Release date for cosplay fetish acadamy? why

Visual Novel Community Archive, 2000-2009
#21

You are right, that there can be differences. I am aware, that problems may arise everywhere. But if you compare the work required to translate a bishoujo game from Japanese to English with the work required to make a big game (like Starcraft 2, Sims 3, Mass Effect 2 etc.) from scratch, then obviously only a tiny part of the work to make such games is required to translate a bishoujo game. Nevertheless it takes about the same time (or sometimes even more time) to translate a bishoujo game to English (the time is measured from the original announcement to the release date). This can only be explained by the small number of people working on the translation of the bishoujo game and the huge number of people working on each of the other types of games.

The amount of information about the original game engine is obviously a matter of trust and payment. The game company which made the original game should be interested in giving information to be used to make the English version, because the original game company will be paid for their rights when the English version is made and sold. But it is obviously a matter about the deal between the two game companies. So if the original game company isn’t paid very much for their rights then they won’t help very much. But isn’t it better to pay them a little more then to use years of extra work to avoid it?

#22

It seems to me after reading your latest post erpe, that you think that throwing more people at the problem will make things go faster. While doing so is true to some extent, it may seriously impact quality when it comes to translation. Again, you need only look at the issues Mangagamer had early on. Just as everyone has a different style of writing and speaking, translators can look at the same passage and come up with completely different translations. While the translations may have the same general meaning, the nuances the translator imposes on the sentence can make it quite different. Splitting up the translation between multiple people and then putting it together again can make the translation feel schizophrenic.
As for the amount of time things take, you are understating how much time the big name games takes. Often with big titles, from what I have been able to pick up, the game has been in development for quite a while before it is announced. With the games that PP/GC/JAST do, the game is announced pretty much as soon as the rights have been acquired as far as I can tell. Also, I think you are overstating the amount of time it takes for the localized versions to come out. Take a look at how much time lies between the Japanese release and the localized version of some games in my collection. (All dates are referenced from vndb.org, and I will only list the original release dates unless a re-release or remake somehow factors in to the localization):
???/Kana -Little Sister-: 1999-06-25(JP)/2002-07-02(EN)
Crescendo ???/Crescendo: 2001-09-28(JP)/2003-07-25(JP, full voice version)/2003-10-21(EN)
???/Come See Me Tonight: 2001-08-03(JP)/2004-03-15(EN)
???/Come See Me Tonight 2 : 2002-10-18(JP)/2004-08-13(EN)
???/Figures of Happiness: 2003-09-19(JP)/2005-03-28(EN)
??/Snow Sakura: 2003-11-28(JP)/2007-12-13(EN)
???/Hitomi -My Stepsister-: 2004-01-30(JP)/2004-11-24(EN) ( :shock: Wow!!)
???/Yume Miru Kusuri :: A Drug That Makes You Dream: 2005-12-22(JP)/2007-04-25(EN)
Princess Waltz: 2006-04-28(JP)/2008-12-02(EN)

At a glance, it appears that the average (mode, not median or mean) is about two years.

#23

Woh I could’ve never guessed :shock:

Dowble WOW!!! :shock: :shock:

Back to Topic:
Actually with Big games i think the Situation is same as Meiji said. For example Diablo 3 has been in production for sooo long. So IMO u can never compare the “ero game” industry, which is more like a niche segment to the more “mainstream” stuff. Now translation is a pretty complicated stuff.U have to develop scripts, then U’ll realise that the script is not so well done. Besides there is trouble of matching the display with the voice. Who knows how many more issues.

#24

Good news :smiley:

The official site is nice, though nowhere near as good as the one they made for Princess Waltz. Well, I guess PW was the most important title of 2008 for PP (like Kazoku Keikaku for 2009, probably), so they gave it more attention.

Anyway, I wonder if we’ll be able to buy CFA in download version. That would really help.

#25

a news regarding the DRM? will it need activation or not?

#26

It is true, that games often have had a long design phase, before they are announced to the public. But in this phase often only a few people are working on them and sometimes the ideas are dropped again, before they really seriously start making the game. So if the design phase from the first sketchy ideas to the public announcement is counted too, then it can be very difficult to assess the total development time for the game. But there shouldn’t be such a design phase when you only translate a game from Japanese to English. Therefore we should only really count the time from the end of the design phase to the actual release of the game when we compare other games with the English bishoujo games.

