Vay has been Released
I've had to keep this quiet for legal reasons, but I'm no longer under NDA!
I sit on the board of directors of a small video game company, Somoga. We had a very small release of a game called "Yuki Matsuri" for mobile phones about a year ago, but earlier this week, we released our first big title on the iTunes App Store, which is a port of an old Sega CD game: Vay. It's a full fledged role-playing game with virtually every feature translated directly from the Sega CD version to the iPhone.
We did not purchase any of the rights from the folks who put out the original English release, so we re-translated the entire script from the original, and re-translated and recorded all of the dialog for the cinematic animations. I never played the original English release and did not look at any of the original English script until the work was nearly complete so as not to plagiarize the earlier work (even inadvertently), but I strongly believe we have a release that's very close to the original Japanese version.
We also allowed for changeable character names, re-did the character (but not the monster) artwork, and re-did the backgrounds. Since we were moving from a game that was originally designed for display on a 4:3 television screen, moving to the widescreen format of the iPhone necessitated a lot of the aesthetic changes (though we wanted to do them, anyway).
My official role in the project was "Creative Director." What did this mean? I lent a hand with some of the translation and editing work (though we hired a professional translator, since translating a 250+ page script would have taken me at least a month), did most of the direction for the voice actors, and provided a lot of feedback on the game's user interface. I also ended up recording a minor role of some windbag foreign minister for one of the cinematic scenes, which I hadn't intended or especially wanted to do, but some last-minute logistical problems made it necessary. I had a lot of fun in the directorial role and the job seemed to come naturally, which provides some measure of encouragement towards my future career goals.
So, Vay is out and available for purchase in the iTunes store. You need to have an iPhone (any model) or an iPod Touch running firmware version 2.0 in order to play. The cost is a mere $5.
We won't know how sales are for some time, yet, but I'm hoping for more projects like this in the future. To the select few who knew about this project, many thanks for your encouragement along the way.
I sit on the board of directors of a small video game company, Somoga. We had a very small release of a game called "Yuki Matsuri" for mobile phones about a year ago, but earlier this week, we released our first big title on the iTunes App Store, which is a port of an old Sega CD game: Vay. It's a full fledged role-playing game with virtually every feature translated directly from the Sega CD version to the iPhone.
We did not purchase any of the rights from the folks who put out the original English release, so we re-translated the entire script from the original, and re-translated and recorded all of the dialog for the cinematic animations. I never played the original English release and did not look at any of the original English script until the work was nearly complete so as not to plagiarize the earlier work (even inadvertently), but I strongly believe we have a release that's very close to the original Japanese version.
We also allowed for changeable character names, re-did the character (but not the monster) artwork, and re-did the backgrounds. Since we were moving from a game that was originally designed for display on a 4:3 television screen, moving to the widescreen format of the iPhone necessitated a lot of the aesthetic changes (though we wanted to do them, anyway).
My official role in the project was "Creative Director." What did this mean? I lent a hand with some of the translation and editing work (though we hired a professional translator, since translating a 250+ page script would have taken me at least a month), did most of the direction for the voice actors, and provided a lot of feedback on the game's user interface. I also ended up recording a minor role of some windbag foreign minister for one of the cinematic scenes, which I hadn't intended or especially wanted to do, but some last-minute logistical problems made it necessary. I had a lot of fun in the directorial role and the job seemed to come naturally, which provides some measure of encouragement towards my future career goals.
So, Vay is out and available for purchase in the iTunes store. You need to have an iPhone (any model) or an iPod Touch running firmware version 2.0 in order to play. The cost is a mere $5.
We won't know how sales are for some time, yet, but I'm hoping for more projects like this in the future. To the select few who knew about this project, many thanks for your encouragement along the way.