And they are fairly short. By and large, between the fairly straightforward nature of the game and script and the general size of the script compared to either Recettear or Fortune Summoners, there were not a particularly large number of changes made. The flip side of the coin is that there were only two substantial changes made, but they are a bit larger than any change made to either of our other extant titles. Both can spoil the plot of the game to some extent, and so are hidden under the jump. (And remember, reading this post first is a good idea to get a primer on why we do things the way we do.)

Chante: The Nature of Childishness

The first substantial change made was to Chante’s speech patterns; the changes made to her lines went somewhat above and beyond what is normally done with a character in our process, and I feel I need to justify the magnitude of the changes we made.

Both the script itself and EGS’ notes to us call for Chante to be the more “childish” of the two sisters, despite being older than Elise, and yet to still have moments of older-sister clarity and responsibility. In Japanese, the childishness comes across in Chante’s use of short phrases, onomatopoeia and general “childish sounds”. In English, however, this ran the risk of her sounding almost like a mental two-year-old at times, which would have been at overly dissonant odds with her moments of clarity. So I elected to pull more toward a “grade-schooler” sound in English. That is, a kid who talks a lot and I mean a pretty large amount with run on sentences that use up a good bit of the textbox AND ALSO PRETTY LOUDLY SOMETIMES.

Based on the feedback we’ve gotten, as well as my own personal reading of the script afterwards, it worked very well, but it did constitute effectively rewriting the diction of every single one of Chante’s lines. As always, the meaning has not been changed – we actually asked questions of EGS at times to ensure we were getting the meaning of everything right – but on a word-for-word basis, Chante is definitely the most “altered” of the characters I’ve worked on so far and virtually none of her lines in the published CF English version are close to what they are in Japanese.

Also, as a matter of full disclosure, the “shins” running joke is a bit like “Capitalism Ho” – an invention of your humble editor. Chante does occasionally threaten bodily violence on people in a humorous but non-specific way at various points, but her obsession with assaulting shins is unique to the English version.

(Also also, since I imagine it will come up: the Zelda Joke toward the end of the game is one of the few places where Chante’s lines are not altered. That is essentially verbatim from the original script, every line.)

Fortuna: Fortune Does Not Favor The… Mirai?

The other change is somewhat more substantial in meaning, and represents what might be termed a “breach” of policy for CF… as it is, to date, the only time we have completely renamed a character.

The “glasses-wearing former shop owner” character, depicted to the left, was named Mirai in the original script. Some of our more Japanese-familiar readers may recognize this as the word for “future” in Japanese, though the name was spelled out as ミライ rather than as the actual word. We did check with EGS, however, and this was a deliberate bit of symbolism – she is the character who sets much of the plot in motion in order to save “the future”, when our sister protagonists arrive. Her name even forms a bit of a pun/a bit of symbolism in the title of the final chapter, as it is simply titled “mirai” – both her name, and “future”.

This, of course, presented us with a very large problem.

Especially based on feedback received from Recettear, we knew that while most of our fanbase might be passingly familiar with bits of Japanese culture, we absolutely could not guarantee that a majority – or even a significant minority – of purchasers of the game would understand the symbolism if her name was left unaltered. And also, she was basically named “future” in Japanese so to any Japanese player the meaning would be obvious, and it felt like the same should be true of the English version – everyone should be able to get it.

This was further exacerbated by the fact that there are few, if any, names common to the English language (or its cousins) which directly mean “future”. The best I could come up with was Skuld from Norse mythology, which was sufficiently obtuse as to still risk many people missing the symbolism. In the end, I came up with a different solution – we would change not just her name, but in some ways the meaning of her name.

She would become Fortuna, representing the hope that her plans would work out in a “fortunate” way in the future and that, while a gamble, she was trying to break the cycle of “hero creation” and sealing that had been perpetuating itself for who knows how long. The name of the final chapter was even changed to “Fortuna Favors The Bold”, completing the pun and symbolism (and making it very clear to 95%+ of English readers). This was, however, a complete departure from CF’s usual practices and something we previously thought to not do – changing a name, and its meaning, completely.

I ended up agonizing over this idea for weeks (as Robin can tell you with a heavy sigh). We told EGS of the plan and gave them full veto control over it – twice. Both times, they said “yes, do it” – they recognized that it was an alteration, but also that leaving the name alone risked many people not understanding the symbolism without help, while Fortuna would be clear to most readers.

And so in the end, the Fortuna change went to print. I don’t regret it, though it’s still something I don’t wish to make a habit of. And our fans do deserve to know about this – even if it is some time after Chantelise’s release.

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Two years on, it’s safe to say we’ve gotten a bit more than that.

I know the blog, and indeed Carpe Fulgur in a wider sense, seems like it has been on silent running ever since Fortune Summoners was released. In a sense, we have been – but that’s been due to the fact that what we’re currently working on is bound under non-disclosure agreements. This isn’t quite what we had planned – we’d originally hoped to lift the veil of secrecy over Project Four some months ago. The day where that will actually happen is hopefully now not far off. Know, however, that we have not been idle – far from it. We’ve been working on a project that we think is wonderful and that we desperately wish to share with you. The very instant we can do that, you will know. Because we want to talk about it.

This blog post is not about announcing that, though. It’s about discussing where we’ve been and what’s going on right now.

What is going on right now, first and foremost, is our large summer sale on Steam. It’s been up for a while now and I suspect many of you saw it, but  as of this posting it will be up for another 18 hours. The CF Collection can also be thought of as “CF: The First Two Years” – it is all three of our games collected at one low price (namely, 75% off). Each game can also be purchased individually for 75% off as well, if you wish. If you’ve been waiting to get Fortune Summoners especially, now is your chance, as it will not be on sale like this again for quite some time.

Also, the soon-to-be-present holds a pair of convention trips for Robin and I. We will be traveling to Japan again for the 82nd Comiket convention to scout new potential titles, as well as meet with our current partners to strategize for the coming year. I suspect we will be in particularly deep counsel with EasyGameStation over various things. We will also be at PAX Prime – we attempted to get a solo panel just for CF, but didn’t quite manage it. I will be on a panel with several other indie-RPG luminaries (such as Robert Boyd and Jeff Vogel) discussing the path RPG mechanics are taking, among other things (and I can hopefully get a few words in on the subject of localization), but we will not have a “proper” solo panel.

And finally, this blog. This is not the only blog post I intend to make this month – old words, perhaps, but now I have the time and energy to back up my intent. Over the next week or two, to commemorate the two-year anniversary of Carpe Fulgur’s reveal to the world, I will be posting about various subjects, including the long-needed editor’s notes to both Chantelise and Fortune Summoners, and once the Steam Sale is over, something everyone always looks forward to – hard number updates across all distro platforms for all three titles and a discussion of how successful they’ve been. (We have, admittedly, waited on discussing this for FS because we knew that its first big sale would go a long way to determining how successful it would be in the long term.)

