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    • OH JOES! (A Proto Man Adventure)
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OH JOES! Developer Diary #6: Writing and Translating

6/15/2018

3 Comments

 
Story navigation: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

I don't play video games for the story. Story is a nice bit of seasoning you sprinkle on top to give the gameplay more flavor. I'm not opposed to story-heavy games (see: Chrono Trigger, Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic), but when it comes to Mega Man, all you really need is an excuse to go blow up robots.

I knew I wanted an intro cutscene for OH JOES!, and I knew I wanted to keep it short. With such a simple premise (Regular Joe steals Proto Man's shield; gameplay ensues), I could afford to devote most of the panels to developing a story that's essentially a tongue-in-cheek explanation of why I made the game in the first place.

Proto Man is always portrayed as a loner in the official Mega Man games, but even a loner needs a place to hang his helmet. I thought it might be interesting if, after rescuing Kalinka in Mega Man 4, Proto Man developed a rapport with the Cossack family. He might have run away from Dr. Light's lab, but maybe he received an open invitation to drop by Dr. Cossack's Siberian citadel anytime. This was a perfect way to get Kalinka involved in the story of OH JOES!, and I like how the situation itself implies some character development without me needing to devote any screen time to it. Sneaking in a little trivia about the origin of Sniper Joes was a bonus.
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In his official appearances, Proto Man is typically casual, concise, and opinionated in his speech; and his moments of silence reflect that he's got more to say than he's letting on. Kalinka, on the other hand, has only a couple lines in one scene of one game—but you can still extrapolate that she's articulate, compassionate, and a little formal. Although OH JOES! isn't always 100% faithful to the source material (eg, fudging the color choices when the NES palette was too restrictive), I wanted to make sure the dialogue fit the established personalities of these characters.

If we assume that Proto Man has been hanging out with the Cossacks off and on for the last several years, it's plausible that Kalinka has adopted Proto Man as sort of an older brother figure, and that Proto Man has grown comfortable being less reserved and aloof around her. Hopefully I captured their distinctive voices in the way the dialogue is written, because the actual content of the dialogue is basically just me having a discussion with myself. Proto Man's complaints are my complaints about the games I've played, and Kalinka's optimism is my optimism for the game you're about to play.
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The last few panels hang a lantern on why Proto Man has this small, random assortment of weapons when the game begins; why the weapons aren't completely accurate to the original games; and why Break Man is a playable character. These aren't things that need to be explained, but they help set player expectations for the gameplay, and I always appreciate it when there's a story reason (however flimsy) for design decisions that have nothing to do with the story.
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Of course, these are the panels as they appeared upon the game's release. The initial draft (and there were really only two drafts, initial and final) used more words to say less:
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I do miss the throwaway joke about the closet full of Skeleton Joes (my wife had some fun "thought bubble" art planned for that), and I'm still amused at the thought of interrupting my own cutscene with the theft of the Proto Shield when things start getting longwinded. Like, "okay, you've had enough plot; go play the game now."

The intro cutscene was one of the first things I finished for the game, and I didn't need to do any other writing for over half a year. By early 2017, the game had expanded to four stages, the last of which contained a secret "break room" where the player could chat with a bunch of friendly Joes. I don't get to do it often, but I love writing NPC dialogue. Most of the break room text is purely for comedic purposes, but Apache Joe and especially Rider Joe break the fourth wall a little to explain why they aren't featured in the game.

Given the increased length of the game, I expected the player to see the game over screen at least a couple times. Influenced by both the randomized game over messages of Mega Man: Super Fighting Robot and the irreverent and occasionally informative death messages of Sierra adventure games, I began writing very helpful gameplay tips that would appear at random upon a game over.
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The hints underwent numerous revisions as the level design evolved and as more gameplay options were introduced. When all was said and done, I had 74 distinct game over messages. That's pretty absurd when you consider the original screen count for this game was half that number.

However, the method of determining which game over message you receive is more complex than simply rolling a 74-sided digital die. This gets into programming territory, but the short version is that a number of variables control which game over messages you'll potentially see. In addition to pulling from a pool of general gameplay tips, the randomizer also considers which character and difficulty mode you've selected, which JOES letters you've collected, and where you died in the level.
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Invisible to the player is a "global.COD" (cause of death) variable that changes every time you start or finish a gimmick path. There's a 1/14 chance that the message you get will specifically pertain to quicksand, magnets, or whatever gimmick was present in the section where you died. Generic sections with no gimmick offer some boring tips that really belong in an instruction manual; I should have been more judicious about cutting weak and superfluous tips. I did sneak in a couple hard-to-find messages—there's a global.COD variable specifically for the final boss, and there are special messages that you will only and always get by self-destructing or by holding your breath underwater too long as the secret character.

