Translation (EN): Atelier Marie, Elie & Anis (GBA)

[logicallysound]

For the past few weeks I've been working on translating Atelier Marie, Elie & Anis to English. I think this one is or will be a quick favorite for fans of classic Atelier, especially the Salburg games. I was partly inspired by the official Atelier Marie Remake but mostly it was a lark because I got an Analogue Pocket recently and I've been playing more GBA games.

From a technical standpoint I've laid some groundwork in the hacking and reverse engineering. I worked out how the font was compressed in the ROM well enough that I could write a program to output a BMP of the font. This helped me complete a full Japanese text table for the game so that text could be dumped. The game's default font unfortunately doesn't include lowercase letters at all, so I needed to hack a font into the game. In the process, I changed the font size from 12x12 to 8x12, but it's still fixed width -- I don't have quite enough confidence in my abilities to implement VWF for this game though I've definitely been thinking about it a lot. I have a small program that inserts translated text into the free space on the ROM and rewrites pointers, which works for most all of the event/dialogue in the game and leaves just some gameplay/menu text to edit in manually with a hex editor. I haven't touched any graphics yet, including text in the game that renders as graphics instead of using the game's font (such as the client of "酒場" in this screenshot).



In terms of the translation work, I'm trying to stay as consistent as I can to existing translations/localizations of the Salburg games while still working within the limits of the handheld screen. For the moment I've been focused on the Tutorial section of the game since it would make for a nice playable demo milestone.

There are definitely a few rough spots right now as a result of just not having enough pixels on screen. There are also a lot of item names and random bits of UI to be filled in, some of which are shared with the main game.

Here's a video I uploaded today with some of my progress:

I'll soldier on and post updates here as I make more progress. It has been a fun project so far and I've learned a lot, so I really want to bring it as far as I can.

[mikeprado30]

Great news!  Wish you the best success in this project.  Atelier games are really awesome.

[aquagon]

Best of luck with the project!

Also, if you need any information on why we took we translation choices we did for the Atelier Marie + Elie fan translation, you just have to ask!

[logicallysound]

Among other things I've been working on some of the bits of Japanese that are displayed as images rather than using the game's font. One of those things is the "nameplate" that some characters have when speaking instead of a picture (not quite 100% happy with this one yet):



One of these nameplates may also appear when looking at a request (still not 100% happy with this one, either):



This little bit of UI just needed the 日 to turn into "Days" and actually I just filled this in pixel by pixel rather than using an image editor to write it with a TrueType font (I hope it turned out okay):



When looking at items in the catalog there's some extra information such as the item's level, it's target level, it's MP cost, and the number of days to make one (I might try adding space in "TargetLV" later to see if it works):



Stuff like this is where I'd really appreciate help from somebody who is better with art and tile editing than I am but I did want to try and work it out for myself at least to start. YY-CHR ended up being the best tool for the job when it came to editing the tiles in the ROM.

I'm also still a bit on the fence about how I want to abbreviate the names for neutralizers. While it looks like there's extra room there, in other places where item names appear I've found I have about 12 characters of room before the letters start colliding with other stuff. Maybe Grn., Red, and Blu.Neutrlzr? In any case I think I'd really like to avoid making a separate, thinner font just for item names. Right now it uses the same font as other text in the game and the color is changed by swapping palettes.

EDIT: did a bit more work on the item cards that are used to show materials in synthesis:

[Nezz]

This little bit of UI just needed the 日 to turn into "Days" and actually I just filled this in pixel by pixel rather than using an image editor to write it with a TrueType font (I hope it turned out okay):

When I was doing the same kind of hacking, I found that while the Latin font is flexible in many ways, it's more or less impossible to escape the basic proportions of ascenders and descenders. This site hosts one 4x4 font, and even that has the "y" properly descending below the baseline, even if it's just by 1 pixel. That's how important this principle is in typography.

[logicallysound]

When I was doing the same kind of hacking, I found that while the Latin font is flexible in many ways, it's more or less impossible to escape the basic proportions of ascenders and descenders. This site hosts one 4x4 font, and even that has the "y" properly descending below the baseline, even if it's just by 1 pixel. That's how important this principle is in typography.

That totally escaped my notice. I think it should be easy for me to fix given that the entire box which displays the days and MP for the two alchemists is one big graphic.

Thanks for pointing it out because you're absolutely right and now I can't unsee it.

UPDATE: wow that really looks so much better now