2/22 Update: Mea Culpa

Well, it’s been longer than I usually try to go between updates.  At this point we’re clearly stretching the definition of “soon” and I’m sorry about that.  That’s partly unavoidable and partly my fault.  The Colosseum has turned out to need considerably more work that I had estimated, at the time of the last post I hadn’t looked closely at those files, since we had planned on saving them for last, as they’re mostly not as important as the story or the NPCs and side quests.

The Colosseum files are structured differently than all of the game’s other files.  Where most conversations look like you’d imagine they would, a string where one person’s dialogue shows up is followed by either that person’s next line, or a line spoken by someone else, with a speaker ID in the metadata, the Colosseum files are not like that at all.  The Speaker ID data is calculated completely different from any other text file we encountered. To make it short: We can’t really find the Speaker ID at this point. In the mean time, we are working on those files, but it’s a lot slower to need to open up the game, have a save file with all of the Colosseum battles available, and see who says what where.  A fair number of them seem pretty straight forward, they’re basically filler there to add some content, so the dialogue doesn’t get very involved, but some of them, particularly the sidequests that happen in the Colosseum are more complicated.

Also unavoidable was the limitations on our time.  I took three months off of school at the end of last year for reasons I won’t get in to here, and that gave me a lot more time to work on this project, and we made a lot of progress during that time.  Fortunately for my eventual career, but unfortunately for this project, I went back to school a few days after I made the last post, and Romsstar started his Master’s degree program.  In a few weeks I’ll be done with this term and will need to transfer to a different university, where I won’t be able to start classes until the fall, so I’ll once again have several months in which I’ll have lots of time to work on translation projects, which I’m looking forward to.

Here’s the part that’s all my fault though. I shouldn’t have made a public prediction about our release schedule.  It seemed reasonable enough at the time that I made those predictions, and I did go out of my way to say they weren’t guaranteed, but it was still foolish of me.  We’re still going to release, and there’s still a comparatively small amount of work left to do, but I can’t promise we’ll make the kind of progress we’d like to until I finish out the term in mid March, and given what happened last time, I’m not going to make any public predictions about a release date again, though we’ll keep you informed of the progress we make as we make it.  I apologize to anyone who has been upset at our lack of progress, and while I can’t promise slow downs won’t happen in the future, I will try to be better about not promising things I am not 100% certain can be delivered.  The vast majority of people have been extremely patient and kind, and I think I speak for everyone on the team when I say that we appreciate it.