And really finally, because we perhaps do not say it often enough: thank you. You people, our fans, Recettear’s fans, Fortune Summoners’ fans, indie RPG fans, are the people who have given wind to our sails, as cliche as that may sound. Without you, none of what we’ve accomplished – or intend to accomplish in the year(s) to come – would be possible. Your continued support is the main reason we get out of bed in the morning.

We’ve been in business to the public for two years now – it’s almost mindblowing to think that we’ve been doing this for years now. I can’t wait to discuss where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and what we’re doing with all of you.

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This all perhaps requires some defense.  First of all, as a general mea culpa, the second delay announcement itself came so late due to the fact that I’m in the middle of changing apartments and thus my Internet situation is spotty at best at the moment. I’d actually hoped to have Fortune Summoners out before I moved, but that didn’t quite shake out. (The good news is, the move will make it tremendously easier for Robin and I to get things done in the long run.)

More generally, though, Fortune Summoners is being held back for a reason. This may not smooth any furrowed brows, but I can say this: the game is actually playable, right now. It can be played to completion in English.

We aren’t just settling for “playable”, however.

From the start, one of the goals I set for Fortune Summoners as a project was that the release would be absolutely flawless – that we’d release the game and then would have no need to patch it. While Recettear and Chantelise were both well-received in their respective launches, the sad fact is that they both launched with issues that required patching – multiple times, in Recettear’s case. (As you can imagine, the initial state of the FS demo left us a bit frustrated and left me wondering how I missed one or two of those issues.)

This isn’t actually acceptable to us, especially not if we intend to expand our business out onto platforms where patching *isn’t* readily available. We have to prove, to ourselves, our potential partners and most of all to you guys, our fans, that we can produce a product that is flawless out of the gate.

So we are taking the time to really get FS right. A few crash bugs were found in the last build, in particular, that were completely unacceptable in a game people would be paying money for. We wanted to make sure we corrected EVERYTHING before we got the game in your hands.

There have been other considerations as well – schedule timing with our distributors compared to when we had builds of the game available, for example – but above all, this is about quality. We were perhaps a little hasty in announcing a date for FS – a lesson Robin’s been whacking me over the head with, I assure you – but I would much rather give our customers something as close to perfect as we can make it, rather than something rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline.

I hope everyone understands, and don’t worry – Fortune Summoners will be in your hands very, very soon.

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So apparently people are excited about a certain little thing we’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s a little surprising, to be honest, but then I am such a terrible judge of these things.

Snark aside, we have indeed unleashed our second game translation project on the world today; our English-localized version of EasyGameStation’s first “original-content” title, Chantelise. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while now, and I’m glad we can finally get it into your waiting, eager hands. We’ve worked hard to make this every bit as good as our Recettear localization, and I’ll be publishing some “loc notes” on the game toward the end of August, after people have had a chance to get to the spoiler bits in the game proper. Needless to say there is some stuff to discuss there, as we simultaneously made fewer changes overall compared to Recettear, but a few of them are bigger in “scope”. (Though not without reason!)

There’s a few things worth addressing here, though. One is exactly what this version of Chantelise, which is 1.1 both here and in Japan, has over previous releases (including DHM Interactive’s previous multilingual release)… but, more importantly for a lot of our longer-time fans, I suspect: what in the bloody hell took so long with this game?

- A Tale Of Two Herpaderpers

As many Recettear fans likely remember, Chantelise was first announced in an offhand, casual fashion way, way back in the blogpost I made to kick off this year. We did, in fact, have early binaries and an open client for script translation and insertion when I made that post, and the contract for Chantelise had been signed but a week prior (we having just gotten word of DHM’s impending demise and the freeing of the Chantelise license for Europe, which was the clincher for us pulling the trigger on the project). We were pretty much ready to begin work right then and there.

We then proceeded to do precisely dick-all with the game for two and a half months.

This isn’t actually nearly as “SpaceDrake is a monument to the concept of durf” as it might be made out to be. January and February were devoted almost entirely to the fairly significant enterprise of shipping my scrawny caucasian buttocks clear across the continental United States. You see, even before Recettear went to market, a decision had been made. Recettear’s localization development took a period of approximately eight months – largely due to the fact that Robin and I were telecommuting from clear across the damn country and were having to constantly wrestle with timezone issues  and schedule synching, never mind the fact that I wasn’t even living on my own at the time and had to deal with housework and the like (unsurprisingly, my folks were rather skeptical of my claims that this could become a Real Job while Recettear was in loc-development). Given this, if Recettear made enough money for everyone involved to make a living wage on – and this would mean it would have to be a reasonably robust success -  then I’d move from my home in Fairfax, Virginia out to the area Robin lived in, in Portland, Oregon. Being able to work a) together b) without interference and c) in the same timezone and on the same schedule would speed up future efforts immensely. It was just a question of whether or not Recettear would allow it.

Once the Carpe Fulgur bank account crested the six-figure mark, the question was pretty well answered.

Of course, crossing one of the largest countries on Earth, with possessions, while simultaneously moving out on your own for the first real time (college not really counting) is no small undertaking, and in the end it consumed the entirety of January (including an epic trip across the U.S. in a U-Haul in which my Volkswagen Beetle dangled like a worm on a hook for 3000 miles and came close to needless destruction at least twice; furthermore, many Frappucinos perished in the line of duty), and February was consumed by dealing with the thousand minutiae of moving in to my new place and getting settled and ready to be productive.

The beginning of March, of course, saw me attending the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference, where Important Stuff DID happen, but it basically delayed the game for a week. And then, driving home, my left arm almost died.

I still have no explanation for exactly what happened – the best guess I have is that I managed to pinch a nerve or sprain my wrist SOMEHOW. Either way, right after getting home from GDC my arm was in a full-arm splint for a week, pushing us back even further. So I announced Chantelise at the beginning of the year and we didn’t even get started on it until late into the second week of March. That was the biggest delay.

The good news is, moving paid off; Chantelise’s script is small compared to Recettear’s monster of a script (which includes all those optional events you can see), but even then we blazed through the gametext incredibly fast. We started in mid-March and basically had everything save a few odds and ends wrapped up by the beginning of May, so in the main, the translation and localization process took only a month and a half, a massive increase in speed over Recettear’s generally slow crawl.

Once we hit May, though, Things started happening that required our attention. Late April saw us enter into real negotiations with Lizsoft, and those ended up consuming a not-insignificant amount of our time. Real negotiations also began on Project Four, also eating into our time. The last bits of Chantelise kind of crawled by as a result, and debug and last text insertion was slow as a result. Ditto June, although by early-mid June we more or less had the game ready to ship, or so we thought.

The original release date we had pegged was exactly one month ago, June 29th. Valve, however, pointed something out to us: this was one day before the start of the Steam Summer Sale.

Oops.

In the end, it was deemed smarter for everyone involved that we push back Chantelise’s release even further, to ensure that its release wasn’t swallowed in the blast radius of the Summer Sale (especially since Recettear was chosen to be a headliner for the first day, it would’ve been bad if the games stole one another’s thunder!) and so a date was set for exactly one month later. This turned out to be a bit of extra time that EGS wanted, but more on that in a moment.

