Darbury

It's explained in one of the routes you have remaining. That's all I'll say.

Firecat, I think the image you're referring to was actually an example of what *not* to do — i.e., cloning from a non-opaque source won't actually cover the original type. So when you say you can still see the word "no" with the brush used, you're absolutely right. The rest of the post discussed the easiest way to non-destructively remove a baked-in transparency from an image so that it could be more effectively be retouched. Imagine there was an intricate illustration of a dragon on the paper behind the type. That's something you'd need to spend some time repairing, and it's definitely not something you'd want to do with a non-opaque source. And while there are hundreds of image editing programs out there in the world, I'm but one man; I don't have it in me to write hundreds of sets of instructions. (Not while sober, anyway.) This is my personal blog, so I thought I'd focus on my personal workflow. #adobe4eva

And now a little something for all you image editors out there. (If you don't speak Photoshop, just keep walking; there's nothing for you here.) Some visual novels make image edits simple — the UI is mostly flat colors, 90º angles, and 1-bit transparencies. Easy peasy. Meanwhile, some more recent VNs like to store all their UI elements as semi-transparent overlays with full 8-bit alpha channels. If you've ever tried editing these, you know what a pain they can be. And so, I came to love a command I've never had to use before in all my years with Photoshop — namely because if there's a transparency on something, I'm usually the one who put it there in the first place. Ready? Tattoo this on your arm: Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency Let's look at one possible scenario where it might come into play: Text on paper. At first glance, doesn't seem like it would be too hard, right? Then you get it into Photoshop and realize it's a mix of transparent elements and fully opaque type. If you just grabbed the rubber stamp tool and tried cloning out the text right now, you'd end up with something like this. That's because your cloning source is semi-transparent. The trick here is to separate out the 8-bit alpha channel from the source image so you have an entirely opaque image. So with the source layer selected, choose Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency, temporarily disable the resulting layer mask, and you get something like this. From there, it's just a standard retouching job. Once you clone out the type as best you can, you're ready to add new text from your TL team. (In this case, since the type and paper are at two different levels of transparency, you'd also need to do a quick cleanup on the layer mask. If you look closely at the mask thumbnail, you can see the type as pure white on a 60% gray. Just paint over that part of the mask with more 60% gray and you'll be good to go.) Enable the layer mask again, export as a file with 8-bit alpha support (a PNG, most likely) and you're done. This was a fairly straightforward example, of course, but the basics remain the same no matter how complex the retouching job. Now rinse and repeat 500 more times with all the rest of the game files. Aren't you glad you decided to take up image editing?

Pop quiz, hotshot. There’s an untranslated (i.e, romaji) word sitting there in the script you're editing, staring right up at you. It’s been left like that because the TL team figured people ought to know what it means. But will they really? And what are the ramifications if they don’t? You’re running out of time, and patch release day is breathing down your neck. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO? In the case of KoiRizo, I ended up relying on a journalistic standard commonly called “the first reference rule.” Here’s how it works. Visual novels for all! Let’s say you’re a journalist writing an article about efforts to improve educational standards in underdeveloped nations. At some point, you might find yourself needing to refer to The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, aka UNESCO. But if just you dropped the acronym “UNESCO” in there, most people wouldn’t know what the bloody hell you were talking about. And if you went with “The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization” every time, your prose would be about as ungainly as me at my prom. So a compromise gets struck: you explain the term on your first reference to it, then use the shorter form thereafter. An example first reference: “The director-general of The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), pledged to make visual novels part of the global curriculum by 2025.” Or: “The director-general of UNESCO, the UN agency focused on international education efforts, pledged to make visual novels part of the global curriculum by 2025.” At this point, you’d be free to use “UNESCO” in any future references, since you’ve already explained the term. Everyone wins: the reader understands what you’re talking about, and you only have to use one word instead of eight. Ojousamas for all! The same holds true for visual novels. Let’s say an untranslated term like “ojousama” shows up in your script. if the reader has consumed a fair number of anime/manga/VNs, they might know this describes a young woman of certain means and refinement. It’s a common VN archetype, after all. But a relative newcomer to these genres would have no way of knowing that. They’d be lost if you just started dropping O-bombs out of the blue. So the first thing to do is determine context. Is this a one-off reference? If so, you can probably just fully translate the line and be done with it. (“She takes a limo to school? She must be an ojousama” becomes, “She takes a limo to school? She must come from money.”) In the case of KoiRizo, however, the word “ojousama” is used several dozen times. In fact, a character’s ojousama-ness becomes the focal point of an entire route. It would be a fool’s errand to try and excise it, particularly when there’s no one English word to replace it. So we apply the first reference rule. The initial mention in the translated KoiRizo script reads: “Because she's an ojousama, it'd be a given that she wouldn't worry about matters like money.” It hints at the meaning, but doesn't quite go far enough. So applying our rule, we update it to: “She's a proper young lady of means — an ojousama — so you'd expect her not to worry about things like money.” We’ve now defined the word “ojousama” in context and set the stage for its future use. This will make the rest of the VN flow much more smoothly for both new readers and purists who prefer their tropey terms untranslated. If several hours go by without us using the word again, it’s common courtesy to provide a reminder of its definition, but otherwise we should be good to go. All for gruel! You can even apply the rule in reverse. Here, two characters are about to spend 50 or so lines talking about a certain home-cooked dish. Original translation below: A: “Okay ... What's in the pot?” B: “Rice gruel with egg broth.” We don’t want to spend the next 50 lines saying “Rice gruel with egg broth.” Nor do we want to just say “gruel,” which sounds like something ladled out in a Depression-era orphanage. In fact, this is a steaming bowl of Japanese comfort food deliciousness. So we apply the rule in reverse, and bring back the untranslated term from the original script: A: “Okay ... What's in the pot?” B: “Ojiya — rice end egg porridge.” Now we can safely use the term “ojiya” for the next 50 lines. This ends up working better on several levels: it makes the dish sound more traditionally Japanese, it strikes the right emotional tone, and it helps us shave extra words from our lines. P.S. - If anyone knows where I can get a really good bowl of ojiya in New York City, I’m all ears.