Writing good game over messages is hard. You've got to be sensitive to the fact that the player might be touchy or downright angry after dying (and I'm not convinced I entirely succeeded here). Any hints need to be genuinely useful, either by revealing something the player might not have realized or by reinforcing a core survival strategy. Any humor needs to soften the blow, encouraging the player to laugh about their failure instead of feeling like a failure. That's why most of the snarky game over messages don't show up until you've collected some of the JOES letters—by that point, you're probably far enough that you have a handle on the game's sense of humor and need a quick laugh more than you need a hint.
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The space restrictions offered another layer of difficulty. I was able to fit six lines of text in the message box, but the number of characters per line varied because I wasn't using a fixed-width font. I had to scale back my usual verbosity and micromanage the exact wording of certain hints to fit the space. Moreover, I didn't have the programming knowledge to force automatic line breaks, so every line break had to be done by hand. The testing process for this was outrageously inefficient; I programmed a keyboard key to send me to the game over screen, randomly scrambling the variables that affect what messages might display, and I kept hitting the key to reload the screen until I saw the messages I wanted to check.

Keep in mind that the size of the message window changed once or twice during the development process, and that I kept adding and updating messages any time I wanted to work on the game but didn't feel like doing any of the harder tasks. I spent untold hours finessing these messages. When one of my playtesters suggested making it easier to tell when you were entering a new stage, I slapped together a transition screen showcasing some of the game over hints people were less likely to see—which meant completely redoing all the line breaks yet again, and testing them in the same inefficient manner. This was one of the most tedious parts of the development process...and then I decided to do it again in three other languages.
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As the curator of what might be the most comprehensive list of Mega Man fangames on the Internet, I can tell you that the ratio of unilingual to multilingual fangames is at least 200 to 1. Language options are an extreme rarity. If you don't speak English, you're pretty much out of luck. You'll find a handful of games in Japanese, one or two games in Spanish or Chinese, and not much else. I know from personal experience that the Mega Man fan community is an international one, so I had every intention of making OH JOES! accessible to a broader audience.

I went to school to be a Spanish teacher, but I only briefly entertained the notion of doing a Spanish translation for OH JOES! myself. I'm out of practice, and my vocabulary is better suited to ordering lemonade and identifying color-coded farm animals than to advising players that they've been a real pantload. I'd have to do a lot of research and brushing up on grammar, and I'd want to run my translations by a native speaker no matter what. I was willing to put in the effort, but it made more sense from an efficiency and quality perspective to ask a native speaker to do the whole thing. Fortunately, I knew a guy.

Dan Castro and I were on staff together at GameCola for several years, and he had written some articles about video game localization and had done some localization/translation work himself. He was my first choice for translating OH JOES! into Spanish, and he kindly agreed to the project. Around the same time, I put out a call for translators on Discord and Sprites INC—any language you could speak, I'd try to add to the game. Garirry, one of the judges for Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 2, volunteered to do a French translation. PKWeegee, another MaGMML community dweller, signed up for a German translation. I also received offers for Malay, Russian, and Latin, but nothing ultimately came of them.

Occasionally, a translator would ask me for some context to help them decide how to translate a line. My favorite instance of this was being asked what Scuba Joe meant by saying "Blub." Y'know...blub. It's a way of life. It's the noise you make when blowing bubbles underwater. What cracks me up is that, in French, this translates to "Bloup." I don't know why that's so funny to me, but I laugh every time I see it.
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The translators were the very last people I recruited for the project, because I wanted to ensure the text was absolutely final before getting them involved. I felt it would be a waste of their time to translate anything that was still subject to change, and I didn't want to be That Guy who kept asking for revisions after the work was supposedly finished—and I especially didn't want anybody to bail before the project was over. Spanish notwithstanding, translation was the one aspect of the game I absolutely couldn't finish up myself. I had backup plans if all my programmers, composers, artists, and playtesters jumped ship, but I wasn't about to lean on Google Translate to fill in any gaps.