So the Summer Sale came and went, and, despite one or two small attacks of derp at the last moment, the game was ready to go by the weekend. And so here we are – later than originally planned, but still out before Recettear’s one year anniversary.

- Sharpening the Blade: What’s Better

As I hinted above, the extra time was not spent idly. Some improvements were made earlier on, but EGS was able to use the delay to improve the game in another way. To explain in detail:

1) The game has been completely re-fonted. The original release of Chantelise, as well as the DHM release, used a rather ugly system font to handle all in-game text. EGS went back and plugged in their new, scaling font that they developed for Recettear and Territoire into Chantelise, meaning the ingame text looks much, much nicer than it used to.

2) The game now has full Xinput support. Previous releases of Chantelise (and of Recettear for that matter) didn’t include “proper” full support for Xinput gamepads like the Xbox 360 controller or the PS3 controller using the MotionJoy drivers. CF’s release of Chantelise features full support for all Xinput devices, including mappable triggers and using the right-hand joystick for additional (and crucial) camera control, making the game even easier to control and far more enjoyable to play.

3) The bosses have been completely re-tuned. Some of the boss encounters later in the full game suffered a bit because EGS, during the game’s original development, wasn’t able to do the bosses the justice they wanted to, due to time and money constraints. Between the sale-induced delay, and the fact that EGS hardly has cash-flow issues any longer, this wasn’t an issue with the English release of Chantelise. All bosses in the fourth and fifth (final) dungeons have been extensively redesigned and retuned to provide for a more compelling, interesting challenge.

The short version is this: it was our, and EGS’, intent from the start to produce the definitive version of Chantelise with this release. Even if you’ve played the original release or the DHM release before, this is a different game.

So there you have it – the ways in which our Chantelise release are Way Better, and just why it seemed to take so long from announcement to release.. The good news is, Chantelise exposed the few remaining holes in our workflow, and we’ve taken steps to improve even further with Fortune Summoners and Project Four. We’re ripping away at FS, in fact, and if this pace is kept up we may well end up pushing the game out the door a bit earlier than projected… though don’t quote me on that!

You’ll be hearing a lot more about Fortune Summoners soon, either way. Never fear.

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First of all, of course, news. And to lead off… well, shit, the biggest piece of news is right here (or right below this blogpost, if you aren’t scroll-lazy). I’d actually intended at first to get this blogpost out before we announced Fortune Summoners, but, well, that’s not how I roll. (Which is to say, I “roll” by occasionally leaving blogposts to moulder for months while we tackle multiple projects at once.) There’s not too much else to talk about with Fortune Summoners just yet beyond it being A Thing (and yes, we do hope it’ll be coming to all our current digidistro partners including Steam), but the August-September timeframe should see us slinging some words around about it, and we are aiming for a November-early December release timeframe, for reals. I can’t absolutely guarantee we’ll make it, but there shouldn’t be as many hangups with FS as there have been with other projects and we should be able to get this one out the door quite a bit faster (provided I don’t start erasing a week’s worth of progress in one go in a bout of herpaderp-fueled inanity again as I did recently, but, well painful story).

Development on Territoire in Japan continues apace; there really isn’t a “date” for it in Japan yet, so we can’t actually guarantee it’ll see the light of day from us this year at this point (in fact, with it for sure not coming out at Comiket 80, meaning a gold master for us to work on in September at the earliest, and with our plates pretty full for the rest of the year at this point, it’s all but certain to not land from us this year). We’re still super excited for it, though, and assuming EGS wants to hand off their most recent baby to us we’re eager to sink our teeth into it. EGS has even begun to update their devblog again, and if people want, we could begin posting translations of these up to the CF forums.

There’s a few other things going on in the background… that, sadly, I still can’t talk about other than them being A Thing That Exists. Snipers wait outside my window to take my head off if I so much as type a letter of the plans otherwise. While the possibilities behind the Background Stuff are really exciting, the lack of ability to talk about them basically means we have to run entirely silently and look almost totally inactive for the time being. On some level, it’s maddening. We can say, at least, that beyond our recently-announced Project Three (that being Fortune Summoners), there is a Project Four in some stage of “in the works”, and we can hopefully talk more about that in the future. I may even be allowed to drop a few hints over on The Twitters™ about Project Four in the future. I look forward to the mad speculation, as I always do, since I am fundamentally a very, very evil man.

Finally, in the interest of actually getting some questions answered, I’ve now got a Formspring. I want to use this primarily to answer “smaller” questions from the community that aren’t big enough for a blog post (meaning I can also answer them in a fashion that hopefully doesn’t take months). So feel free to direct questions over there, though Really Big Questions might get reserved for the outer reaches a blog post.

With the news out of the way, there is actually something else I wish to blog about this time around, something I’ve been meaning to talk about for months, even ahead of our own dissection of how Recettear’s release went from our point of view. While Recettear’s English version has been met with near-universal praise, there have been some questions raised in certain corners about how and why we handled the English version of Recettear the way we did. I’d like to use this blog post to explain why some elements of Carpe Fulgur’s version of Recettear are what they are, address the (tiny) number of flat-out changes we made, and more generally talk about our philosophy to this thing called “localization” and why we consider it so desperately important to both the success of Recettear and to imported games in general. This will be split into two parts: the first being an explanation of our general philosophy to localization, and the second addressing loc choices made in Recettear proper.

Yayifications – To Every Character, A Voice

To begin with, I should define what we mean by “localization” and why we use this word instead of “translation”. I mean, that’s all we’re doing, right? Just taking a Japanese videogame and turning the words therein into English. Well, no; by a word-for-word translation, many of the lines in Recettear are wildly different from the original script. Some have been expanded, some new phraseology slipped in there, puns and whatnot are familiar to American audiences, oh god it’s like the 1980s and chainsaws-to-anime all over again send help.

And yet our version of Recettear is also exactly the same: same characters, same voices, same story. It’s different, and it’s the same. That, ideally, is what we’re talking about with localization: the words may be different and “easier” to read for a native English speaker, but the experience should be exactly the same as the original.

To head off certain arguments (from both sides) at the pass, it’s worth pointing out that “straight” translation certainly has its place. In face-to-face business deals or diplomatic negotiations, for example, you definitely want to know exactly what the other person said. There’s no time or inclination to get flowery with the prose. Direct translation being misunderstood can still lead to, well, international incidents and whatnot, but it’s better to be misunderstood at first and then sort  out what was misunderstood later than have to blame some limp-wristed tramp of a translator for getting creative with that letter from the President. Instructions, comments from game developers, many other sorts of non-fiction writing and speech should be directly translated as well. (This sometimes leads to hilarity, but, well, that’s just bad translation and doesn’t have much to do with localization.)

In fiction, however, the circumstances are different. Fictional works, above all, rely on the suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader to retain their potency, their ability to entertain and even educate. And while bad translation has certainly marred a number of Japanese video games in particular over the years, even perfectly accurate straight translation often falls flat. It isn’t exciting, it isn’t engaging, it doesn’t capture players. It doesn’t seem like the translation is “good”, despite being perfectly accurate.