Great topic! You might be interested in reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living, which is a nice introduction to secular meditation for beginners. (I've based my own meditation and mindfulness practice in part on the program in this book.) The funny thing about meditation is that it requires some motivation to get started, but once you do, you kinda need to let go of any expectations of getting anything from it. Imagining meditation will make this sudden difference in your life is the quickest way to get frustrated with it and give up. Maybe something will change, maybe something won't. Just be there in the moment and observe whatever happens (or doesn't happen). The observing is where the magic lives.

Sorry you had to take one for the team, Tiag. But hey, better you than me. And trust me, Rooke, I plan to be much more ruthless with ellipses in future efforts. They shall know fear.

There is no greater truth than the Oxford comma.

I make a living in copywriting, but KoiRizo was my first attempt at editing a visual novel. Suffice to say, there were a few bumps along the way. So in the spirit of this blog, here are just a few of the many, many things I wish I had done differently. 1. I should have started out using a style guide. From the very beginning, I should have picked one of the major styles guides and made it my bible. Instead, as I came across questions — Should this be hyphenated? Should that be capitalized? — I just googled the answer. As long as I had a browser open, I might as well have gone to Orbitz and bought myself a one-way ticket to Inconsistencyville. Population: this guy. Thankfully, I quickly realized the error of my ways and was able to minimize the damage early on, but save yourself some pain and don’t repeat my mistake. Pick a style guide. Use it. My formal training is in journalism, so I’m partial to AP style, but most any style guide should do just fine: Chicago, MLA, MHRA, etc. But if you don’t use the Oxford comma, you deserve to die alone.* 2. I should have (mostly) ignored the VO. In hindsight, I spent a bit too much time worrying about how the English script would match up to the exact cadences of the voice over. As a result, I kept in far too many ellipses from the original Japanese. So … at times … the script reads … like this. And, as it turns out, most of those VO pauses weren’t even perceptible enough to warrant their inclusion in the English text. Feh. Lesson learned. Next time, I’ll give priority to the written word. After all, it’s called a “visual novel,” not a “visual audio play.” 3. I should have established character voice cheat sheets early on. This ranks pretty high on the list of things wish I had done differently when editing KoiRizo. The base translation was very literal, so, at least on the page, the characters’ speech patterns all read pretty much the same. The actual content of their dialogue gave them some level of characterization — oh Yuuhi, you so crazy — but still, I wish I’d been able to give everyone a more distinct voice ... Next time out, I plan to make up an index card for each main character with notes on speech patterns, vocal tics, and catchphrases. And then, I’ll spend sufficient time with the translator agreeing on how each character should speak. (I'm just an editor. The nuances of untranslated Japanese speech are a bit beyond my pay grade.) Do they drop their “g”s when talkin’? Does one use painfully proper grammar when one speaks? This should go a long way toward making sure each character maintains a consistent voice, particularly if multiple translators and editors are involved. 4. I should have picked a visual novel I liked more. I know, right? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with KoiRizo. It’s a perfectly fine moege. It’s light and fluffy and inconsequential. (Except for the dramatic bits, which are angsty and fluffy and inconsequential.) I guess that’s partly why I chose it; far easier to hone my craft on lighter titles like KoiRizo, then move onto more substantial fare. But yeah, it never really clicked for me. (My VNDB rating for it has been hovering around a 6, if that tells you anything.) I tend toward VNs that take more narrative and metatextual risks, whereas KoiRizo is perfectly happy being an average, trope-heavy, cookie-cutter moege. Moreover, it had way too many H-scenes for my taste, often at the expense of plot. While it forced me to learn how to edit those types of scripts very quickly — more on that in a later blog post, I’m sure — it wasn’t something I always enjoyed. But still, I never let any of this affect the quality of the output. I work in advertising, and we very rarely have the luxury of actually liking the brands we create campaigns for. You either learn to compartmentalize, or you get weeded out fast. All of which is to say, I always tried to honor both the original authorial intent and the lead TL’s vision for the project as best I could. __________________ So there you go. Just a few of the many editing mistakes I have made, presented here for your approval. May you go forth and learn from my facepalms. Because, as Goro says, forewarned is four-armed. *Or surrounded by cats.