However, I did use Google Translate to check that the translations did indeed say what I thought they said. "Trust, but verify," as the saying goes. Between Google's translations of the translations, my understanding of Spanish, and my limited recollection of French and German from trips abroad, I got an interesting picture of what my game was like in different languages. Translation isn't a straightforward process; there's a lot of linguistic and cultural context to take into consideration, so literal translations don't always convey the right tone or meaning. As far as I can tell, the translators did a good job capturing the spirit of the text. With the Spanish translation, I was even able to appreciate specific word and phrase choices.

To keep things organized for myself and the translators, I dumped the entire game script and all the menu text into a Word document, organized everything into categories (identifying what was most and least essential to translate, if time/energy/interest became an issue), indicated any length restrictions, and numbered each line of text so I could quickly match up the translations with the original text. As it turns out, OH JOES! contains 8 single-spaced pages' worth of text. For comparison, the dialogue-heavy Mega Man 7 weighs in at only 3 pages. Maybe I'll write a visual novel next time.
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My favorite part was matching up the randomized disclaimer text that appears when you start the game. I felt amusingly insulted to discover that the French translation of "DECOMPILE AT YOUR OWN RISK; MY CODE IS PROBABLY TERRIBLE" omitted the "PROBABLY" part. I laughed out loud at Google Translate's attempts to turn German into English, with such gems as "DECOMPILE WITH CAUTION; MY CODE IS FEARABLE," "IF YOU FIND ERRORS YOU ARE WRONG," and "IF YOU BELIEVE, PRESS 2."

Implementing the translations was tricky. There's a lot of programming involved in changing text from one language to another; it's not necessarily difficult programming, but you need to keep track of everything in the game that displays text, and you need to keep the code organized enough to not get confused when conditional or randomized text comes into play. In my case, I also had to keep track of image files with text as part of the picture. Despite knowing almost from the beginning that I might want to translate the game, I didn't bother making arrangements to accommodate translations until far too late. I knew this was a mistake; I would've saved a lot of time and effort by planning the game around language options from the get-go.

For the most part, I was able to keep revisions to a minimum. There were a few additional requests—for one thing, I had completely overlooked the need to translate "READY." For another thing, several playtesters expressed some confusion over what to do when they reached Dr. Cossack's lab, so I reworked his dialogue to be more direct and instructional. Unfortunately, this meant ditching two lines that I would've liked to have kept. One was the line about mushroom dumplings, pictured above; the other (which I guess I could have kept, but was too tired of programming at that point to deal with it) was in response to playing as Kalinka without having met the conditions for unlocking her: "Oh, Kalinka. I see you've been hacking your save file again. I thought we agreed you'd stop doing that."

I was originally planning on including a digital instruction manual with the game, but I wondered if it would be worth the time. Hardly anybody reads instruction manuals anymore, and anyone downloading OH JOES! probably already has a basic understanding of how to play Mega Man. On top of that, the translators already had a hefty workload, and I was concerned about what might happen if I needed to make revisions in the future and couldn't get all the translators back on board.

In retrospect, the better plan would have been to do an English-only initial release, incorporate feedback from the general public, and then translate the game once things were actually unlikely to change further. Still, I'm grateful to the translators for sticking with me, and I'm very impressed that the entire game was available in four different languages on release day. I'm very confident that's a first for a Mega Man fangame, and I've had at least a couple people express appreciation that the game is available in their language.

OK, so technically not the entire game got translated. A few items (eg, "CHARGE SFX") were deliberately left untranslated per the suggestion of one or more translators. Most notably (for me, at least), the alternate languages only have about a dozen randomized disclaimers, whereas English has...58. Coming up with disclaimers was pure fun, and my brain gravitated toward crafting more whenever I had an idle moment. I didn't think it was fair to keep foisting new disclaimers on the translators, and several of the phrases really only work in English (given that they're often nerdy quotes or riffs on warnings or product slogans in English). I told the translators they were welcome to provide their own silly disclaimers, but none did.
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For posterity, and for people with better things to do than continually refreshing the startup screen until they see the message they're looking for, I leave you with the complete list of English disclaimers for OH JOES!:

