Langrisser Projects

Tomorrow will be the last day for submitting reports. Following that, accounts will revert to being comments-only.

For all the beta testers who actually submitted comments, thank you. You guys helped us so much. We’ve been able to fix a lot of dialogue thanks to your feedback. This game’s biggest nightmare was that we never knew who said what. You giving us the context and seeing what happened live in the game has been invaluable.

Today I made the final spell check over the complete game script: all 859 A4 pages of it. I fixed a lot of small errors that slipped through even the beta test, and spent time unifying a lot of little things, like making sure “hmmm” always has the same number of “m”s, and “hmph” is always “hmph,” not “hmmph.” I know it’s small things, but it really adds to the polish of the finished game.

I also had fun adding in a few references to other games and comments, so even if you played the beta test, you might see a few nameless commanders screaming new things as they die

The instruction manual is still lagging behind, and I really need to work out the final patch. We will be distributing the game in a NINJA 2.0 patch file. Unfortunately, the only NINJA patcher is still the one I wrote. It is available at http://ninja.cinnamonpirate.com/, and has a load of bugs. I’m really sorry about this, and I’m trying to work out a few of the problems. There will be a much better patcher available by the end of the week, but it will likely remain command-line only, since I no longer have Windows.

Beta testers had no end of trouble patching the ROM, and if they had problems following directions, then it will be a nightmare for end users. With NINJA, even if getting it running is a bit of a hassle, we can at least be sure that users are guaranteed to patch successfully. A NINJA patch will reject a 1.0 ROM, fix a 1.1 interleaved ROM, and automatically adjust depending on whether or not it has a header. Byuu and I are working on a successor to NINJA, so even that format will soon go the way of the dinosaur. When our new patch format is ready, we will release Der Langrisser in that as well.

On top of that, tomorrow and Thursday (Wednesday in your time zone) are both production days at the newspaper I work at, so I will be swamped there. And I still need to pick up one of my girlfriend’s birthday presents.

Needless to say, it’s going to be a very, very busy two days. If I just die and can’t make things work, the release might be pushed up to June 9 instead of June 8. You have been given fair warning.

It’s been six years. We don’t really want to foul things up at the end, but by the same token, we don’t want this to drag on another month. A 1.0 release means a game is “done,” not “perfect.” We may polish more dialogue in the future once the patch has seen the eyes of hundreds of end users. If we do, that will be our 1.01 release.

As a last note, we have re-enabled a long-lost feature of the game which has been known to exist since alamone first began his work on a translation in 1998, but which has never been discovered. Look for it in the final release. It’s a little buggy — likely why it was removed — but it’s neat to finally see it in action in the game.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 8:45 am and is filed under Der Langrisser News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.