This is because English and Japanese are different languages.

You may think “Oh, SpaceDrake is exploring new frontiers of blindingly obvious herp-a-derp” with that statement. The fact of the matter is, though, that statement is true; more true than its simplicity might imply. Japanese and English are two of the least related languages on the planet; modern Anglic is a frankly bizzare Frankenstein’s Monster of Germanic and Norman-Gallic, and Japanese is derived in parts from both Sino-Tibetan and (possibly) Altaic roots. Massive swaths of the way they treat grammar, diction, case, and even gender and address are all completely different and non-compatible in a 1:1 sense. In many cases, it’s difficult if not impossible to straight-translate Japanese to English and not have it sound at least a little strange, and the opposite holds true as well. Quite simply, they are different languages. To paraphrase a certain famous wise man: “They aren’t just in the same ballpark, they aren’t even the same effin’ sport.” And for fiction, this poses problems.

When you translate something straight, you often lose much of the “voice” of the language or character or whatnot involved. To somewhat paraphrase another wise man who is somewhat less famous than the first (sadly):

“[Japanese] translation further requires an ear for voice. In any decent [piece of fiction], each character has a distinctive style of speech. In some cases it is more subtle than in others… [you must look] at the speech as a whole, and consider the personality, background, and mindset of the speaker.”

This is why Carpe Fulgur does what it does the way it does. Were we to simply translate everything 1:1, the characters would sound flat and uninspired – and almost nothing rips a reader/player/what-have-you out of their suspension of disbelief quite like flat, unnatural-sounding characters do. Getting to the essence of the characters requires reading deeply and extensively into what is said in-game, and opening a dialogue directly with the original authors to ensure we understand everything (the latter of which is mercifully easy to do, now that we live in the 21st century and can rely on things like email). That is the essence of what we do – in dialogue, incidental text, everything, find the spirit of the work and carry it forward into English – even if that requires fairly significant diction changes compared to “straight” translation.

The Carpe Fulgur Method – Finding the Voice

So what, exactly, is involved with making sure we get the voice of a piece right? As mentioned, the first part is sitting down with the creator(s) of a work proper and going over the characters and world with them. What kind of common terminology is used, what inspired the setting, what kind of outlook do not just the various characters but the world around them have, are there any themes in particular we should focus on, etc. In the age of the Internet, there’s really no excuse for not doing this sort of thing even if we can’t travel to Japan directly to hand-deliver questions; this is not the 20th century, and it’s trivial to discuss works with their creators (and, in our experience so far, creators love to discuss what they’ve worked on). It’s also our policy to bring things like name changes to the developers directly, for approval or veto. If we make any truly major changes to a game, you can be sure that the original creators approve of the move.

The next step involves Robin having a go at Japanese language elements directly. This is where everything is first converted into English – and, ironically, it’s in a format many fansubbers would recognize, full of annotations about cultural mores, explanations of Japan-specific jokes, and the like. It is extensively documented, and still left in its most literal-sounding form (although Robin sometimes mentions what he thinks would be the best way to handle a certain bit of text, and I give these opinions a lot of weight).

This is where I then step in. I take the raw Japanese translation and, consulting both the provided notes as well as talking to Robin and/or the developers directly, I proceed to render the dialogue/interface element/voice bit/what-have-you into something that sounds natural in English. Sometimes, this requires very little “rewriting” at all, outside of perhaps a bit of grammar shifting to ensure it sounds like English a person would actually speak. Other times, however, achieving a character’s natural voice – something that really matches what the Japanese sounded like to a Japanese speaker – requires somewhat more substantial changes to diction. Where an idiom might have worked in Japanese, it needs to be completely re-rendered in English to be sensible; where a character might sound “young”, they end up sounding flat in translation and this needs to be rectified. Sometimes the end result ends up deviating wildly from the original Japanese on a word-for-word basis… but assuming I have done my job even remotely right, the meaning should be preserved.

And then – and this is a crucial part of our process – after I’ve ridden roughshod over the glorious fruits of Nippon with my gaijin-fueled wheels of madness, Robin comes back and takes a look at what I’ve written, and tells me if I’ve completely missed the mark on anything. You guys who are worried about the original translation and meaning being preserved? Robin is basically your advocate: not only does he provide the “initial” translation, but a large part of his purpose in this process is to make sure that I don’t completely over-localize something in a fit of herpaderp-fueled over-exuberance and change part of a game into something not even recognizable.

This is actually a fairly crucial part of our philosophy and process – the concept that the script should never have only a single pair of eyes on it. There have been successful translators in the past who have also been their own editors – the aforementioned Matt Thorn, Alexander O. Smith, Ted Woolsey, several others – but to link back to an analogy above: being a master of two different sports at once is hard. Really, really hard. You are very likely to be better at one than the other, and our system relies on this. I studied for a specialized degree in English and wrote creatively extensively before Carpe Fulgur was a Thing; Robin has a degree, and a decade’s worth of near-constant experience, in Japanese. We are both far better at separate things, and it’s to a project’s overall benefit if we both contribute and bounce ideas off of one another rather than trying to do it on our own, where we’d only be relying on our own life experience to make the work sound as natural and “good” as possible. (It also helps prevent a single person’s ego from getting in the way of making changes – or not making changes – that are necessary.)

That, then, is how our scripts are produced. No one person has sole say in how it comes out – Robin contributes, I contribute, and we make sure the original developers contribute, too. The end result, unless we are fantastically poor at our jobs, should be a game script that doesn’t read exactly like the Japanese version – but one that tells the exact same story, hits all the same emotional responses, and has as near as we can come to the same voice as the original. One of our internal goals is that, even with the changes in wording, a fan from Japan and a fan from America should be able to discuss the plot of game with perfect accuracy. Even if what Griff says in Recettear, for example, is different on a word-for-word basis, both fans should recognize the exact same drives and motivations from the character. If we’ve done our jobs right, you should notice no changes to the story at all – the characters will remain intact, and hopefully make even more sense to the new audience.

The Recettear Notes: What Got Changed And Why

With this established, it’s time to address something: many people have noticed that we didn’t include “translation notes” in the game. Fansub-style translation notes are something we’ll probably never include; they’re massive immersion-breakers and at worst are simply a crutch for lazy translators who don’t actually know the meaning of a given word. So we’ll never do that because we’re professionals (we think) and we aren’t going to wreck someone’s immersion to  drive a reference in their face. We didn’t include one in the manual, either, since we wanted to make sure the manual was light and easy to navigate; including translation notes may simply have confused some users who were just looking for the controls. So in one place, they’re unprofessional; in another place, they’re inadvisable.

This blog labors under neither restriction. One of the purposes of this blog is to catalog any “major” changes we make to a game, or note anything that we feel requires special explanation about our particular version of a game. And so we’re going to begin with our first project, and the major notes surrounding its localization: what is “different” from the original script, and why we did this in the first place. Note that this will, by necessity, contain spoilers, so if you haven’t beaten Recettear yet and wish to avoid spoilers, stop reading now.