  1. FLASHMAN85'S WARDROBE BY WHEREVER THESE CLOTHES CAME FROM
  2. DO NOT NIBBLE ON OH JOES! LEAVE OH JOES! AT ROOM TEMPERATURE
  3. IF YOU FIND ANY GLITCHES, IT MEANS YOU'RE PLAYING WRONG
  4. DECOMPILE AT YOUR OWN RISK; MY CODE IS PROBABLY TERRIBLE
  5. OH JOES! STAYS CRUNCHY, EVEN IN MILK
  6. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED; BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED
  7. NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE
  8. READING THIS TEXT WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY
  9. OH JOES! IS SUITABLE FOR VEGETARIANS
  10. DO NOT OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY WHILE PLAYING OH JOES!
  11. SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: DON'T DIE
  12. THE MANAGEMENT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR SHENANIGANS
  13. MACHINE WASH COLD WITH LIKE COLORS; TUMBLE DRY LOW
  14. PLEASE REPORT ANY UNFAIR CHALLENGES TO SOMEONE WHO CARES
  15. JUST KIDDING; YOU'RE ACTUALLY ABOUT TO PLAY 'MAZE OF DEATH'
  16. NOW LOADING PAIN AND SUFFERING
  17. I HOPE YOU WIN
  18. NINE OUT OF TEN DOCTORS AGREE: YOU'RE ABOUT TO PLAY OH JOES!
  19. THIS SPACE FOR RENT
  20. EXTRA LIVES ARE DONATED TO CHARITY AFTER EACH GAME
  21. NO JOES WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF THIS SENTENCE
  22. FUN WILL NOW COMMENCE
  23. SHOUTING 'SIZZLING CIRCUITS!' WILL NOT BE TOLERATED
  24. OH JOES! IS NOT INTENDED FOR WOOZY WATER BUFFALOES
  25. EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE PLAYING OH JOES!
  26. OH JOES! HAS BEEN TESTED ON ANIMALS; THEY ENJOYED IT
  27. IF YOU GET BORED DURING NORMAL GAMEPLAY, PRESS 2
  28. BASED ON A TRUE STORY
  29. NO PIZZA UNTIL YOU BEAT THE GAME
  30. HAVE FUN, OR ELSE
  31. OH JOES! IS MADE POSSIBLE BY PLAYERS LIKE YOU
  32. IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF A WATER LANDING, OH JOES! CAN BE USED AS A FLOTATION DEVICE
  33. MAY YOU NEVER FIND ROCKS IN YOUR SANDALS
  34. OH JOES! IS THE CANONICAL LINK TO THE OH JOES! SERIES
  35. EXCESSIVE ENJOYMENT MAY RESULT IN A SEQUEL
  36. RETICULATING SPLINES
  37. FREE HUGS; INQUIRE WITHIN
  38. WHEN YOU FALL IN A BOTTOMLESS PIT, YOU DIE OF STARVATION
  39. OH JOES! TASTES SO GOOD, CATS ASK FOR IT BY NAME
  40. HOW APPROPRIATE. YOU FIGHT LIKE A COW.
  41. OH JOES! IS FILMED IN FRONT OF A LIVE STUDIO AUDIENCE
  42. I LIKE SHORTS; THEY'RE COMFY AND EASY TO WEAR
  43. OH JOES! IS MANUFACTURED IN A FACILITY THAT PROCESSES PEANUTS
  44. OH JOES! IS CLOSED DURING NORMAL BUSINESS HOURS
  45. YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME
  46. PLEASE REMAIN SEATED UNTIL THE GAME COMES TO A COMPLETE STOP
  47. ALSO AVAILABLE ON LASERDISC, BETAMAX, 8-TRACK, AND VINYL
  48. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, IF APPLICABLE
  49. IT IS PITCH BLACK; YOU ARE LIKELY TO BE EATEN BY A GRUE
  50. OH JOES! IS NOT GONNA WRITE YOU A LOVE SONG
  51. GETTING STUCK IN A WALL IS A SIGN OF GOOD LUCK
  52. DOES ANYBODY EVEN READ THIS STUFF?
  53. OH JOES! IS CONVENIENTLY LOCATED RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU
  54. YOU ARE DRESSED APPROPRIATELY TO PLAY OH JOES!
  55. EXTRA LIFE EVERY 6,000,050 POINTS
  56. I HOPE YOU DIDN'T PAY FULL PRICE FOR THIS
  57. SKIPPING THE INTRO CUTSCENE IS A FEDERAL CRIME
  58. DON'T BLOW UP. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.
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    This work by Nathaniel Hoover is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
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