Welcome to our 4th Beastly DevLog! Where we give all our wishlisters and patient fans a little sneak peak into our process of localizing this game into English, some extra snapshots of unique parts of the game, and introduce a few of the extra guest characters you might meet as you hop around town.
DAYS UNTIL LAUNCH: 4
Next up, our very own Fakku Games Director, Meru, is here to chat about a some of the language-based mini-games you may find while wandering around the neighborhood...
Mini-Games Galore!!!
Hi, this is Meru, publishing director and occasional translator!
I came into the Two Beasts Or Not To Beast project after translation of the scripts had mostly been completed. However, that's only one aspect of a game localization project, so there was still a lot of work left to do, including uncensoring the sexy scenes (which the developer helped us out with!) as well as finding and translating text that appeared in other places in the game.
Here I'll talk a little bit about localizing the quiz minigames, which was a fun challenge!
Quiz 1
Originally, this language quiz was about English grammar. It's the kind of thing that Japanese people would learn in school, but could easily have forgotten if they didn't keep up with their language skills. We could have simply kept it as an English grammar quiz, however in our version Tsarin is a "foreign language teacher", and it wouldn't make sense for her to be quizzing you in English when... you're already playing the game in English!
First, we considered using Spanish, as it's the most common second language in the US, but there are many other English-speaking countries that don't have such a connection to Spanish.
Eventually I decided that since this is a Japanese game, it would make sense to use Japanese (plus I don't speak a word of Spanish!). I then came up with a few questions about simple words in Japanese, including two animal-related words to fit the furry theme. To start with, we had the answers written out in roman letters, but then decided this was way too easy, so in the editing phase I changed to writing them in Japanese hiragana characters. But don't worry if you can't make heads or tails of them; the "penalty" for failing a minigame is very enjoyable ;)
Quiz 2
In the second quiz, there were some questions on Japanese grammar and language. Again, these are things that people would have learned in school–in other words, pretty simple, but might make you pause for a second to remember them.
As the first question was kind of equivalent to a spelling question (asking the reading for a kanji compound), I chose a word in English that can be difficult to spell. The others consisted of a translation question that asked for the meaning of an English word and a grammar question asking for the modern-day meaning of a phrase in Classical Japanese. I again thought about animal-related words, and came up with the idea of a question about collective nouns, and one about Latin names, which I figured would be a nice nod to the original question containing classical language.
I hope this has given some insight into the difficulties of localization, and how it's never as simple as just replacing one word with the equivalent in the other language! While my first reaction upon encountering something like these minigames is usually along the lines of "oh no, this is going to be a real pain to translate", they usually end up being some of the most interesting parts of a project due to the creative thinking required.
I hope you all enjoy the game when it releases later this week!
Guest Character Spotlight
These next ladies are awaiting your attendance to instruct you in the ways of seduction with their dominating presence.
Will you be able to resist the lure of your provocative Professor Tsarin...
...or your stunning fellow classmate, Hyuri?
Thanks for reading, see you next week!