Character Voices  – Yayifications and other things

The first thing to address is probably some of the “differences” in character diction between the original script and ours; the largest changes center around Recette, Tear, and Griff.

A fair bit of hay has been made about Recette’s “creative” ways of saying “yay”, which sprang partially from her penchant for saying “yatta” as basically a catchphrase. The actual catalyst for making her “catchphrase” a variable phrase instead of a set one, however, was the content of the game itself.

Recette, as she is presented in the game, is not nearly as “dumb” as many people might initially suspect. While she’s clearly not very worldly or experienced, she’s also a very bright, creative young girl – as evidenced early on in her ability to make the sign for Recettear completely of her own volition. Later scenes, like the infamous “tree scene” (and the sequences with Caillou leading up to it), only reinforce this; she’s capable of quite a lot of creative thinking. It therefore made a lot of sense, to me, for her to display similar, nearly-subconscious creativity in her language. She’d practically invent affirmative responses on the spot; she couldn’t not just stick to one answer. So from there we get yayifications, yepperoni, yayness, and a host of other replies. When coming out of Recette’s mouth, they seemed so natural to me that I couldn’t not include them.

(For the record, however: “Capitalism, ho!” is also purely an invention and one of the very, very few I can offer no explanation for beyond “it felt right”. Given the memetic status it’s reached, however, I don’t feel particularly bad about that one bit of liberty taken with the script.)

With Griff, the one large “liberty” taken with his text was actually its volume. While Griff did have a tendency to make somewhat long speeches in the original script, in a few places in the English script, particularly atop the Obsidian Tower, this was played up even further for effect. The concept around Griff’s character is that he’s trying to be a supervillain, more or less, and is frankly not doing a particularly good job of it for various reasons (not the least of which is the fact that his heart doesn’t truly seem to be in it, despite what he may say). If we produced an English voice for him, he’d pretty much sound like a handsome twentysomething doing a Cobra Commander impersonation. That’s exactly how his voicework, and his tone in general, come across in Japanese.

The way we developed our localization methodology behind the scenes, however, meant that we’d become very adept at handling script insertion so as to reduce the load on our Japanese partners… which meant that, in some places, we could add textboxes to the game. With no character did I abuse this ability quite like I did with Griff. To properly come across as a “would-be villain”, especially one who was trying to hard, he really HAD to try too hard – which meant expanding out his speech in places. His speech atop the Obsidian Tower is the most obvious – in terms of textboxes, it is nearly three times as long as the original script. Nothing was omitted from his speech… but the imagery and, ah, violence of the language was enhanced. A lot of “hammy” villains in English tend to make overly-long speeches (hell, the very word hammy is derived from the famously long monologues in Hamlet), so Griff felt the most “right” when he was given leave and encouragement to start gorging himself on the scenery. As far as I’m concerned, it worked brilliantly, and the scene at the top of the Tower is my favorite scene in the entire game, both for what Griff says and for Recette’s equally epic rebuttal. So mission accomplished on this front, I think.

For the curious, the character who second-most-abused the “we can add textboxes!” function was Tear. Which segues nicely into…

Tear’s “voice” both was and wasn’t changed in the English script. Tear actually went through a complete script revision around halfway through the project, in fact (that is, everything she said in-game was thrown out and redone from scratch) as I realized she wasn’t coming across precisely as I wanted her to.  The problem was twofold: her level of formality, and linguistically foreshadowing certain events later in the plot.

Tear, naturally, is very formal in Japanese, being basically a businesswoman. In the original script, just as in our version, she is very much the straight man to Recette’s silly comedian. She also has a tendency to launch into long, overly-technical explanations of things, which I tried to keep intact as much as I possibly could. The main thrust I wanted to convey, however, was not only that she was almost overly-stuffy, but that “human speech” is practically a second language for her. She was raised in fairy society to be, essentially, something between and envoy and a slave to powerful humans. Thus, her grasp of the language that Recette and the other characters speak is actually not perfect; this is represented largely by the fact that she never uses contractions except in a tiny number of circumstances. Part of the early patching to the game was correcting one or two instances where contraction use had survived from the “old” script.

And in the interest of full disclosure, this is the one “experiment” with the script that I’m not actually entirely sure worked as I meant it to. Tear can sound a bit stilted or overly-formal a lot of times, yes – but I’ve also seen comments in various places that Tear led people to believe early on that the game was translated “poorly” (see above). Because she’s one of the two omnipresent characters and the very first one we hear speak, readers have to deal with her contractionless, hyperformalized, slightly stilted speech constantly, and I think it may have grated on some readers. I’m ultimately still pleased with how she came out – some of the scenes later in the game are very poignant with the approach we took – but if I had to do it all again, I might take yet another look at how I’d approach a character like Tear.

References – Clinton jokes are clearly timeless

Some questions have been raised about the amount of “meta” humor we may have inserted into the game. To be frank, while we did slip some references in, in my view we didn’t go overboard with it compared to the tone of the original script. A good bit of Recettear’s humor operated on a “meta” level from the very start; the item list in particular was filled with references that didn’t even carry over at all (such as the Totally-Not-Druaga gear, which nobody outside of Japan would recognize but would be instantly familiar to any Japanese game fan of a certain age) or with references that even we missed (Japanese fans pointed out a few to us post-release that had totally gone over our heads!) Recettear is a game that knows its audience, and knows what they’d find humorous, regardless of the language. While we did slip in some additional references, especially in the item list (in particular I tried to get some western game references in there, to balance out all the obscure Japanese references a little) a good deal of that was already present in the original script and the game as a whole had a self-aware spirit about it. We simply tried to stay true to that.

Names – Third time is the (c)sharme

On the topic of name changes, generally we didn’t engage in any at all. A few of the names were slightly naturalized in spelling – “Louie” vs. “Lui” and “Griff” vs. “Griffe”, but by and large we left the names alone, and even with a few of the “altered” names, the theme naming and the puns therein (as virtually all the characters have French words for names) remained perfectly obvious and intact.

The one name we did change to a significant degree was the “third” adventurer you might get.

Tielle, in the original Japanese katakana, is named as “ティエール”, which one might think would actually be a cut-and-dry situation. The original site for the game, however, indicates a bit of a different spelling than you’d expect at first: “Tiers”. That is, the French word for “third”. When we spoke with EGS, we found out that this referred to her place in her family; that is, she was literally the third of three sisters.

This actually ended up being a bit of a dilemma and a debate for us. On the one hand, it matched the rest of the somewhat silly theme naming well enough (“Griff(e)” literally means “claw” in French, for example). At the same time, however, it ultimately struck us as both a bit too silly and also perhaps a little too cruel on a cosmic level. (“Oh, Third was eaten by a monster? Well, missus, time to get to making Fourth, then!”) This was compounded a little further by the fact that this character and her sisters may well make an appearance in a future EGS game (or three). Further not helping our decision was the fact that, like many of the characters, she wasn’t consistently labeled in the data files themselves – sometimes she was references as “Tiers”, other times as “Tiel”.