If I should find something to compare to this then the time Aspyr uses to make a Mac version of a Windows game comes to mind. But Aspyr have been faster and faster to do this and now only uses a few months to make the Mac version.

Of course translating from Windows to Mac isn’t the same as translating text. But the bishoujo games only come with a translation to English, while the Sims 2 games give you the opportunity to select between about 20 languages (even Japanese). If we compare with an expansion package for the Sims 2 (which is nearly a whole new game which is added but still fundamentally using the original Sims 2 game engine) then I know that they only work seriously making the expansion package in about three months before it is released and it is still translated so it can be played in all the languages.

The development time for the Sims 2 and the Sims 3 was about 4 years for each game. But they didn’t even try to make those games within a shorter time because they wanted all expansions to the previous versions of Sims to be released and sold before they released the next version of the basegame. Therefore they only experimented very little with ideas to new graphics and a new game engine in the first couple of years (and they (EA) also asked a couple of other graphics companies to develop ideas to a new graphic style which they could consider for the Sims 3). So the actual development time is very difficult to assess. But still a translated version of an existing bishoujo game doesn’t require neither new graphics nor a totally new game engine.

Just translating the text shouldn’t take more than a couple of months for a trained translator, if the translator works full time with the translation. Other people could then place the translated text in the game. But I am aware that placing the translated text in the game and get it to be always shown correct and in the correct places could take a little longer. Still it shouldn’t be difficult for a team of programmers to make the translated version to be ready within a year, when they don’t have to worry about making neither new graphics nor new game design.

#27

I think it’s a logistics problem. If the English-language market were more lucrative, we’d see wholehearted participation from the original developers, as well as full-time translation - even while the Japanese game is still in progress. That’s how the mainstream game market works, and those companies can produce localized versions very quickly.

With bishoujo games, I understand that some (most?) translators work on the scripts as a sideline, which isn’t ideal in terms of speed. Additionally, the original developers (who the localization companies rely on to modify code and implement scripts) are slow to support them. However, with the right process in place, I’m sure that these things could be done in a just a few months.

Good question. Since the physical copy and download may be pre-ordered together (for just $5 more), I’m guessing that they’re somehow tied.

#28

It commonly takes a year just to localize a big-name title like an RPG, which is comparable to a b-game in amount of text. Persona 3 and FF12 both took about a year to localize into English. Otherwise you end up with games like FF Tactics.

#29

This is incorrect. The Japanese makers prepare the English version. They make all the code changes. Then it gets sent to the US testers, and it goes back and forth in this manner.

Furthermore, you seem to be unaware of two key facts about the market:

  1. The English-translated market is insignificant compared to the Japanese. The games sell in the thousands here, over several years, and that’s the good ones. In Japan, in the space of a few months, popular games can sell tens of thousands. And PP isn’t charging Japanese prices ($80 or so). So “just a little” more money? The time spent on a game for the English market could be spent making further progress on a new title for Japanese customers, and make the original company a lot more money per unit time.

  2. The business in Japan is very cutthroat. Competition is extensive, tons of games are released all the time, and games typically stop selling after a few weeks (except the uberpopular ones). Most Japanese companies in this business survive, in essence, from release to release, and they can’t rely on the back catalog to prop them up. They don’t have a lot of money to lose.

The general thrust is that it is very risky to spend lots of money. And after the high-profile failures of the past (Knights of Xentar being one of the big ones), Japanese companies are very unwilling to commit themselves very heavily to the English market. If they did, the reduced return-on-investment could sink the company! In fact, I’m convinced the only reason any of them are interested is that they plan on slowly expanding the market over time.

#30

But can we preorder only the download edition? i don’t see the option

And the official thread of Cosplay Fetish Academy? when?

#31

can’t wait for it
i preordered today

#32

It is a matter about the length of the text and how skilled the translator is. But it shouldn’t take that long to translate a whole book which might be comparable to translating all the text in a b-game.