Welcome aboard the S.S. Fuwa. Have fun!

Someone will always be better than you. Someone will always be worse than you. That's life. The sooner you embrace that, the happier you'll be. As for myself, I try to practice a bit of mindfulness in competition by letting go of as many expectations as possible. If I'm lucky, I can focus on the moment, not the result. Was I happy with my performance? Did I have fun? If so, then I consider it time well-spent, regardless of whether I won or lost.

That first week is so long, relatively speaking, because they want to give equal screen time to each of the girls before you make your pick — and that takes lines. Once you do choose, of course, all the other girls get eaten by sharks or something, so there's nothing but quality time for you and your sweetie.

Smartass? Me?

A Wataru route would have been god-tier. Just saying.

A good editor is a good reader. By that, I don’t mean that he or she is well-read (although that helps). And I don’t mean that he or she reads exceptionally fast (although I’m sure that helps, too). An editor’s most important job is to serve, quite literally, as the reader’s proxy. If you want to edit anything — a magazine article, a TV script, a visual novel — it’s your job to approach the text not as yourself, but as someone you’ve never met, someone who doesn’t share your likes, your dislikes, your accumulated knowledge. And that doesn’t mean approaching the text as some imaginary “ideal reader” either. They, like unicorns and affordable housing in San Fran, simply don’t exist. Seriously, when you ask a content creator to describe their “ideal reader,” they invariably end up describing themselves. Instead, it’s your job to edit for the “average reader.” And just who is that? And how do you edit for them? That’s going to vary from title to title. If you’re editing some hardcore and super-niche VN, your assumed reader will be very different than that of some light and frothy moege. (And if you’re editing a Sakura title, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Let me buy you a shot.) That said, I do have some basic ground rules I try to follow. 1. Anticipate that this could be the reader’s first VN. I've decided to edit visual novels because I believe in them as an art form. I want to see their English releases improve in quality and become more widely accepted outside of certain closed cultural circles. That means I choose to invite new VN readers into a text and make them feel, if not at home, then at least like a welcomed guest. Stop. Put down the pitchforks. I’m not talking about dumbing down VNs. This is simply Writing 101. Among the authors I know, a common credo is, “A good novel teaches the reader how to read it.” (Unless it’s trying very, very hard to be unreadable. *cough*) A text in translation needs to work doubly hard to achieve this. First, it needs to bridge the gaps in cultural knowledge between the original audience (Japanese VN fans) and the secondary audience (Western VN fans). Otherwise, the work becomes much harder to read and enjoy than the author ever intended. As you edit, read with beginner’s mind. Where might someone new to the VN genre get hung up? Which cultural nuances might prove confusing? Ask yourself if there’s a way you can bring clarity to those aspects without diluting the original text. If you do your job right, they’ll seem organic enough part of the VN that the experienced reader will barely know they’re there. 2. Choose to operate on the same timeline as the reader As an editor, you have a luxury the reader does not: access to the full text. You probably go into the project already having read a large chunk of the VN several times over. Maybe you were even involved in the translation of it. Whatever the case, you run the risk of your brain filling in gaps that might leave the average reader confused. Think of yourself as Bill Murray midway through Groundhog Day. Trapped in those endless 24 hours, he bull-rushes through his routine, responding not to what people are actually saying, but what he remembers them saying in past loops. He falls prey to over-familiarity and, as a result, alienates everyone he meets. It’s only when he learns to interact with people in their timeframe again, living and responding in the moment, that he finally gets what he wants. (The girl. It’s always the girl.) Be late-movie Bill Murray. Edit mindfully. When working on KoiRizo, I forced myself to do three separate editing passes. First, I tackled each script completely blind, going in with no more knowledge than any other reader. No cheating, no reading ahead. As I encountered lines that left me, the reader, feeling like I just missed something, I edited them as best I could but flagged them for later. Maybe the author intended that line to be cryptic. Maybe it was foreshadowing. Or maybe something got lost in translation. No way of knowing, so best to keep moving. After reaching the end of a script, I’d start back at the beginning and do another full edit, this time focusing on the lines I’d flagged previously. VNs tend to be episodic, so if I hadn’t found the answer I needed inside that self-contained script, I elevated the flag and left a comment for the translator asking for clarification. Finally, when I’d finished an entire route, I’d go back do a third, quick edit through the whole thing, top to bottom. I had all the facts from the scripts and all the notes from the translator, so if something still wasn’t working, it was likely all my fault. And that meant it was time to really hunker down and do some major surgery. Technically, I also did a fourth edit pass once I’d finished the entire VN, since some of the routes had little in-jokes and references to other routes, but I consider that more of an enhanced read-through than anything, since I was only making tiny tweaks. Which brings me to my last point ... 3. Read, read, and read again You might be done editing, but you’re not done reading. Find that beginner’s mind and read through everything again. And again. And again. Forget that you’re the one who rewrote the words on the page and just try to approach them anew. Be the reader. Each time, you’ll probably find something new — typos, grammatical errors, slight nuances you might have missed earlier that change the whole meaning of a line. I read through KoiRizo a bunch of times and I know I still missed all sorts of things. Sorry! I've been kicking myself whenever I see the occasional typo report float through. (Editors are not proofreaders, by the way. Or vice versa. Fodder for a future blog post.) But at a certain point, a work just wants to get out in the world, warts and all. And that’s another part of editing: learning to let go.

