Main Site Stuff Archive

Putting My Drawing Tablet to Use

I’m almost completely done with making thumbnails for the 250+ games we have listed on the site. It was an easy matter of getting shots of the title screens for every game and editing them to be thumbnail size.

A few games caused problems, though. Like that arcade game called Download. It’s almost impossible to search for on the googs. And then there’s Ninja Gaiden X, which was a mobile phone game released in Japan in 2004 and it no longer exists. This is the only title screen I was able to find for it (yeah, that’s the biggest size too):

So I definitely had to remake it from scratch for the thumbnail. With my trusty drawing tablet and growing knowledge of Photoshop effects, I came up with this:

Ta-da! It would have taken too long to learn how to do a fire effect for a simple thumbnail that almost nobody will see, so I went with the glowy effect instead. I gained some experience points!

Gilbert Goes to Target

Poe: What’s with this thumbnail?

Mato: I don’t know. I didn’t know what to do.
Poe: What’s that behind him?
Mato: Shopping carts from Target.
Poe: Why?!
Mato: I don’t know, it’s a free stock photo. Please make a better one.
Poe: Okay I’ll try.

Poe: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Fantasy Gradients

We have a new section on the website! Now you can browse articles by series. Take a look here~

Most of the old thumbnails need to be replaced, so I’ve been working on that today. I’m a novice at photo editing software, so I spent a long time messing around with gradients to make this simple thumbnail for the Final Fantasy section:

That took longer that I was hoping, but it came out nice. Hopefully I’ll be fully done with thumbnails by tomorrow!

Now You’re Playing with Programming

I’ve been working on a pretty large coding project that will make the Info Dumps and side-by-side game comparison galleries easier for me to organize and comment on. I basically had to redo the research page stuff from scratch and write it all in a new language + write a back end organization tool.

I finally got it into an alpha state yesterday. Before, I had to manually edit dozens of .txt files and rebuild pages manually, but now I can just drag and drop and type text.

And here’s what that same stuff looks like on the front end, aka what ordinary users will see:

Once I have it in a more complete state I plan to do full side-by-side game comparison galleries somewhat regularly for Legends of Localization. They won’t be as info dense as my EarthBound, Zelda, FFIV sections but they’ll still provide lots of cool info for me and for readers.

Showers of Localization

While in the shower last Thursday I suddenly decided that hey, maybe I should make a dedicated page for the bad translation galleries we have on the main site. So I moved things around and added a Zero Wing gallery at the start of the series, then tweeted out the new page link. I thought it’d be a popular series, but it seems I underestimated the power of bad translations:

I guess it makes a lot of sense though – we made our bad translation book largely to be an introduction to LoL as a whole, and the book immediately got super popular as soon as it was announced. In a way, this is the same deal, the bad translation galleries will hopefully entertain enough to introduce the LoL site to readers who never would’ve noticed it otherwise.

I accidentally skipped over gallery #6 so I’ll probably go back and fill it in with Breath of Fire 2 highlights. After that, there’s a lot of games that we could add to the bad translation series. Hopefully it’ll be a new, strong pillar for the site in the long run.