Saturday 3 December 2016

Not Dead, Current Situation, and Future Plans

So someone asked if the Virgins Protection Magic translation was still being worked on in the comment, which is a polite way of asking "Are you dead?"

Well, I'm not dead.

There has been lots of trials and tribulations though. I'm a bit more active on the forums at ULMF due to Blogger being a kinda poor platform in a lot of ways (i.e. not pleasant to use). I made a long post on my current situation there, and it's certainly worth a copy and paste here:

It's been a hectic month or so due to employment issues. As of a couple of weeks ago, I was made part time (thanks, Brexit! I'm an academic, and there is evidence showing academia has already seen a direct, negative consequence of the vote. I'm not sure if it would have helped my specific case had the vote gone the other way, but it certainly couldn't have hurt.) I've already reduced my costs, but I still need to find some other way of generating money or things will get tricky.

Is this a plea for donations? Categorically No. Leaving aside the fact that I do not solicit donations for my fan translation works due to the ethics of doing so, there's the practical aspect: Donations won't solve the problem, they'd only prolong the amount of time I could go between full-time jobs. And, to be honest, my current experience with donations is that they really don't amount to that much - I can reveal that since 2011, I've received about $250 in donations for RPGMaker Trans, which won't cover a single months rent in the UK. It's a good thing it's a passion project, not a commercial one.

What this is notification of is that things are very hectic for me at the moment. I have no idea on how much time I will be able to dedicate to translation. Progress could be faster, slower, or wildly oscillating. I would certainly like to have the next version of the patch done by Christmas, but again this is an aspiration, not a timetable.

And as to where I am personally: don't worry too much about me. I'm fortunate in that I've got about 4-months of "rainy day" money, and I am still earning some from the part-time work I have. I estimate I've got about 7-8 months to find an alternate source of money before I start to have issues, which is way, way more than most people who find themselves having their employment status being altered. In short: There is a problem upcoming for me, but it's still some way off.
With regards to the patch itself: my tools put the patch at being 76% complete at the present time. I don't yet have all the tools I need to do the quality checking though, so the release has been postponed while I implement them. Quality checking includes quite important stuff like checking to see if translations go out of box, spelling etc. so I'm unwilling to release an unedited patch. But expect the next release to contain the complete game up to the end of Act 4, including all H-scenes in Alchester and Frisbee.

As to ongoing progress... as I've said, it's going to be a bit hectic. The Stream on Assembla is a good source for updates, so if you want to check the heartbeat of the project, head over there (although note that the timestamps are when I push the changes up to Assembla, and not the actual timestamps).

Due to the general crummyness of Blogger, I'm currently looking at creating an actual website for this project, as well as a bunch of other stuff. If all goes well, that should be done before Christmas, but I've made promises of this nature before and they've lapsed.

Anyhow... congrats on reading this far I guess.