Phil McCauley at UWS
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
I Return - With More Japanese!
Seems this blog was highly useful in allowing me to both collect letters after my name in the form of BSc and permit me access to Honours year! So I have resumed it for Glorious Benefit of Honours Project!
So this year's project looks like it will centre around the localisation of Japanese games. I've been looking for an excuse to step up the rate of my learning, so why not tie it to something that will force me to panic learn. Nothing to worry about there, right?
Specifically, for the first part I'm looking to analyse the history and highlights of localising games. Such games to look at could be Zero Wing's famously bad translation; or the Final Fantasy series' localisation, giving the player freedom to imagine this could be representative of anywhere in the world; and Persona's localisation, keeping their games rooted firmly in Japan. Another view could be to analyse the refusal to localise Mother 3 and Nintendo's regionally split opinion on Operation Rainfall.
I'm also looking to attempt a localisation of my own of, say, the Final Fantasy Type-0 demo. Specific details of what I'd look to do would come after discussing it with my my supervisor, one Doctor John Sutherland, but I'm thinking I'm probably going to try making a series of documents detailing translations, with subtitled videos of things like the opening cinematic. お楽しみに!
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Week 10 - Jamie Was Too Scared!
Week 9 - Huzzah For Busy!
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Week 8 - We Need To Do What Now?
Week 7 - Phil Fulfils His Debt Obligations
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Week 6 - Pierce The Blog With Your Drill!
Keyboard
Key Used - Action
W/A/S/D - Move up/left/down/right
Space Bar - Interact with platform or secret/climb
1 à 0 number row - Bound skill activation
Esc - Key Menu/pause
i key - Inventory
Arrow Keys - Navigate menu
Enter Key - Select menu option
Tab Key - Enemy lock-on/cycle between enemies
Mouse
Button Used - Action
Left-click - Enemy lock-on/select menu option (only)
Right-click - Auto-attack/use inventory item/use skill (only)
Scroll-wheel - Zoom in/out
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Week 5 - Art Isn't An Explosion! D:
- The Human Path seems to be gearing more towards the exploration and free-running side than combat.
- The Animal Path is towards a physical combat, similar to a Rogue from classic RPGs like Warcraft.
- The Asura, or demi-god, is heavier physical combat, similar to a Warrior.
- The Naraka, or demon, a magical combatant specialising in fire and ice attacks.
- The Preta, or hungry ghost, is a scavenger of health and other items, and can reveal hidden interactable objects.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Week 4 - Bansho Ten'in Bitches
Week 3 - Yes We Nyan!
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Week 2 - Subete wa Bekon to Yoideshou
3rd Year Games Dev. - Games ideas/Roles
Game Genres
Chris: Survival horror, Stealth, Platformer
Euan: Platformer, Puzzle, RPG
Phil: Platformer, Fighting,
Johnny: FPS, Platformer, 2D Game
J: Platformer, RPG, Over the shoulder Shooter
Winning Genre: Platformer
Traits
Survival Horror - Design
Positive: Strong Atmosphere, Black Humour,
Negative: Hard to pull off, Difficulty in wide spread marketing, Repetitive, Lighting would have to be pulled off well, Music would have to be heavily atmospheric.
Stealth – Design
Positive: Not done too often could be viewed as a fresh take, could be fairly challenging, after figuring out AI the rest of the game would follow fairly easy,
Negative: AI would need to be heavily in-depth, will get repetitive, if not balanced well could turn out wrong,
Platformer – Design
Positive: Fairly large term a lot could be implemented and experimented with, could be done in both 2D and 3D rather well, a large markey still exists for the genre, once a single level is created it would be easy to create more of them, easily referencable, would be easier to pull off compared to other genres, easy to implement with the available dev tools,
Negative: A lot of games has been made in the genre causing it to have been a bit overdone, a viable story would be relatively hard to implement, difficulty may be hard to balance sometimes,
Puzzle – Design
Positive: Could be geared towards either a pick-up-and-play or story rpg games, if done well would be easily made addictive, length may not come up as a problem depending on the type of game, large market for the genre
Negative: Would be hard to come up with either unique, challenging or fun puzzles, a long development time may be needed to come up with good puzzles/justifiable story,
RPG – Design
Positive: Like platformer it's a fairly large genre, a large fanbase/market,depending on the type of RPG we can easily generate more content, if implemented well it can turn out great, a lot of roles available during development,
Negative: Overdone as of late, can get repetitive, the development time for an RPG can get fairly lengthy, a picky market/fanbase,
Fighting – Design
Positive: Fairly large market and fanbase, not a lot of innovation required during some aspects, if only an online vs game not a lot of AI would need to implemented, would be easily done as an adaption or geared towards a certain style,
Negative: If no AI was needed then a lot of networking would need to be done, could become repetitive, market could also be heavily competitive, no frame of reference for available games,
FPS – Design
Positive: A lot of different themes/times/areas could be easily implemented for an FPS, market for FPS is very large compared to every other genre, once AI is figured out the rest of the dev. Would be easy, tools that we could use are nearly all geared towards an FPS,
Negative: Overly done to hell, would be fairly hard to become distinguishable from the existing games, some physics and AI scripting may prove to be problematic,