hopefully the last fe4 status update that i'll ever have to write

May. 14th, 2019 09:13 pm
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[personal profile] bookofholsety


i know, i know. we've been through this song and dance a fucktillion times by now. and just like clockwork, here i am again after another year mostly comprised of unrelated ramblings and dead air, flogging a dead horse of an anniversary to make promises about a patch that is Totally Coming Soon People™: promises which, frankly, must be sounding pretty bloody hollow to most people by now. it's something i feel incredibly guilty about - that my slowness is constantly screwing over so many other people who have better things to do - but things are looking up

what in the absolute hell happened, anyway?

as i've almost certainly harped on about before, genealogy was my first translation project of any description (not counting my minor contributions to gringe's work on the binding blade): originally started more or less on a whim to see if i even could do it. the entire thing was one very long learning experience, and boy shitting howdy does it show. my initial take, to me, has long felt hamfisted and almost naive. it comes across as if i knew what the basic steps were in theory, but the resulting attempt to put them into practice was clunky as all hell. i also had a frustrating habit of letting myself get carried away with silly ideas and the occasional steep deviation: things that i'd like to think i would never do today, were i taking a whack at the game for the first time

in hindsight, i feel like i rushed the script to hit the 20th anniversary mark (which is fuckin hilarious given how long i'd been working on it beforehand, but w/e). i did have an opportunity to patch up some of the worst deficiencies before we launched - crunching to fix up chapter 1 vividly comes to mind - but there's a lot that i didn't get the chance to do at the time. i suppose that makes the patch a beta in more ways than one, if not a way that i intended. launching in this state is something that i've always regretted, and as a result i've pretty much sworn to myself that i'll never make the mistake of releasing anything before i'm completely satisfied with it again

needless to say, i got to work on editing almost immediately, and the handful of patch releases between may and august 2016 had a continuous trickle of tweaks and updates: a trickle that was supposed to continue to see patch releases, but was soon held up by what can only be described as a cocktail of real-life obligations, neuroses and utter bullshit. the longer it went on, the more and more dissatisfied i became with my work as it was; i've always talked an obnoxiously large game, but each time i came back to it, i came away more acutely aware that what i'd delivered just did not live up to it at all

before long, it was no longer a proofreading/editing sweep, so much as a near-total rewrite and retranslation. i took to combing through the game all over again, scrutinising almost every single passage from scratch. i suppose i figured, i'd already made people wait so long that i might as well make the wait actually, y'know, substantially worth it; and by the same token, i'm determined not to release anything until i am 100% convinced that i am absolutely done and have no reason to ever touch the script again

i do want to touch a little more on the (fairly personal) problems which caused this to take so obnoxiously long, but i think i'll save some of the self-pitying melodrama for once i'm done

anyway, that's what's been happening for a few years now. progress has, needless to say, been very slow, but i am getting there. the good news is, i'm well and truly in the epilogue now. it's still an uphill haul, but the bulk of the work is done. in an attempt to better commit myself to consistent progress, i'm trying to semi-regularly post work-in-progress updates and previews on twitter. admittedly, that went roughly as well as you'd expect in terms of consistency

as to when you can expect completion, as usual, i'm not willing to commit to a hard deadline; i'd rather not make myself more of a liar than i already am. i am, however, optimistic that i can finally have the script locked down before i go back to work in august

now, of course, genealogy hasn't been my only project for five years now. honestly, i've always found i work best when i have multiple irons in the fire; staring at one thing (usually genealogy) can get mindnumbing and disheartening after a while, so it always helps to have other projects to turn to for a breather. in particular, that's a big part of the reason i work on the cipher card game: it ensures that i always stretch my translation muscles, no matter how briefly, at least once a weekday, even if i don't have the time to work on genealogy, thracia or anything else proper that day. when they do jugdral cards, it's also an excellent excuse to hyperfocus on specific passages and really polish the fuck out of them

now, what about everything else i've been working on recently? well...

thracia 776!



that's right, it's the other thing that i've been talking an obnoxiously big game about for years. thracia 776, for my money, is a truly special game, one that i'm absolutely determined to give the justice it is due. i've been periodically dipping into it for a while now, alternating between it and genealogy every so often; i've recently shared a fair few in-progress passages from it on twitter and elsewhere, which i might as well take the lazy way out and link here:

a surprise side project!




what's this? i actually finished something for once? i considered leaving this one a total surprise, but honestly, this is probably as good an opportunity to reveal it as any

for those of you who aren't familiar with it (which, understandably, is probably most of you), in 2015, fire emblem cipher launched "emma and shade's cipher classroom", a cute little web game that demonstrates the basics of the card game. it's outdated as hell, but i've always eyed off translating it, both because of its charm and because it would fill a vital niche for the international cipher community: a guide for beginners, whereas all our current rule resources tend to be extremely detailed and daunting

because of difficulties figuring out how to even technically do this, this was very much a minor pie-in-the-sky idea until a few weeks ago, when my friend auroraskye from the serenes cipher community had an insight into getting ahold of all the raw files. a couple of days' work later, and the translation was complete, proving to be a nice, fun breather of a project. right now we're still looking into hosting possibilities, so we don't know when it'll be up and ready; it's pretty much out of my hands now
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