ROM Hack Question Question about learning to make Game Translations

[RetroGenerica]

Hi, I've always been curious about making game translations and how to get started.
Is there someone here who might be able to lead me in the right direction? I'd love to learn more and hopefully put out some fan translations in the future.

 

[masagrator]

Hi, I've always been curious about making game translations and how to get started.
Is there someone here who might be able to lead me in the right direction? I'd love to learn more and hopefully put out some fan translations in the future.

There is no tutorial because most games need different things.
Decide what game you would to translate. The best case to start would be UE4 or Unity game thanks to rich tool support.
It would be good to have basic knowledge of programming language supporting file operations which would make things easier if you will meet some custom format.

 

[cearp]

In the most simple case, it's just replacing text.
What games do you want to translate? 10-20 year old games, new ones? I'm guessing switch ones since you're posting in the switch area.

For switch games, you'd want to start with this tool to extract a game https://github.com/DarkMatterCore/nxdumptool/releases
then just look in the files

if you want to start with something easy... I wouldn't choose switch, start with some gba game or something, where it's easy to quickly test your changes

 

[masagrator]

if you want to start with something easy... I wouldn't choose switch, start with some gba game or something, where it's easy to quickly test your changes

I wouldn't say that this is a big pro, when text is hardcoded and you need to either be wary of character limit, learn to use emulator hooks or how to work with assembly

Some Switch games are storing text in text files and fonts in TTF/OTF. I would say this is much more easier to work with than what old roms provides. And it's not that you need to look at display all the time you're translating,