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:
Ever since Mato & I streamed Funky Fantasy 4, people have been asking for a Funky Fantasy 6. Because Final Fantasy 6 uses kanji in its script, machine translations are pretty competent and a lot less entertaining. AI is still pretty far behind the skills of human translators, though.
As a test, Mato ran Final Fantasy 6’s script through Google Translate and I’m combing through it now trying to see if it would be worth streaming. I’m only a fifth of the way done (god it’s huge), but here are some funny lines I’ve found so far:
The funny lines are few and far between, unfortunately! Not sure if we’ll stream this, but I’ll continue to post more funny goofs as I scrub through the script.
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:
This week I’ve been doing some organization-related work for my upcoming book about Funky Fantasy IV. I’ve got an early chapter already mostly done but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything good/funny so I’ve been scouring through text files and jumping around in the game to get things I missed before.
It’s a bit of a hassle since FFIV/FFII don’t really have debug menus, so I’ve been relying on an old save file archive I put together for my FF4 comparison site. The problem is that I never really documented where each save file is so it’s always taken me 10+ minutes just to find a save file where I need it to be. So now I’m finally going through and documenting that stuff for future time savings.
Unfortunately it looks like one of my saves is missing entirely so I’ll have to play a good chunk of the game to re-create it. It’s also a bit of a hassle when using different save files on different versions of the game, as it means the characters’ names get messed up each time. But it’s a small hassle when I stop to realize I’m playing Final Fantasy IV for a career – kid me would be so shocked hear about this 😛
While working on my academic paper about Funky Fantasy IV I noticed something familiar.
First, the game was obsessed with fluoride for some reason:
Then, while looking through another really badly translated game, I found this:
I can only assume that Google’s old machine translation system considered dentistry as fantasy.