What’s the game?

(with thanks for all who contributed to my research; your insight was greatly appreciated)

I've been learning some truths about game development over the months and in particular what it takes to put a typical Japanese RPG into the shops of Europe. I mean, everyone wonders about a delay or a shipping date, and it's sometimes hard to figure out what's going on.

When translations are done badly or games glitch why does this happen? Here are the facts:
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Fact #1: Size is everything
A typical role-playing-game (RPG) for a console can exceed 400,000 words of text. That's quite a lot; a good few books worth. Now consider this must be translated, checked, rechecked, edited, adjusted and fitted into a game. This makes quality assurance and testing one of the most daunting tasks I can imagine.

Factor in online games and you're looking at in excess of ten-times that amount. Are you scared yet?

Fact #2: Mices are female mouses
Pluralizing text in a game is a nightmare from Japanese. Why? Because Japanese doesn't work that way; axe doesn't become axes, a mouse doesn't become mice. When translators get involved late in a game due to market decisions, fitting such things in becomes hard. This is often why you see "2 axe" in a menu or "those mouse over there.", when you don't, really clever people have done really clever stuff; trust me on this.

Now consider any European language other than English. Word gender becomes an even bigger problem; it's very hard to explain that each word or thing has an associated gender; in fact even for English developers this is a hard thing for them to get their head around.

In short, if you see a good example of a game translated into all languages then someone built a very sophisticated language engine into the game that understood how to correctly construct game elements. It does exist, but it's rare; I take my hat off to every example coded through the blood and sweat of so many.

Fact #3: Space the final frontier
Japanese characters consume substantially less space than any western language. This is a problem as games designers tend to cram every inch of low resolution console they can. It leads to cryptic labels such as Phy, Lvl and Pwr simply due to constraints imposed by the original un-translated game.

Fact #4: Do you speak with an accent?
Getting character sets into a game can be tricky. Again, this is due to the Japanese character heritage. Normally English characters are fairly well supported, but the subtle accents or extended characters of French and German? Think again.

Fact #5: Europeans' are slow
Game developers are hardcore. They like coding to the edge, squeezing the most out of a games console. One particular technique is fatal in the modern world; they tie their in-game speed to the refresh rate of the TV.

Okay, this gets a bit technical, but Japanese and American TV refresh at 60 frames-per-second. Therefore a game developer may write software that counts refreshes; when it hits 60 he knows one-second of real time has passed.

Time needs to be tied to many things, movement, sound, events, all sorts of things. For internationalization, a game developer should actually use a thing called an RTC or Real Time Clock. This is a special part of the console that allows the developer to know how much real time has passed.

Are you following? Good. Now let's consider Europe. Here (and other places in the world) the TV refreshes at 50 frames-per-second; all those lovely real time calculations are now 1/6s too slow and in the old days this one of the reasons why games like Tekken felt slow on a European Playstation.

When a game is ported all these references to frames-per-second need updating, sadly our hardcore game developers sometimes miss a few, leading to odd issues such as people walking through walls, or footsteps after people stop walking etc ergo ported games have to be tested really thoroughly.

Fact #6: Brought to you in widescreen
Why do we have black borders in European games? The answer comes back to TV standards. The resolution of European TV is different from America and Japan; while our refresh rate is less, we gain more pixels on the screen. In theory the data-throughput is the same, so game speed should in theory be identical but it's not.

Poor porting results in one of two problems: black borders and an incorrect aspect-ratio or artifact problems, lost screen area and lost resolution.

The black border problem is simple: no care has been taken to reformat to the new resolution. By using the original resolution (which is less pixels) you end up with black borders and fat short characters. Sometimes this gets quite strange; in-game play might be reformatted so there are no borders, but full motion video (FMV) not.

It's a complicated task. Reformatting FMV can be costly after initial game production, and if the original FMV was less pixels sometimes it can't be reformatted. The correct solution to this problem however is to render FMV in high-resolution at a high frame rate and then down-sample to the resolution of the TV used; it means no loss of quality when dealing with any of the TV standards around the world.

When some effort is made to reformat games and remove the black borders, odd things happen. Sometimes games designers simply rescale things. Rescaling also results in strange aspect ratios, lost resolution and bits of the original screen being pushed off the edges. Polygon artifact problems lurk in such porting too due to lack of forethought in the game design.

All these problems stem from games that are rarely designed for a world market; this comes later, after that games initial success. Thankfully however high definition TV (HDTV) is sweeping the world, and the next generation consoles will demand more from video and graphics content; these problem should then finally be gone.

Fact #7: The cat ate the mouse that ate the cheese
95% of Japanese games are a translation of a translation. Access to Japanese text and Japanese translators hasn't always been an easy thing; particularly when you consider that Japanese has whole sets of linguistic specialization depending on what you want to communicate. A generic Japanese translator doesn't generally make a good game translator; they need background, context and gaming abilities.

The result is that most games are translated from Japanese to English and then to another European language; it's like Chinese Whispers, depending on how well the first translation was done can effect how well the final translation is done. The good translators work off multiple language texts and have a dedicated passion unsurpassed and backed up by experienced editors.

You should also note that waiting for a translation to be completed before embarking on another translation doubles the translation time; in fact this probably accounts for the biggest delay between a game release in the first region and the game release in the last region.
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What I've tried to give you here is a selection of the potential problems faced by a games company. Depending on the planning, success of the game and business goals not all the things I've listed can be a problem; it is however a gigantean task attacked by thousands of people in their day-to-day lives within the gaming industry.

So next time there's a delay in your game, or a few oddities, consider the struggle that went on to get you that game in the first place. A lot of people care very passionately and try very hard to give you the best they possibly can.

[EotM]

I'mafeelin: satisfied
I'malistinto: a colleague bitch about another colleague