Book Stuff Archive

Well, sort of an LoL book. It’s a localization of a Japanese children’s book! It was written by the producer and narrator of Game Center CX (Producer Kan!), and illustrated and translated by the multi-talented Nina Matsumoto.

Not only that, the Legends of Localization team added tons of bonus content. We interviewed the author, the illustrator/translator, and the designer of the English book. AND! The original Japanese edition of the book is also there in the back, so you can check out the changes that were made.

Also free stickers B-)

Here’s the commercial that was a huge group effort and tons of fun to make!

Buy the book heeeeeeere! And if you happen to find yourself at Tokyo Game Show this week, the book will also be available there! Producer Kan himself will be selling it 😀

Um. I swear I bought all this for work!

My coworker and I did some filming for a commercial yesterday! It’s for the I’m Stuck in a Video Game book written by Game Center CX’s producer & narrator, and illustrated & translated by Nina Matsumoto. The LoL team also added a substantial amount of extra content – interviews, behind-the-scenes sketches and photos, and more.

We filmed it at bossman reidman’s house with the help of his family. Here are some behind-the-scenes photos I took during production:

Now comes editing, adding in special effects, getting music composed, and narration! The book will release once we have this commercial in the bag (hopefully next week?)~

The Funky Fantasy IV book is deep in crunch mode and there’s still so much to do before our early October deadline. In fact, we figured out a final page count only yesterday: 240 pages. In actuality it’s a little less, since some of those pages will get used by the legal info page and other stuff. Here’s where it all ends though:

I think that’s even longer than the first Zelda LoL book!

Progress on the Funky Fantasy 4 book is chuggin’ along. Here are some pics from today’s meeting:

Tony always prints and staples together the latest version of whatever book we’re working on. It really helps to envision the final product.

Zuuly butted in several times today seeking attention. She wanted to sleep in my chair, but I wasn’t budging.

We also ordered some gorp.

Mato & Tony have been hard at work writing and designing the Funky Fantasy 4 book these past few weeks. Here’s a peek at a page printed on our weird office printer that will definitely change by the time the book is finished:

We also need to figure out what to call this book. “Funky Fantasy IV” doesn’t get the point across very easily! D:

While putting the upcoming Funky Fantasy IV book together I keep discovering or rediscovering great lines. I’m almost tempted to do another stream of the game in the near future with cheats on so we can blast through the game in like two days. That way I can get screenshots of all this stuff I missed – it turns out when we streamed it last year I only took a few screenshots once in a while since I had no idea it would turn into a serious book project down the road. The book schedule is pretty tight as it is though so I dunno how doable a few stream days would be though.

I’ve been working on a lot of stuff this week even though it barely feels like it.

One good piece of news is that a Fangamer pal helped make the HTML of the new site design for the main LoL site. I’ve still got a lot of internal work to do to make it work with my custom WordPress coding so I don’t think the design will be up for a few months, but it’s good to see it coming together finally. The best thing is that it’s mobile-friendly and can resize automatically to fit different screen types / dimensions. Besides being super helpful for mobile readers, it’ll help with search engine ranking too, since mobile friendly plays a part in those crazy algorithms too.

The last few days Tony and I have been working on the base layout for the upcoming Funky Fantasy IV book. It’s coming along well but it’s still very early and will change a lot I’m sure. At the moment it looks like it’ll be in the area of 250-300 pages long. Here are some example layouts we experimented with earlier this week that are now outdated.

We’re already working on something different from those two samples. We’ve decided what kind of info we’ll continue to use, what kind of info we’ll drop (mostly the uninformative ones that sound like they’re from a bad TruTV show), and how we’ll arrange things. In the end it looks like it’s going to be a mix between our This be book bad translations, video games! book and our main Legends of Localization books.

It doesn’t look like much now but I can tell this is gonna be one of my favorite books I ever work on!

I’ve been going over the version 2 script of Funky Fantasy IV this week in preparation for our latest book project. I can’t believe it, but I’ve run across a couple of lines that give really good life advice. Learn well from the friends of Gorube, Skull Million, and eagles:

• While I am aware of my fault, my life is just right.
• Do not mess up with the people you love.
• Take it easy!
• Do not be afraid of the dangerous part.
• Educational guidance will be helpful.
• Do not try hard to think that the eagle is an eagle!

While at SGDQ, we realized that we were about 2 hours away from the corporate headquarters of Bang Printing. They’re our favorite book printer, and they’ve printed every LoL book to date. So Kari Fry, Ryan Novak, and I drove up there to take a tour! Here are some pictures from that trip:

Click that ↓ link to see more!