Hi sweets!

We hope you’ve enjoyed the demo—now available in English! 

Here we present you the dev log for this month. Again Norika wrote the Chinese version, I (Sinope) converted it into English while adding a whole lot of details about the translation and programming work I’ve done😉.

A quick summary of what we’ve accomplished this month:

• A brand-new, beautiful UI design across all interfaces
• English & Japanese translation for all Demo 1.0 content
• Whitefish is still writing, a lot, to be specific around 40,000 Chinese characters
• Norika is still drawing, also a lot, to be specific new CGs plus refinements to existing backgrounds and other art assets
• I myself improved some animation/transformation code and added the English translation

Plus, Norika also has some reflections on project management for indie games. She’ll be writing a separate article about it, and I’ll be translating it in my own words, as usual.

Art & UI

This month hasn’t been easy for Norika. Her cold has been lingering, if not getting worse, and her neck issues flared up due to mistreatment during physiotherapy, which seriously affected her productivity as she was just unable to draw. But don’t worry, she’s recovering now.

As for the UI, we’ve always had a better version in mind. But when Demo 1.0 was released, we simply didn’t have enough time, so we had to go with the default Ren'Py layout. Last month, we posted some early drafts, and here’s a little spoiler:

The main design concept we’re going for is typewriter + magazine/journal collage style. While we may not be able to launch it in Demo 2.0, there will definitely be a journal feature, where you can check collected items, the dictionary, and maybe even find a little surprise or two.

Norika mentioned that she feels like she’s starting to grasp a few tricks of graphic design, and she plans to blend those techniques into scene/layout design. How exactly she’s going to do that… well, you’ll have to wait for Demo 2.0 to find out. What we can say is that there will be at least two important scenes with special design, but they involve spoilers, so we will keep them a secret for now.

On the art side, Norika is unsatisfied with some of her earlier work and that made her upset for a whole week, because, as I told her, she’s grown too much. When we started development, a friend told her she’d probably end up redrawing the sprites twice, and she’s already done it once. She made a vow not to keep endlessly redrawing and to wait until everything is finished before starting to refine things, otherwise she’ll never get to draw anything new.

And we’ll wrap up this section with a CG spoiler. If you’ve played the demo, you probably already know where Kazuya is at this moment.

Translation & Programming

I kinda forget everything I’ve done after finishing them off, but still, let’s see what I can dig out from my poor memory.

Step 1: Translate & proofread

This is the part where we divide credits, isn’t it?

First of all, a big thank you to our kind volunteer 橘子 (Orange). She completed the translation for more than half of the content in Demo 1.0. Norika handled the conversations for Kazuya, [spoiler], and [spoiler] after the scene with Hatsuyuki in the theatre. I did the rest of the translation, as well as proofreading everything. When I say "proofread," it was more like doing a second round of translation. But 橘子’s work made things so much easier for me. If I had been the only one working on the translation, it definitely wouldn’t have been released until, god knows when.

The translation approach I’ve taken is to faithfully reflect what Whitefish originally wrote in Chinese, translating it into English as literally as I can, including sentence structure, punctuation etc. It’s actually kinda interesting to think about how to play with words to achieve the effect I want and to convey the atmosphere I feel. Despite the joy in that thinking process, the work itself is still pretty tedious QAQ.

Anyway, we’ve managed to complete the English translation for Demo 1.0. Actually the Japanese translation is done as well, all thanks to our amazing volunteer 蛇村铃田. She did the whole thing single-handedly. Incredible. Now it’s just my responsibility to implement it and I shall fulfil that responsibility soon.

Step 2: Add translation and relevant UI assets

We did our translation in Excel, and I thought there would be a handy tool to convert .rpy files into Excel (or something like that, e.g., CSV) so that I could just easily copy and paste the translation, convert it back to .rpy files, and then be done. Since Ren'Py is such a mature community, I thought that would be the case.

But no.

I found a tool that does what I described above, but has some encoding problem with it. Then I asked around, and the answer was to add each line of translation manually, one by one—thousands of lines.

So what did I do. I opened one of those AI chatbots, sent it the .rpy with no translation and the translation, and asked it to fill it in for me. Then, as a very responsible human, I opened a text comparison website to make sure it didn’t change anything other than the translation I wanted it to add. The whole process took about 3 hours. God, I just wish I knew programming better so that I could write a convenient tool myself using that time.

Nevertheless, that’s done.

Then I translated pics and texts for opening announcements, ending thank-yous and the About section. Also I added a choice menu which allows players to choose the language when they first open the game, as well as switch it in the preferences. Norika and I also maded UI assets that we need to localise for, specifically the main menu buttons and one CG. Norika took this chance to renovate some of the UI design, hence in memory of the old ones you never had a chance to see and never will see again, here is a group photo and screenshot.

Step 3: Fix all the code that's causing errors which you could have done better to avoid them from happening

Here we’re getting a little bit technical, sorry but that’s what happens when you ask your programmer to write the dev log.

Okay, so, what have I done wrong.

First, the quick menu. When I switched to English, the buttons were just all over the place, because, obviously, English and Chinese text have different lengths. The namebox and the history section (which we call "script" in the game—cute, huh?) had the same issue, because, for example, "Kazuya Mochitsuki" is just "望月 和也" in Chinese. So I had to add a lot of styling code to make things look good in English. The same goes for items like the gifts Kotori receives. "桐花纹的礼物" becomes "Gifts with the Paulownia Seals" in English, which is almost twice as long. I should have made the code more flexible for different languages but I didn’t, so now I’m paying the price.

Next, variables. Some variables should’ve been dynamic, but I didn’t create them that way, so they wouldn’t switch to English automatically. Another lesson learned. That’s how you learn by doing.

And finally, I found a bug that caused the main menu to crash when everything else was done. I crashed with the main menu. After some debugging I figured out it was because I named a transformation main_menu, which is also the name of the screen main_menu. Naming, is, very, important. Remember that.

Script

Norika interviewed Whitefish about her writing progress. Whitefish admitted that she’s having a creative block: her inspiration comes and goes, and whenever she finishes a scene and looks back at it, nothing feels right. They share the same struggle, and I’m not sure if that’s a struggle every creator experiences, but I hope they will overcome, or at least find peace with it.

If you’ve played the demo, you might have noticed there’s a currently unavailable choice. That’s what Whitefish has been working on. Although the overall events remain the same regardless of which option you choose (with only the sequence varying), she’s still made subtle adjustments to reflect the characters’ personalities.

We’re not sure how many players will go through both paths to notice those details, but we believe that the effort we put into these little details won’t go unnoticed. Just like when we spend hours fine-tuning the characters’ facial expressions, and players tell us how vivid and expressive those subtle changes feel. Even if someone hasn’t read this dev log, if they’ve played the game, we hope they can feel the care and effort we’ve poured into it, and love the story we’re telling just a little more because of that.

Although not many people have discovered our game yet, we like to think that there are many out there who share our tastes and passions. And we just need to wait before they find us. I mean, who still reads articles this long these days? Well, we still do.

Thank you to everyone we’ve met through this game. With that, we’ll wrap up this month’s dev log.

All the best,

SweetSome