The one thing that finally pushed us over the edge to render her name as “Tielle” was, in fact, the original katakana. “Tiers” is actually pronounced with an effectively silent s (much like “Paris”), but I was fairly certain that most Americans would try to pronounce it with a hard S, meaning it’d seem like her name no longer matched up with the voiceover still in the game. This ultimately drove us to decide to render it as “Tielle”, and after giving EGS a chance to veto the spelling change, the elven archer became Tielle in our script. It’s a policy of ours to still try and stick as close as we possibly can to the original katakana if we have to “change” a name, and given the voicework and given If her sisters show up in the future, we’ll deal with them as they come.

The one other, more minor, name change worth noting here is the name of the town itself. Originally the town was called “Heartsease”. It was altered largely as a result of one item: the “town magazine”. This was originally the “Hartzworker”, which operated on a pronunciation pun that works to some extent in Japanese (T and D sounds are separated only by dakuten marks in the Japanese alphabet, as are S and Z sounds) but didn’t really quite transfer over right to English. There was the added issue of the name not quite gelling with the very French feel of the rest of the town. We therefore asked EGS if they were alright with us changing the name to “Pensee”, and thus allowing us to call the magazine “Le Penseur”. If you’re wondering why we would go with “Pensee” of all things, look at what kind of flower a heartsease is.

Food – The kimono that changed a town

The other change to the script that made a bit of hay in the media was the alterations we made to some food references; basically every reference to foodstuffs in Pensee was made “western”. This is a fairly controversial action to take (some previous anime and game projects have been slammed a bit for making similar decisions), but our reasons for doing this were twofold. The first was simply the extreme “French-ness” of the setting otherwise; we’d talked with EGS and found out that Pensee had a lot of French influences, and so some of the casual references to tofu being a diet staple and whatnot felt a little disjointed in that light. This wasn’t helped by the fact that many other food references were “western” to start with, making it all feel a little disjointed in terms of setting.

Even that, however, might not have been enough to justify such a (relatively) radical change of content had there not been one character in particular who shined a spotlight on the issue.

The entire concept around Nagi as a character is that she’s a bit of a stranger in a strange land; a naginata-wielding female samurai who is trying to make the best of a life among a whole bunch of foreigners. This worked well enough on its own, and she’s one of my favorite characters hands-down, but she created a problem: there were scenes wherein her “foreign-ness” was played up by the rest of the cast to make it clear she’s Not From Around Here… and this included her diet. She’d occasionally describe making some kind of elaborate Japanese dish… and then, occasionally in that same scene, Recette and Tear would talk about the paucity of their meals of things like tofu and the like. To a Japanese reader, this might not seem that odd, but to us this read extremely strangely; it created a sense that this “foreign” character both was and wasn’t foreign to the setting at the same time. So, in order to make sure that Nagi’s “foreign-ness” came through as it should, food in Pensee was made to, well, be foreign to her. With the setting consistent, she properly sticks out like she should.

Questions?

This more or less covers the large changes made to Recettear’s script, and this post is already a monster, so we’ll stop here. If you have questions about other parts of the script, however, or are just curious, feel free to drop a question in the discussion thread on the forums or in my Formspring. I’ll be happy to tackle any questions that might arise, and I do take some pride in the fact that any “change” made to the game was made for a reason.

With that, we’ll see you next time!

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Wait, what’s that?

You say the news section of the blog isn’t complete? You want to know what we’re doing with Chantelise?

Well, we do have an update to make on that.

It’s a little something. I doubt anyone will find it of all that much interest.

But I suppose we can share it.

You know, if people will find it interesting.

I’d been thinking about waiting a little while longer on this, but the game is already show-off-able, and announcing at AnimeExpo was simply too tempting.

So. Just as announced at AnimeExpo – Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone is Carpe Fulgur’s Project Three. You may recall that we were previously uncertain if this project was actually possible. I am happy to report that all issues have been worked out with Lizsoft and that work is now proceeding apace, to the point where we already have a build in-house with interface elements 90%+ in English and only in need of debug and a further editing pass; all of the “events” in the prologue/demo are also now fully rendered into English, and need only minor editing before they are ready for primetime. Progress has been rapid since the deal was reached. Expect more screenshots Damn Soon™.

The game itself, for the unaware, is a side-scrolling platformer action-RPG, cut from the same sort of cloth as Zelda II, Wonder Boy or the original Ys III (Wanderers From Ys, not Oath in Felghana). It includes both combat and puzzle elements, with later puzzles requiring clever usage of all three party members to succeed. Each party member has different abilities – Arche is a swordfighter and is surprisingly strong for her age, Sana is a water spellcaster and has a number of support abilities (and can breathe underwater) and Stella… burns things. Lots.

Here’s an abbreviated version of most of the special things our version will (and won’t) have, a bit short largely because god damn this con is exhausting:

• 100% DRM-free. We never wavered in our commitment to providing games with no built-in DRM, and the English release of FS will not have the Japanese version’s built-in DRM.
• Full Xinput support. This means it’ll work with Xbox 360 controllers and all derivatives, including the Logitech F series, the Saitek Cyborg Evo (Xinput version), and PS3 controllers with MotionInJoy drivers. Triggers, the right stick, everything will be mappable.
• It will have the graphical enhancements from the Deluxe version. This mostly involves a richer color palette (it really makes original-flavor FS look washed out in comparison) but also includes a few miscellaneous adjustments. This makes the game look even more incredible than normal.
• It will not have the Deluxe voices; it will utilize the original indie voice actresses. A bit of clarification is in order: FS was originally released in 2008 as a pure independent release; Lizsoft later teamed up with Jungle Japan in 2009 to produce a “Deluxe” version of the game with “professional” voicework, a little bit of extra content and a full-color artbook. The extra content was also released as a “Fortune Summoners Plus” DLC add-on pack. What we’ve licensed is the “core” Fortune Summoners game; it does not include the Plus/Deluxe content. The “professional” voicework, in particular, is held under separate license; much like other niche publishers as of late, the going rate for getting the rights for the “pro” voice-work would’ve immediately turned everyone at CF into hobos. There was no way to afford it and stay in business.

I know the last bit will disappoint some, but I’m personally not very upset about it at all, in large part because it allows us to showcase the work the original, indepedant voice actresses did, and as anyone who follows CF knows, we’re all about being Indie As Fuck around here. So I cannot complain too much about being “forced” to use what I consider the superior (if much smaller) voice-set.

We’ll have more screenshots and talk more about the game as we get closer to release – moreso than we have with Chantelise, I promise (and yes, there’s a lot coming up on that front, as well). While we can’t commit to an exact release date just yet, we’re targeting a November-to-early-December release window and are pretty confident about making that. The demo will be out in a September-to-October timeframe, circumstances depending. I really cannot wait to get this game to people, personally, as Fortune Summoners is one of my favorite games of the past few years – “indie” or otherwise.

