Original title: “My First Blog Ever”

This is an edited version of a blog post that originally appeared on 08/13/2006.

Our project is the English language patch of a Sega Dreamcast game called Segagaga. It’s a weird title, once billed as a “Sega Simulator.” Everyone really hoped that Sega would come out with an English version, but Sega never invested the time or money.

In the story, you assume the role of the Taro Sega, an average, pre-teen anime boy summoned to lead a plan that will save the videogame industry.

Specifically, Sega is in trouble by the year 2025. They control only three percent of the videogame market. Gamers everywhere have drifted away from games because nothing revolutionary has hit the market in a long time. Giant game corporations compete with each other by releasing expensive hardware that isn’t compatible with anyone else’s product. Everyone loses.

So, Sega throws the problem to their hyper-awesome computer, the TeraDrive. (The story almost sounds inspired by Douglas Adams.) They decide to enact the top secret plan called Segagaga. The TeraDrive tells them to choose two kids to run around as CEOs for three years with a limited budget. You’re one of them.

You have to go through the Research and Development areas in the form of an RPG dungeon crawler, albeit pepped up with Sega’s charm. You encounter former developers who have gone insane with the stress from software development. They have become bestial as a result, and they attack you. You have to defeat them in an RPG-style battle, and you’ll occasionally get a chance to recruit them as your development staff. (Neatly, in order to recruit characters successfully, you have to answer a series of questions about the history of Sega correctly.)

We’re working on an English patch for the Japanese game.

The idea is that you’d make a backup copy of your Japanese copy of Segagaga, add our patch to the backup, burn the patched backup on a CD-ROM disc, and play the English language version on your Dreamcast. We’re still working out the technical details.

I naturally looked for any language documents on the game when I got my copy off eBay. I think that a full translation already exists on GameFAQs, but I haven’t looked at it. We aren’t using it as our foundation.

Don’t discount that translation as a credible resource. I’ve heard that it’s reliable. I simply prize the “first encounter experience” with a given translation project. I regard that as an intimate experience: to know something and attempt to re-express it using your mother tongue.

I feel more strongly about language than most, though, so perhaps not everyone understands this reaction. The bottom line is we’re building this from the ground up.

After some coaching from our original programmer, we’ve extracted more of the J-text out of the main .BIN file. Previously, we had only been able to get dialogue text from the intro. For that, I just started opening Segagaga files at random. I got lucky.

Not very methodical.

Our first programmer gave us a quick glossary of the text pointers so I could lay out the English text in a way that helps coordinate character animations with the proper text. We’re trying to use those conscientiously, so we won’t trip over the code-language’s unintelligibility-and so we won’t forget where to put them back.

Our biggest potential obstacle, at this point, seems to be the unavailability of a half-width font. Segagaga only calls for block-width romanji characters from the Dreamcast’s cache. Unless we figure out some way to utilize the hardware’s half-width font, we’re forced to create additional dialogue boxes to accommodate for the unpacked English text.

This creates another problem. We only have a limited amount of spare room for the overflow of data that results from so much more text. We might run out of room, say, after the first R&D dungeon.

This is clearly unacceptable. We’re now considering a multi-disc strategy. We’re going to make the best translation with that resources, and that might mean expecting a few extra CDs from someone using our patch.

Basically, we’ll create Patch Disc 1 which hypothetically covers up to the end of the first R&D section. At the end of that disc, we’ll have Alisa (the secretary) say, “Please save your game, turn off the Dreamcast, and insert Segagaga English Disc 2.”

The player will have burned a second Segagaga backup using Patch 2, which leaves everything from the beginning until the end of the first R&D section in Japanese. However, since the player has saved at the end of Patch Disc 2’s Japanese section, he can pick up where Patch Disc 2’s English section begins.

If necessary, we can simply repeat this chain for the entire game. This is our backup plan in the event that we can’t integrate the half-width font.

Our first programmer took some screenshots of our translation of the first half of the introduction. Here’s what Segagaga English will look like using block-width English characters.

We start working on the Item menus and descriptions tomorrow. Those will be tough. Many of the items only have four Japanese characters in their names, which limits us to four English characters as well. We might end up with a revival of the spell names from the original Final Fantasy.

FIR2 anyone?

We’re also planning to subtitle the animated sequences. We’ve never translated something that didn’t have a printed text component before. Segagaga holds lots of challenges. I think they’re all good things to experience.

I’ll update this again when more work is done.