It could be done even faster if two translators shared the work. But the problem is also to find the right translators if you don’t want to pay them very much for their work. In this case they should be interested in b-games themselves. So it could be a choice between doing the translation yourself if you are a b-game programmer who knows both languages - or to hire professional translators who are used to other types of translation work.

#33

There isn’t much extra programming work to prepare a b-game for a version in another language. But obviously they don’t want to make the English version themselves.

I didn’t know Knights of Xentar until a few days ago. It is now abandonware. But it is still a very good game which I haven’t even finished yet. It wasn’t a failure to make this game in English, and Megatech Software made a few other games too. But the important things isn’t as much to make good games as marketing them. Lots of game companies have made very good games only to be swallowed by a big publishing company like Electronic Arts. (EA didn’t originally make any games themselves at all but they are now one of the two biggest game companies in the world and both publishing and producing the games.) So companies who are good in marketing have been much more successful than companies who just produce good games. (This is also true with other types of software - just compare Microsoft with IBM and similar companies.)

The problem companies who make game versions which the original company didn’t think were were worth making is that if you are too successful then you will just lose your market because the original company will take over. An example is the Sims 2 series which EA didn’t think would be profitable to market as a Mac version. But Aspyr thought differently and got EA’s permission to make the Mac version. Even Aspyr was cautious in the beginning and it took rather long time for them to make the Sims 2 basegame and the first expansions available as Mac versions. But it was a success and the rest of the expansions were therefore quickly made available by Aspyr too. The price for Aspyr’s success is that EA will make the Sims 3 versions for the Mac by themselves. So Aspyr now soon can’t earn more money from the Sims games. The same would happen if English b-games became too successful. Then the Japanese game companies would take over also with the English b-game versions.

#34

However, a book is linear. You can read through it as you go and ensure that all references make sense. A branching story makes it more complicated, and a branching story displayed in the limitations of the game even more so. (Does each line fit within the text box? Do the breaks come in the right places?)

In a book, you can always see the context. In a game script, not necessarily.

There’s a known line back in Maid’s Story, which was (I think) in response to either a random event or something to do with how the laundry task turned out. But the line is written in English as “That is a big, heavy stone” which makes no sense whatsoever. Perhaps it’s a valid translation of a Japanese idiom, I don’t know. But whoever had the script at that point must have missed the context that the line was going to be spoken in, in order to turn the idiom-or-whatever into something that made sense.

Depending on how the game is written, in some cases you’d be best off with a translator who’s also a programmer and can be given the actual source code in order to see the gameplay flow and the circumstances each line is triggered in. However, in some programming environments all text is stored in something like xml files, completely divorced from gameplay logic, and the game only contains references to line numbers to pull text from, making it very difficult for someone only hired to translate to even GUESS what line follows what.

For a good translation, you need to first translate the whole game, then PLAY the whole game, every possible branch, and note down everything that doesn’t add up, then go back and translate it AGAIN.

… making it nearly certain that the exact same object/person/idea will be translated in different ways in different places, confusing the player endlessly as they become unable to tell whether the game is referring to things they already know about or things they haven’t encountered yet.

#35

I agree that the translator(s) should know the exact context where the translated text will be used. So they should probably watch the original version of the game and at the same time translate each text window. They should also know how many English letters they can put into each text window without problems (and use a program to count the letters and give warnings if the text is too long). But the translators shouldn’t be the persons who actually put the text into the game. They should just concentrate on the translations.

This only requires a numbering system so programmers can identify where the translated text should be put into the game. And of course some people should test the game before it is released so that any mistakes can be corrected. But there is no reason at all why the same person should do all three functions (translation, placing the text and test the game). Having the same person to do all the work will only delay the game from being released within a reasonable time.

#36

Which was exactly my point when I talked about a translation feeling schizophrenic in my earlier post.

#37

Are you serious?

Let me tell you one thing: if someone created a standard hardcover book containing all the text in Akabeisoft2’s W.L.O, a b-game, it would be nearly 10,000* pages long.

Books are SHORT. Even long books are short.

*nearly 10,000 pages of standard manuscript paper

#38

then there is redoing the engine
that could take even longer

with 10,000 page no wonder there are at least a few errors here and there

#39