Episode Transcription

ALEX: Hi, everyone! Welcome to another Open World LocFact. Now, before we tell you what game we’re talking about today, don’t forget to follow us on all of our socials that you’re seeing here below.

FLOR: Yes. Today’s LocFact is about one of the best-selling PlayStation 4 games, God of War.

ATREUS: So I’m a man now. Like you?

KRATOS: No.We are not men. We are more than that.

FLOR: The 2018 game is still acclaimed and loved by everyone that plays it for its story, role design, art direction, music, graphics, combat systems and characters. The game is inspired by Norse mythology, with the majority of it set in ancient Scandinavia in the realm of Midgard.

ALEX: This is the first time that in the game series there are two main protagonists. Kratos, we all know him as the Greek god of war that is the only playable character in the game, but now he has his son Atreus with him.

FLOR: Having survived his final encounter with his father Zeus, Kratos has since traveled to Midgard in ancient Norway and now lives with his young son Atreus in the world of Norse Gods, the savage land inhabited by many ferocious monsters and warriors.

ALEX: In order to teach his son how to survive in such a world, Kratos must master the rage that has driven him for many years and embrace his newfound role as a father and a mentor. Now, Kratos keeps his troubled past a secret from Atreus, who is also unaware of his divine nature.

FLOR: The story keeps the fans absolutely involved with the game. From beautiful fan art to what brings us today’s LocFact, fans translating the God of War runes.

ALEX: The runes in God of War are primarily written in Elder Futhark, the eldest form of runic alphabet. This alphabet has been used from the 2^nd to the 18th century, and these runes appear all throughout the game.

FLOR: Some determined fans translated runes from an item in the game’s collector’s edition and were able to unearth a secret item. Since then, other fans have sought to uncover similar secrets or simply learn more about the game story.

ALEX: Now hold up. Here’s where we say that if you haven’t played the game, stop here, fast forward or something, because there are spoilers ahead, okay? Yeah, okay.

FLOR: Yes. You’ve been warned.

ALEX: So, one of the major things… You’ve been warned. One of the major discoveries that were made is the meanings behind Baldur’s tattoos.

FLOR: That’s right. The large red runes on Baldur’s back spell “cursed.” His arms feature a repeated phrase that roughly translates as “never to forget.” While the circular tattoo on his chest has been interpreted as, “Lights confine me with warmth so that I might feel something.“

ALEX: As if those runes weren’t ominous enough, Baldur’s neck bears the words, “I mark the twilight of the gods.” There are fans that believe that this phrase alludes to Baldur being the sign of Ragnarok. If only Atreus could have translated this rune to give Kratos a heads up about the world’s end.

FLOR: If only, right?

ALEX: Yeah.

FLOR: And that’s the end of today’s LocFact. Stay tuned for today’s interview with Renee Gittins, the executive director of IGDA. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

ALEX: Thanks, everyone. Bye.

FLOR: Hi, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Open World. Today with us we have Renee Gittins. Renee is the executive director of IGDA. IGDA is the International Game Developers Association. How are you today, Renee?

RENEE: I’m fine, thank you so much for having me here.

FLOR: Yeah, we’re very excited to have you today, and we’re really excited to learn about your journey within the gaming industry, what it takes to be part of IGDA? What are you working on? So not many of our audience, not many people that tune in are familiar with IGDA, so we’re really excited to have you here and learn more about what you’re doing. So we know that you are a programmer and a game designer, right? So we wanted to learn a bit more about what’s your favorite part within the game design of a video game, and what are your inspirations or even concepts that you take into account during this stage to not miss direction.

RENEE: Yeah, absolutely. So what I think really compels me about video game development in general is that it brings together so many different disciplines and studies. Pretty much anything you learn can be practical within video games. Of course, there’s programing and arts and composition and design. But you know, if you have a history degree, you know, you can provide historical insight. You know, if you have a literature degree, you can help with writing in-game books or with the dialog creation. I just love how games as a medium bring together all of these different elements of human creation and creativity and innovation. And similarly with game design, which I really appreciate about it, it is problem-solving, but not technical problem-solving. Certainly, there’s technical problems. I’ve always been somebody who loves solving problems, but when it comes down to it, math problems and science problems and problems that have straightforward answers are, in my opinion, a lot easier than soft problems. You know, people problems, design problems, encouraging and evoking emotion and satisfaction and curiosity. Those are very difficult problems.

ALEX: It’s a bit trickier.

RENEE: Yeah.

RENEE: Yeah, you get more personal, so you have to be very careful where to draw the line or where to get more involved, right? In the narrative.

