Rakuen
A hospitalized Boy comes to terms with his own story by traveling with his Mom to a beautiful fantasy world; ultimately helping his fellow patients find closure by walking a mile in their shoes.
Supported Platforms
Project Information
Featured screenshots
UNLOCTEAM INPUT
Many players consider RPG Maker to be an old game engine that can create only typical one-like JRPG games without any soul in them. Yet there are several masterpieces that prove these players are wrong. And Rakuen – one of such games. And it’s one of the games that has the greatest community of all the times. We honestly are honored to be part of it because it’s the coziest place in internet to spend time in with huge amount of super people. With Supershigi (Laura Shigihara) at the head — one of the best game composers of our century.
Localization
Rakuen is another game UNLOCTEAM not only translates with our translators. We also help to organize community translation for as many languages as possible.
As we already worked with RPG Maker XP projects (To the Moon and Finding Paradise), we already knew what challenges are in front of us.
Project Management
The translation is not over yet, new and new translators want to localize the game into their language. The CAT tool we used this time works as charm. We can track the status of each file and each language, easily manage them and download translated files with one click. Translators receive an intuitive and easy to use tool, which helps them to localize with consistency, read comments and ask contextual help, and even check themselves with built-in grammar checkers.
Translation
RPG Maker XP translation file (built with custom script from ancient time) has quite many system lines, that are redundant for translators, and if anyone will put some character into them, it will lead to game crashes. We reviewed all texts and with power of custom scripts we put all such lines into blocked variables, so no one could change or remove them. Also, it helped to reduce the size of files. Initially, dialogue file has 57600 lines and around 140k words. After our review and work the file has 22000 lines and 75k words in total. In this way we increased the effectiveness of work for translators and eased a life for them and localization testing, as we avoid crucial mistakes.
Textures
The engine is bitmap/tile based, and whenever you want to make a special effect or something fancy, you will use part of coding and part of images to work with. Rakuen has 40 images with text. They include final credits, control options, in-game tips and map, end and game over screens, tiles. We worked through all of them, recreated and prepared for further localization. So each languages receives the same package to localize, and our team creates the images. And it’s so great to see how localized textures work harmonizing with surrounding world.
Quality Assurance
In Rakuen we tested quite interesting and successful approach. Usually, we make LQA with our internal team of testers, but here we decided to try community testing for several languages, and it was a success.
As game was released years before localization, it has a huge fan base. And they always will to help with everything, that is connected to game.
So this game shows, that community is everything for the game, and it’s ready to help whenever you ask. So, developers, love your community, and they will give their love back to you!
Fonts
Rakuen is quite interesting in meaning of fonts. It has two custom fonts for main game and credits, and both were quite limited in charsets.
That is why we drew additional characters for every language we worked with and found best suited fonts for Vietnamese and Japanese.
The main font obviously has a style of childish writing, and we tended to keep it. It some sort unusual at the beginning, but, from other side, it makes an immersion into Boy’s story deeper.
Afterwords
Its definitely one of the warmest games we ever played, with beautiful story. And receiving thankful messages from streamers for great localization, that helped them to dive deeply into the game, warms our hearts as well.
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