For now, screenshots to prove this is really A Thing:

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As the timetable on that is a bit uncertain, however, I thought I would post a brief bit of news for anyone considering attending AnimeExpo in Los Angeles: both Robin and I will be in attendance for the entire event! Furthermore, the current plan is for both of us to be on the “Bringing Doujin Gaming to the U.S.” panel, sharing our experiences in bringing both Recettear and Chantelise to the U.S., and possibly, maybe sharing other news as well. That particular panel will run in LACC 411 on Sunday, July the 3rd, from 4:30 to 5:30PM. We’ll also be wandering around the convention, schmoozing with fellow industry dudes and, just possibly, setting up a few things for the future. You’ll definitely be able to find me at both the NISA and Aksys panels, in the audience, and around the show floor looking at various things. Normally I’d say I’d be hard to miss in my white coat, but at AX I suspect that might not be quite so true.

Regardless, hopefully some of our fans can see us in the wild for the first time at the Doujin Gaming panel! We’re looking forward to running into some Recettear fans!

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Well, technically we did one here with the crew at RockPaperShotgun. Also, my default state of mind is terminal laziness, so, there you go.

That’s only part of the answer, though. The other part of the answer is that this has been fairly busy month for Team Lightning, just on things that haven’t involved actual game-making. During late January and through most of February, I went though the process of moving from Virginia all the way to Portland, Oregon, which needless to say consumed pretty much all of February in terms of time and manpower. I did this primarily so that Robin and I could work face-to-face from now on (this having been a bit of a problem during Recettear’s localization process), and also for easier access to west coast resources for future development… such as being able to attend the Game Developer’s Conference!

That’s what I’m up to right now; this week is actually going to end up determining quite a bit of how the coming year proceeds for Carpe Fulgur and what we may end up working on. I’ve already had one extrmely interesting lunch meeting that I can’t go into further detail about at the moment, but it certainly opens up a door I’d previously thought was completely closed (and a lost cause, to boot). Over the rest of the week, I’ll be doing things like investigating console possibilities and talking with various companies about things we could do. Wonderful things.

After that, March will be a busy month for us. Now that I’m settled in Portland, real work on Chantelise will begin in earnest, and we’ll hopefully have it out by the end of April (though don’t take that as gospel just yet). And I really truly for honest will get not only to a dedicated blog taking-apart of what went right and wrong with Recettear‘s localization, but I’ll talk about the localization itself and why we did what we did with the project and our methods in general.

The short of it is, no I was not eaten by a shark, and this is an extremely exciting time for us. Stay tuned, Cool Stuff is on the horizon.

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First seems to be this notion that we “didn’t make any money at all” (which is an assertion I’ve seen in a few places). Let me be clear: we still made a heap of money off of Recettear. Recettear so far has earned us enough money to pay for salaries for everyone for over a year (having started in September of 2010). Recettear was never expected to do this; it wasn’t even in the business plan. We were fully willing and able to push Carpe Fulgur forward in some form if Recettear had earned a quarter of what it now has. Recettear’s runaway success means that a lot of what our upcoming projects earn will go straight into the Warchest For Cool Stuff™. Carpe Fulgur is doing better than I could have dreamed it would do at this stage. Let me put it this way: we made way more money with the discount promotions than we would have without them. And a lot more people got to play Recettear, which is even more important as far as we’re concerned.

Second seems to be a notion that I’m displeased with either our distribution partners and/or EGS themselves (which I could see coming from a particularly negative reading of the original line in that part of the blog, which I’ve edited a bit for clarity). It is true that we currently get the smallest share and EGS get the largest. This is deliberate and by design. Recettear is, fundamentally, EGS’ game; they did all of the “real” work on it, and they provided all the code support for the English version. It’s only fair that they should get the largest share of each retail sale. The only reason the ratio of who gets how much is changing post-Recettear is to help CF do Cool Stuff like English voiceovers and whatnot (and to ensure that we can keep operating even if a game doesn’t perform as well as Recettear did).

On top of that, EGS getting a lot of money from Recettear’s English release helps us. It allows them to grow as developers and do more; it allows them to get new equipment, perhaps even add a person or two to the team, and above all it gives them the ability to make their games even better. Which, in turn, gives us more awesome games to bring over. I don’t begrudge EGS their share in any way; if anything, the concept-cum-reality of an EGS with hundreds of thousands of dollars on hand that they didn’t plan on having in 2011 makes me tingle with excitement. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

It’s also worth pointing out: in the end, I’m the one who made the call on the various sales and promotions. Nobody, not Valve or Gamersgate or Impulse or anyone, forced our hand on anything.  I made the call because I thought it would allow us to sell more copies, make more money and have more people enjoy the game. And you know what? We succeeded on all fronts. The sale promotions ultimately made us a lot more money than we would have otherwise, and I’m glad we did them. The only regret I have is that our very first promotion was as deeply discounted as it was, but in the end I’m still the one who approved it. So if I have anyone to blame for that, it’s ultimately myself.

Carpe Fulgur is going fantastically well. Am I a little sad that not every copy of Recettear sold for full retail price? Well, sure; if nothing else, I’d like to do a Scrooge McDuck backflip into a pool filled with benjamins at some point in my life. But I, and everyone at CF for that matter, are not displeased with how things have gone so far; just the opposite. Now that Recettear’s been successful, we have the opportunity to do some really fun and crazy stuff. I’m looking forward to this year more than I’ve looked forward to any year ever.

Lightning ho, mofos!

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P.S.: Alas, we only got “honorable mentions” in the IGF, which means we aren’t in the running for any awards (nor do we get to present on the show floor, nor do we get free rides to the GDC). I’ll still be at GDC 2011 in San Francisco, regardless, though!

With the happy new year comes the bombshell we’ve been sitting on for a little while now: Recettear has sold 100,000+ copies. (In fact, we crossed that line during December.) This is a fairly monumental number, and there aren’t many games in general that can claim to have broken that kind of sales figure, never mind independently-developed-and-published titles. It’s the kind of figure that, on some level, I thought we could never conceivably reach, under any circumstances, ever. Not as a brand-new startup with no advertising budget. But here we are: six-figure sales on Carpe Fulgur’s very first game. Success comparable to releases from established publishers.

We do need to talk about what exactly this means for Carpe Fulgur going into the future, however, as in some ways that may be a deceptive number.

What A Hundred Thousand Copies Sold DOESN’T Mean:

- We don’t have money coming out our ears. In the face of as many sales of one game as the entire catalogs of some companies this assertion may seem faintly ridiculous. The trick being, of course, that it wasn’t a hundred thousand sales at full price. The majority of the game’s sales so far have been at a sale price, meaning we haven’t made as much money as we might have otherwise.

The larger problem comes from the fact that a large portion of units were made at a steep sale price; we pushed a heck of a lot of units via the Indie Story Pack on Steam. The problem is, we made very little money per-unit on that sale, since the pack was sold at less than Recettear’s sale price to begin with, and then, being a pack, we naturally only saw a portion of the price. We still made more money than we did during October, it’s worth pointing that out… but we didn’t make the money we could have, and as the head business dude around here, that nags at me. Especially since we have a lot of data – and I do mean a lot of data – suggesting that people were buying the pack pretty much solely for the promise of “Recettear for $5″.  Had we sold the game for $5 first and then bundled it into a pack, we’d have earned quite a bit more than we did. So lesson learned on that front.

