Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

First off, Merry Christmas, World! Happy holidays and end of year celebrations to one and all...

2009 has been quite productive with Feda and Mystic Ark released. I appreciate the association with one and all who have made this translation hobby mostly satisfying again. To the core group, thanks for sharing the fun and work. I won't try to name everyone else who has contributed to our work and successes, lest I leave out a name, but you know who you are - those who have joined our teams working on various projects and others who have expressed an interest and either given us good opinions to help guide us or provided spot translations and other information that will improve our final products.

To those friends who stop by just to visit, offer encouragement, tell us your interests, or to share in the excitement of progress, we hope we will "see" you often in 2010, because this helps fuel our energy to push ahead, especially when we face some of the tougher challenges.

Also, we are still receptive to the idea of joint RPG projects with other people and groups, whether you just want to try to get unstuck from tricky issues or speed up the process to release.

I will predict that three releases are highly probable in 2010. One is Chaos Seed, followed by Slayers and Hourai High School. Games in which I expect dramatic progress are Burning Heroes (as long as Ritchie is on the team) and Aretha-II (with Filler having brought the total translated script to the 50% level). Serious progress is also possible for Double Moon and Destiny of an Emperor-GB. As far as dumps and translators, Princess Minerva is waiting in the wings, with Shirley standing by to accept this or possibly another script. That leaves Lodoss War, Ranma GB, and the two Albert Odysseys. I am still hopeful that Bongo` will rethink the AO's, but one of the unwritten rules of our group is that we volunteer to work on the projects that interest us and reserve the right to step aside from others. Therefore, I'm hoping we can dump the patched Lodoss War soon so I can get Recca the files that need translating. I don't really know the status of Ranma GB at this time, but I would like to pick up the Oni game we carried once again, regardless of whether anyone else is listing it.

As for me personally, I would still like to write GD Lean, but Gid has it listed at the moment. I am also personally interested in Romancing Saga-II and RS-III, but have ample work piled up for 2010. And we're ready to finish Little Master-III if the gentleman still wants to send us the files.

Finally, as a trained and experienced writer, I am doing in the hobby what I once did as a pro, working on multiple assignments simultaneously. In the fields of journalism and writing official government reports in various capacities, I sometimes stacked as many as 20 projects on my desk at once. This is the nature of that vocation, something that perhaps amateur writers and people who have never pursued a professional career track don't realize. Currently, I am writing Slayers and Burning Heroes simultaneously. Since this is only two works, and I now write mostly for fun, I'm finding these endeavors to be relaxing, overall. That's because I thrive on hard work. I can't stand to be idle, 'cause I don't have a lazy bone in my body. Yep, my work IS my play, much to the chagrin of certain family members who like to just sit around and watch movies and such during times off. Me? I may watch one movie or ball game here and there, but I would rather be doing something useful and creative than just sitting around killing time.

So, I look forward to splitting my time in 2010 between building/finishing three houses and continuing to write video game scripts in my "spare" time, hee-hee, so bring 'em on, translators, prospective joint project partners, and the like... It's time to roll up my sleeves and go to work!!

Beautifully said Wildbill. Thank you for that thoughtful and insightful report. You guys do make this scene fun and exciting and I appreciate all that you guys do.

Merry Christmas to you all! Have a great new years! I look forward to a bright 2010!

Wildbill,

Would you ever be interested in working on the Glory of Heracles series? Its kind of like Dragon Quest in Ancient Greece. Glory of Heracles 2 and 3 are already in English if you want to see what the game is like. And of course the DS game is coming out in 2 weeks.

Sorry for my abscense. Merry Christmas and Happy new Year.

I'm trying to recall who did one of the Heracles games a few years ago - someone I helped with a few small tasks more than 10 years ago. Was it Toma?

Anyway, the answer is yes. I am always receptive to new projects if enough team members feel the same way. I always try to be adaptable and willing to broaden my interests. Accordingly, I have found very few series-based RPGs, if any, that I dislike so much that I would come on this board and rant about how much I hate them - to the point that I might make some people who like them feel uncomfortable. The pleasures I receive from helping others finally enjoy a certain game they love always more than offsets any personal negative feelings I might harbor about a particular work.

But I would need to play a bit of a Heracles game to determine if it was one that could grab me in that special way.

Is everything okay with you? Are you doing well?

Yeah, I was on my sister's home, eating a lot of Christmas food, and couldn't access internet.

I saw that you guys released the universal patch for Mystic Ark. Very good news, now I don't need to feel guilty for the delay anymore

A wish you all a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! I believe that for the Chinese New Year, it will be the year of the Tiger since this year was the Ox. I hope that it will be a good year. Seeing all the projects here developing nicely, I think it will be one. Romhacking/translating is a great hobby which always brings people together here on the web!

I can safely say that you should not need to worry about Romancing SaGa 2. I'm trying to put together a list of the next four games I'll be working on, and RS2 is certainly among them. I'm thinking it'll end up being RS2, Ancient Magic, Ys 5 and Rejoice, though not necessarily in that order. RS2 however will *not* need to be edited. It was translated by Eien ni Hen, and she edits herself. Provided that Ancient Magic comes before RS2, which seems to be very likely, you'll be able to get a good feel for her writing style, and suffice it to say that her scripts are far, far better than the ones I get from most of my other translators (though no offense to them!)

Though if one of your ASM hackers would like to donate VWF voodoo for the main dialogue I would be quite happy to incorporate it ;) The menus are a different routine and the world map stuff something else entirely - sprites, I think. But the main font is a crazy hodgepodge of one routine repeated several times, and the tilemapping for the output is outstandingly insane. I've got it working for a fixed 8 pixels width per character, and unless something drastic happens that's the way it's damn well staying.

At this juncture it should be noted that of the four games I announced that I'd be working on last... August, was it? Three of them required major script edits. This has been THE reason they've been slow - I figured I could do each edit in a week, maybe two. Hacking, for me, tends to be a lot easier than writing, and requires a lot less imagination. As such for future efforts I'm only going to be announcing one of the four which require major edits (in this case, Rejoice, which is a blast to work on and should not be a chore at all.) Of the remaining two of the August announcements, Megami Tensei is glitchy as all hell and Laplace's Demon, well, needs to be edited, though most of its text is descriptive rather than dialog, which presents an interesting shift in effort on my part. I'm still going to give it time, though, and am planning on launching it on Valentine's Day. After all, what better way to color such an occasion than a game rife with Lovecraftian horrors? ;)

Gideon Zhi,

How does script editing usually work for you? Do you copy the script onto a text file, spreadsheet or do you use something else especially if someone is doing editing work for you.