Marc wrote:
It may be a minor detail, and I wouldn't have brought it up if it would single-handedly hold us back, but if I see something I mention it.
For the record, I'm also not just blindly doing whatever he tells me. One of the changes I pushed back on was a new font - midway through, Marc asked me the feasibility of using Metal Gear Solid's normal text font because it is - actually - a cleaner looking version of Policenauts'. Policenauts's. Whatever.
The reason I said no to that one was because Policenauts uses a custom font sheet - English characters have a special header to tell you what width they're supposed to be. Furthermore, there is a LOT of graphical stuff hardcoded to Policenauts's upper limit of 12 pixels vertically for characters.
Even furthermore... where the hell am I getting a Metal Gear font sheet from? (Note: Not the title font with the lines cut out of the letters, I mean the subtitled text from the Codec conversations, etc.)
So I'd have to extract a font sheet from Metal Gear Solid, somehow convert it to the Policenauts's format, change all our text generation routines (we have to pre-cook some of the sentence structures because the game doesn't linebreak correctly out of the box), possibly change all the graphical routines in the game to account for it, test test test. Not to mention the numerous one-off things, like a shooting sequence in Act 2 that uses its own font file, and the fact that I use the Policenauts font file to generate graphics for a lot of graphical changes. (The aforementioned "Autosave file will be deleted" thing.)
I said no to that and we compromised by cleaning up some of the uglier characters. It's subtle, but admittedly the lowercase 'e' especially in Policenauts is kinda ugly looking. Or was, it looks better and more consistent with the other letters in the game.
You might be surprised that there are changes like this that you might not even notice, but I can tell you that it really does make the ROM hack look like a pretty damn good job, and also that I typically do these changes when we don't have bigger issues on the plate.
akor1108 wrote:
F*ck Marc.
Hey Marc, fuck you for spending months translating something to give me the opportunity to play and understand the sequel/successor to a game I loved and grew up with.