(And it’s worth pointing out that, ultimately, I’m the one who said we should go ahead with the pack, so any “blame” for us not making enough money falls squarely on my scrawny little head.)

Another thing to keep in mind is this: for every unit sold of Recettear, Carpe Fulgur doesn’t end up seeing a whole lot of the actual retail price. (And just to be perfectly clear, our distribution partners get a perfectly fair “cut” and aren’t squeezing us at all;  it’s EasyGameStation who, quite deservedly, get the lion’s share of each sale.) We still get enough to operate off of from such a cut – during the “slow period” of October and the non-pack-deal days of November, we earned enough each month to just about cover everyone’s salary, so we were essentially breaking even. But it means that even with huge sales numbers, we don’t see a particularly large amount of that money.

Now, everyone involved has realized that this situation is somewhat less than ideal for various reasons, and for future EGS titles (and any future titles we bring over from other developers) will see CF getting a somewhat bigger slice of the pie. When it comes to sales of Recettear, however, we’ll always see a fairly small portion of the overall purchase. (It’s worth noting that I’m perfectly fine with this; it was a way of proving we were really serious about this, and it still allows the members of CF to live very comfortably.)

Recettear’s still made us a lot more money than I’d dared to hope it would; due to how we timed our discounting and how much certain deals were discounted, however, we don’t really have the insane money hat one might associate with “one hundred thousand sales” and it means we can’t just throw around money on stuff willy-nilly. We’re still quite well off, though; keep reading!

What A Hundred Thousand Copies Sold MIGHT Mean:

- Will it mean Recettear gets an English voice option? Maybe. This one is actually a bit annoying because, due to how the chips have come down, we are literally right on the line money-wise I’d set for us months ago between being comfortable with doing an English voice set for the game and not. The big trick is that we need to be able to throw at least $10,000-15,000 to really do it with the quality I’d want any English voicework to be. This is very much a “we either do it really well or we don’t do it at all” deal; I’ve seen enough feedback about janky English VO over the years to know that it can really ding a publisher’s reputation, so I’m determined to do English VO right if we do it at all. And that, dear readers, means that we need to be able to throw around $15,000 (or more, even) and not have it really affect the future of the company at all… and if I’m being remotely honest with myself, we aren’t there yet.

Now, an upshot to an English voice patch (which would probably include some miscellaneous improvements and whatnot to the game) would be that we could probably do one last promotion for the game with our various distributors and whatnot, which would likely drum up a bit more money… although at this point I’m very worried about us reaching our market cap. (That’s probably a blog post all its own, however.)

And just to head off the inevitable question: if we do English voice, it would complement the Japanese VO already in the game, it would not replace the existing VO. There’s basically no reason we can’t do dual-voice on the PC, so if we move forward with this, we’d do it right.

- Will it mean Carpe Fulgur begins to move to console development on top of their PC stuff? Also maybe. This is really going to depend on the results of my upcoming trip to GDC 2011 (regardless of what happens with Recettear re: the IGF) and what kind of prices get quoted at me when it comes to acquiring a dev kit or two. I won’t lie: for all the problems we had with Recettear on the PC (and yeah, that is a blog post all its own) I am not particularly sanguine about getting involved with the politics that come with publishing a game on a console. (And non-downloadable publishing is still a problem for us, especially DS publishing and the costs involved with the carts.)

It doesn’t help that this is a bit of an odd time to be a new publisher; the 3DS is coming, the PSP2 is also all but confirmed, and it’s an open question as to whether or not we should even pursue “old” DS/PSP games and how many people would buy them. (OTOH, there’s a level on which I do not mind this “digital only” route Sony is taking with the Go and supposedly with the PSP2 as well…)

Another trick, of course, is that this could be exclusive to the voice thing; since it’s all coming out of the same wallet, if we spend money on dev kits we won’t have that money to spend on the English voicework. So we may well have to make a choice here, and since a console devkit could let us expand our operations, it would likely get priority. It all really depends on what the kits would cost us, however.*

Really, a lot of solid answers to this question will only come once I get to GDC, pin down some Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo guys with nailguns, and have nice long chats with them about various things. Including why I’m holding a nailgun, come to think of it.

*As a note here; some people might suggest “well, just take out a business loan if you need to get extra money for voicework or dev kits”. A wise woman once gave me the following advice, however: “No capes, and no debts!” Mortgaging Carpe Fulgur’s future is pretty much the exact last thing I want to do, especially in the modern banking climate. I’ve already witnessed too many companies eaten or nearly eaten by creditors, and I’ve put too much heart and soul into CF to put it in that risk. The plan is to keep us as debt-free for as long as humanly possible… and if given a choice between “go into debt” or “fold the company”, we may well choose the latter. If we end up not dealing with the modern financial sector at all, we’ll be in good shape, I think.

And now for the fun bit:

What A Hundred Thousand Copies DOES Mean:

- It means Carpe Fulgur is very secure moving into the coming year. Even if sales of Recettear were to come to a literal dead stop today, and we released nothing in the coming year, we’d still have enough money on hand to pay everyone their salaries, even after tax, with some left over. In September, we were in a good place but still in a “we have to release another game within a year or we’re smoked” position. Now we could take the entire year to work on something, if need be, and not worry. If we release another game or two and they do even a quarter as well as Recettear has, we’ll be set well into 2012 and we can begin to think seriously about expanding the scope of CF’s operations.

- It means the CF crew can get out and about a bit. I’ve already mentioned the fact that I’ll be attending the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference regardless of what happens to Recettear in the IGF. That’s just the start; Robin attended Comiket 79 this past week to meet up with a lot of developers in Japan and we already have plans for him to attend Comiket 80, as well. Beyond that I’d like for us to make an additional con appearance or two; I’d really like to be at PAX Prime 2011, for example. We’ll be doing what we can to make this happen.

- It means a developer who deserves it earned a lot of money. I won’t throw around exact figures without permission, naturally… but since EGS gets the lion’s share of each Recettear sale, it means you guys made EGS more money than they’ve ever seen before. And I, for one, think they earned every cent of it. One of CF’s missions is to help indie devs in non-English speaking countries get the love they deserve overseas, and in this case I think we can say mission accomplished on this one.

- It means CF can bring you excellent titles in 2011. Above all else, 100,000 copies of Recettear sold proves that the market for imported indie games (not to mention Japanese-style RPGs on the PC) isn’t just there, it’s famished for content, and that Carpe Fulgur knows how to serve that market (occasional bundle-deal-related silliness aside, of course). We’ve already gotten comments from developers in Japan to the effect of “we’ve heard of you and we’d like to work with you”; now we’re an even bigger known quantity. One hundred thousand copies mean that Carpe Fulgur’s future looks bright, and that means that everyone can look forward to a number of great titles in 2011 and beyond.

Like, for example, our worldwide release of Chantelise.

Happy New Year, everyone. Here’s to a very good 2011.

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