not all Japanese companies do it – and they certainly don’t sell their engines to other b-game companies: it’s valuable technology that only enables people to better compete with you. And certainly not for classic old-school titles like Kazoku Keikaku, which is old by b-game standards.
Here’s to hoping Family Project is soon to follow.
I’m curious – where do you see that? I don’t see anything about gold master when I click the link.
Even if the link Ignosco provided doesn’t indicate that, Peter announced that this is the case in his J-List newsletter.
I saw it in the J-List newsletter.
Edit: Beaten