Final Fantasy 7 > WIP

[WIP]FF7 Refined

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Salk:
Again, thanks for keeping us updated here.

I'd like to ask you how many man-hours you expect are needed in order to complete your project and how many you've already invested in finalizing the Wall Market part.

Thanks and godspeed!

Kutsufatmo:
Those are tough questions to answer unfortunately. The thing is the amount of time I spend on any given section can wildly vary depending on how tricky the wording is. I can sometimes get stun-locked for an hour just trying to find the right words for rephrasing a certain line and others I can have cleaned up in minutes. Sometimes I just walk away for a bit when I get stuck. So it's hard for me to give any kind of estimate on how much time I've spent on anything specific since it can be all over the place. What I can say is it's definitely taken a lot more time than I thought it would in general, but I'm also not minding it so much.

With a project of this nature, the nice thing about it is no matter how unfinished it is, it can always seamlessly transition to the old content when the new stuff runs out without "feeling" incomplete. You just might notice a sudden drop in writing quality after a certain point, lol. It helps keep me motivated because regardless if I sometimes feel in over my head or there's too much work ahead of me, I know that any amount of progress is worthwhile and not a waste of time.

I'm sure if I really cranked things out, I could probably have this done in a few months' time. But then this would feel like much more of a job than a hobby to me which I'm looking to avoid at the moment. I also don't think I would be able to maintain the quality I'm going for if I did that. So this is unfortunately looking like a multi-year thing, much like the Beacause project took years to get to where it is now. On the positive side, as I progress further I expect I will spend less time on combat tweaks as the challenge is already sufficient, so I can move more quickly just focusing on the dialogue.

Anyways, alpha version 0.3 is now out. Main post has been updated. Dialogue and combat are now done for the train graveyard, the sector 7 pillar attack, and the aftermath of the plate collapsing. This now leaves just some dialogue to finish up at Aeris' house and then the Midgar building, and that should be it for all of Midgar. That said, the Midgar building is a fairly big segment, so that may take some time, but hopefully not as much as Wall Market.

Salk:
Hello, Kutsufatmo!

Thanks for the answer, full of interesting details about your working method. I, for one, am glad that you put quality over speed in your work. You'll take the time you need in order to keep the pacing and engagement in check. Ideally, it started as a pleasant hobby and will end the same.

One other question, if I may: how did you select which part of the game you tackle first? Also, on a more technical note, I think that Beacause needed to do lots of box replacements to accommodate the new text. Is it something that applies to FF7 Refined as well?

Cheers!

Kutsufatmo:
Yes, I've had to make many adjustments to boxes to ensure they fit with the new text. Thankfully, Makou Reactor makes this mostly easy by streamlining much of the process. There is an auto-resize button that will adjust boxes automatically to fit the new text, and will even account for character names if they are longer than the default. But there are a few text boxes that weren't properly formatted in the original translation which require me to go a step further and dig through all the scripted character events and make sure they are resized correctly. When I first started this project, I was not familiar with how to do that, so there are still some early segments of the game I will need to return to in order to really polish them up, but as it is now, they're still at least technically functional so it's a low priority thing for me right now.

As for how I selected where to start first, it just all around made sense to start with the beginning of the game and work my way forwards. That way I can easily create a save file from the beginning and test things out as I go. It also quickly became apparent to me that reading through lines of dialogue divorced from the actual context of the gameplay can be really difficult at times to understand what exactly a character is trying to convey. That's where it becomes doubly helpful to just jump back into a save file and run through the dialogue in context so I can get a better sense of how I should rephrase it if it needs reworking.

A great example of this actually is just the most recent thing I worked on; the climb through the plate ruins above Wall Market in order to reach the Shinra building. There's a section where Cloud explains the timing on when to jump onto a swinging wire in order to make it across, but the original wording of it was always kind of vague and confusing, so you could end up wasting a lot of time doing trial and error with the jump. So by playing through it again and getting a feel for it, I think I rephrased it in a way that should be a lot more clear to players on when exactly they should jump across.

At any rate, alpha version 0.4 is ready for download. This is just a small update I wanted to get out before the Shinra building, as I probably won't be releasing another update until I've reworked the entire building, and that could take some time. This update just cleans up the remainder of dialogue at Aeris' house before heading out to Wall Market and then climbing the ruins to reach the Shinra building.

Salk:
Excellent!

Thanks again! Looking forward to more snippets of your development process in the future. I'll be sure to keep a vigilant eye on this thread for the time to come.

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