Well, I had a very productive couple of weeks off of work, including quite a few naps, hanging out with friends and family, playing board games, and having fun with my husband and brother playing The Last Guardian and a bit of World of Final Fantasy together on my brother's PS4. It was a lovely bit of time away from my job.
I also managed to make a significant amount of progress on the game translation without alienating everyone I know. Huzzah!
Updated stats:
Text:
95.81% of the text translated (+15.79% since last update; still 1400 blocks of text, plus maybe an additional 700 as a stretch goal if we decide to translate some bonus content that I didn't even know was there when I played the game in Japanese.)
Edited: 13.49% (not moving noticeably, but we're narrowing our focus to areas that were translated before all the terms were nailed down so the % done is not accurate for what we'll consider a release-ready text)
Graphics: 99.9% 'shopped (only one tricky image left to go, and then we have to check everything in-game to make sure there are no subtle glitches after image import)
So, what does 95% done translation mean? It is the entire story from start to final cutscene. I still need to translate 3 DLC quests and the associated "here's why you're doing this quest" context dialogs, as well as all of the Item and Imagen descriptions and some post-game things like the Moya Tower and a few other NPC conversations after you beat the game. We need to fix the 113 strings that our script has identified as being too long, and then we need to do a few cycles of playtest & bug fix using only the English PS3 PDF for reference (since that is what we'll be asking players to do).
I feel like
our playtest cycle is going to take a month or two, especially when you keep in mind that a playthrough is likely to take around 60 hours, but that we can use some of our save files to jump to certain areas to check on specific bug fixes. We do have the ability to use cheat codes in emulators to start with a max HP / MP set of characters, we won't need to do any level grinding to beat any bosses, so that might shave some time off of playthroughs, but... who knows.
This is a huge progress update, and I'm incredibly pleased to say that the end is definitely in sight. This time last year - hell, even August 2016 I felt like we might never finish this, but it is definitely possible now. We're going to make sure that our editing and playtesting and bugfixing all are given the same level of care that the rest of the process has been given, so please don't expect a release before the end of January, probably not even February.
I'll post another progress update once all of the remaining text has been translated, but the Imagen and Item description text is going to be super tedious and annoying because there isn't much space for the text to appear on screen and the descriptions are quite long in Japanese, so we'll have to edit it a few times to get it right, I'm betting.
Thank you for all of your support and patience! And, Happy New Year, folks!