Oldcomer here, taking up a not so anonymous name this time. Who I actually am is of no real importance, although I'm sure a fair few might be able to recognise me by the way I type.
I just want to ask what your stance on an individual working on a solo translation project but asking for donations? I'm juggling two jobs at the same time and am in full time education so I don't have much time. And want to save up money for a new computer to do some heavy programming work on as a games programmer.
The reason why I intend to do it solo without using anyone else's sources is because usually when it comes to translation projects, people either leave, give up, argue over who did what and things fall apart.
Now I'm sitting here with a 75% transcribed and 50% translated Excel sheet of Klonoa Heroes.
This includes all menus, items, tutorials, villager conversations, sidequests and obviously the dialogue and cutscenes themselves which most people focus on before giving up. Where I got it from? Answer should be obvious.
I'm an old fan of Klonoa and I'm trilingual, and given I'm studying a programming course; the romhacking should be good practice.
If I get to the romhacking phase, would the board here be ok if I posted a donations link? It'd give me an incentive to finish this project off. Otherwise I'll have to just continue doing mundane regular people jobs to save up money for a new computer. Currently both my gaming computers are down, and being an avid gaming nerd,
this is an absolute nightmare.Of course I refuse to accept donations until I get to the romhacking phase though - I have values and standards I abide by. If for some reason I just can't get around romhacking and finding what hexcodes to edit and how to insert and edit fonts, I don't want to be taking people's money without having actually contributed anything - That's just sucky.
If you are doubtful of my claims:
![](http://puu.sh/a6WW6/e1a7ccfa1b.png)
Well I dunno what the proper way to hold translations properly as I'm a scrub and this is the first time I'm doing it; I just used excel.
But most of it (everything accessible up to Chapter 6) is transcribed, a good portion of it translated (but that's easy when you understand the language - the hard time consuming part was transcribing everything and keeping the motivation to do so, changing menus screens here and there, meticulously checking I had gotten EVERYTHING including item descriptions and shop descriptions).
I mean who knows if you support me on this current project you might be greenlighting my way towards a potential career of creating spiritual successors to this series, or other things.
STATUS:
NON ROMHACKING BUSINESS:
Transcription (95%) - Diffculty:
EasyNotes: Bestiary left largely untranscribed, rest of game content ready for translation.
Translation: (25%) - Difficulty:
Very EasyNotes: What can I say? This part is the easiest part - However I'm not going to translate it word for word other than things like the Tutorial and certain gameplay features that require an 100% accurate translation in order for the player to know how to play the game.
Rewriting dialogue and plot (0%) - Difficulty:
Relatively EasyNotes: I'm a better writer than Yoshizawa. The characters are very static and in most cases one dimensional. The basic outline and plot of the game will remain largely unchanged. The dialogue itself I will take large liberties with to give the characters more life and to make them generally more appealing and likable, and to have more depth in general - Whether it be making certain characters wittier, making dialogue flow more, making them less annoying, and just things that will bring a smile to the player.
In rare cases like Janga, Garlen and possibly even Nahatomb will I be changing the dialogue significantly to give them more depth they didn't have to begin with. Joker on the other hand is a character where being evil and a complete goof off for no raisin just works for him. If possible I'd be adding scenes with Janga and Joker's somewhat odd personalities communicating with each other in a more comical fashion other than "I heard an explosion is the rocket ok?".
Because as much as spending several lines cursing back and forth at each other over the topic of daddy vengeance, or "The big brain am winning again" can only go so far. People just aren't THAT fond of 90s saturday morning cartoon villains mixed with poorly executed grimdark plotdevices.
Messing with extra content just so that there's a little extra fun for those who have already played and understood the game in Japanese (0%) - Difficulty:
Medium HardNotes: Not as important, will be the last thing I do; People do like my character designs, and this would simply just be an exercise in reverse engineering a rom to the point I can edit stages, change sound effects and music, and possibly add a character to experiment with.
ROMHACKING BUSINESS:
Text Table Generation - (50%) Difficulty -
Medium HardNotes: The entirety of regular cutscene text has been deciphered. A text table is practically a filter you apply over the top of the hex code to change the appearance of certain hex values into something more readable. An arduous task made easier after sheer luck from using the search string "よ*ろ*し*く" which bagged me the phrase 「よろしくたのむ」giving me a starting point to create a table from, and then making Guntz say stupid things in incremental values of Hex to fill out the rest of the hexdictionary. Still have yet to decipher certain text like the mini item description text, as well as location titles in Kanji and so forth.
This puts me in a position to translate all the cutscenes in the game HOWEVER all dialogue would be brief and concise, removing even more character from a game that
gravely needs it.Finding and compiling a list of hexflags that determine what the chunk of code is (1%) Difficulty:
HardNotes: This will allow me to control the flow of every cutscene instead of being limited to overwriting the text space that is provided.
Determining the very structure and nature of the rom compilation and how where it references to certain addresses in the code to preform the appropriate function at the right time (2%) Difficulty:
Very HardNotes:This will allow me to inject large chunks of text and data without worrying about ruining or overwriting the rest of the code.
Locating the fontmap and fonttiles and replacing the latter half of the dictionary with lower case roman letters (0%) Difficulty:
EasyNotes: I'll do it when I feel like doing it; the other stuff I'd rather get done first to see if I can actually do it.
APPLYING THE TRANSLATION:
This is around the time I start opening up a donations account (0%) Difficulty:
Easy, but long and time consuming.Notes: If I make it this far, it means the translation will eventually get done, and that everything is generally green lit, meaning I can be certain I'll be able to finish the project. Now all I need is a little financial motivation.