It's here! It's finally here! The Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort English patch release, brought to you by the tireless MDZ and team. The plot: Soutarou thought it would be a summer like any other, working part-time at his aunt's dilapidated island resort. But then came the night of the meteor crash and the five strange space girls who climbed out of the smoldering crater. With them, they brought an ancient artifact that could doom the entire multiverse ... or save it. Oh, who am I kidding? There are no space girls. It's just a moege set on a tropical island. I had a fun time editing it. Now go and read the thing already.

I couldn't agree more. Wait, wut?

I’m a research junkie. Before taking on any new venture, I tend to waste stupid amounts time reading up on whatever it is I’m about to tackle. So when I got it in my head earlier this year to try editing a visual novel, the first thing I did was start googling like mad: “visual novel editing tips”“visual novel editing advice”“visual novel editing examples”“should my baby’s poop be this color?” (Okay, I was multitasking. The answer is “yes,” by the way, but call your pediatrician if it stays like that for more than two or three days.) It didn’t look good. I stumbled on a blog post Moogy had written on VN editing way back in 2009, but that was pretty much it. Still, to paraphrase Cadillac cribbing Brené Brown quoting Teddy Roosevelt, better to dare greatly and fail than just sit around and whine. So I dove in head-first … and landed head-first. I’d been hoping my experience in writing and editing ad campaigns would help me make short work of things. I mean, how different could it be? Very different, as it turns out. I made a ton of rookie mistakes, followed by a bunch of slightly less rookie mistakes, topped off by several “Did you seriously just do that?” whoppers near the very end. Yet somehow, 36,000+ lines later, I managed to stumble across the finish line, just having edited my first visual novel. The result, MDZ’s translation of Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort, turned out pretty nicely, all things considered. (It should be releasing any day now. I’ll link to the patch when it does.) Of course, I still can’t read any of the scripts without obsessing over the countless things I wish I’d done differently. Which brings me to the point of this blog. Back when I first started, I couldn’t find any good resources on VN editing. Don’t worry – this won’t be one either. I’m still a rank amateur by any standard, so I wouldn’t presume to offer authoritative advice to anyone. But what I can do is discuss the various editing challenges I faced, my approach to them, and the many, many different ways I fell flat on my face. I might not have the right answers, but at least I can point out some of the things you might want to start considering if you’re planning on editing a VN. Here's another way to think about it: In the (insanely great) Dark Souls games, there are bloodstains scattered throughout the game world marking places where other players have met their demise. Activate one, and you can see a spectral re-enactment of their final few seconds. Point being, if you see a bunch of bloodstains massed around a door, you can be sure something there’s something truly nasty lurking on the other side. It's probably a good idea to stop, watch, and learn from others' mistakes before going any further. Let me be your Yoko Ono bloodstain.

Good luck! True Remembrance is a personal favorite of mine, so I'd love to see what you come up with. Regarding the images/GUI with text: You might be better off re-typesetting those elements rather than trying to size them up. Text is a little less forgiving than art when it comes to scaling and smoothing. (If you need any help with that part of things, feel free to shoot me a PM. I'd be happy to lend a hand.)