RENEE: Exactly. And I love that kind of problem-solving. And that’s what compels me about game design. So I wouldn’t say that I’m necessarily the most inspired game designer I know. I have a very good friend who has literally journals like books and books and notebooks of game designs. He just has game designs come out of his brain all the time and has to write them down, and then we’ll eventually pick one to try to make. I design through frustration.

ALEX: That’s a nice fuel, right?

RENEE: Right? I will play a game and I will just get so frustrated about some aspect of it. And these are generally large concepts, not like, “Oh, I hate this mechanic” or “I hate this UI.” I’ll get frustrated with like an entire game concept, and then I will design a game based on my frustration there. And the game that I’m currently working on, Potions: A Curious Tail, it’s an adventure crafting game where you play as a young witch, she brews magical potions and she uses spells to battle monsters and solve puzzles. But the reason I created that game is because I was playing a game called Pixel Dungeon on the phone, and it was a rogue-like dungeon crawler. And it had two elements that I found not great. One is you had to eat food and each step you took slowly decreased your food you’d had and you could starve to death.

ALEX: Your energy. Yeah.

RENEE: Right. And then the other element is you wanna find the entrance down to the next level of the dungeon, but you have to kill all of the monsters on the level in order to level up enough to beat the boss monster that’s like five or ten levels down. Which meant that, if you were playing the game and you found the entrance down early, it was bad. It was a bad thing to find the exit to the next level because it meant that you had to still clear out the rest of the level and you’d lose your food, energy and things like that on your way. I was like, this is so frustrating. It’s so frustrating that something that should be satisfying and that feels good, like, “Oh, yes!” Like going deeper in the dungeon should feel good instead of the exact opposite.

ALEX: Because you weren’t prepared to be in the second level, right?

RENEE: Right. And that put me on like a whole tirade of like, why do games work the way they work? And it brought me to a conclusion, that I don’t really like the experience, like the leveling up experience. It’s just funny because I play lots of RPGs. They are generally very, very experience-based, but it encourages bad behavior. For example, you’re usually a hero of these games, but you get praised for just being completely psychopathic and murdering everything you see, right?

ALEX: Grinding.

RENEE: Right, grinding! You know, it’s like instead of just like, oh, kill some bunnies for some bunny fur, but if you keep killing bunnies, you still profit from it, right? Like, even when you’ve slayed like thousands of bunnies, far more bunnies than you should ever kill. And it just doesn’t feel… it doesn’t feel very heroic. And so I wanted to make a game that was balancing the cost of fighting with the benefit. And that’s why I came up with Potions. It’s all based around potions because that is resource management, and you literally don’t have an ability to kill anything unless you’re using resources to do so. So it means that as you get stronger, you don’t want to go through and murder everything because it’s a waste of resources to try to do that. And similarly, the way you progress throughout the game is you learn new things and you figure out new puzzles and you’re sort of expanding the tools or resources available to you. So it feels more personal, your growth, instead of just like, you got some numbers and your number bar went up and now your number of bars is bigger, right?

ALEX: You’re stronger because you killed a bunch of bunnies and you got XP out of it.

RENEE: Yeah, exactly.

ALEX: I know that you are a witch in your game, right?

RENEE: Yes, yes.

ALEX: I know that you’ve been working for quite a while in your game. Do you have an E.T.A.? And other than that, how’s the dev process behind this game that you’re so passionate about? And I want to know then if you are thinking about localizing it. I know that that’s quite the task as an indie developer, right? But what can you tell us about that whole process?

RENEE: Yeah. So we launched our alpha last December, and we’re getting close to beta. We’re probably about 85% of the way done with the game content. And right now I’m actually bringing on a designer or two. This is the first time I’ve announced it, so.

FLOR: Wow! We have the news.

RENEE: You do. Breaking news!

ALEX: Breaking news!

RENEE: To help with the final polishing, you know, additional puzzles, additional elements in the dungeons, you know, helping with tuning the boss fights. So we’re getting real close. I won’t say a date, but…

ALEX: That’s my idea. Okay.

RENEE: But I have a date in mind. I just need to make sure all the parts are falling into place there. Now, localization is a really interesting question because something that you might also know about my game is that it is very culturally inclusive. It’s actually inspired by fairy tales and folklore from around the world. So we have, you know, Baba Yaga from Slavic lore, and Tripitaka and Sun Wukong from “Journey to the West,” you know, traditional Western European fantasy, and things like the Zaqqum fruit from Islamic legend. And bringing those all together, I wanted to make sure that this was quite a worldly game. And because of that, I was thinking about localization from the very start. I don’t… You know, whether or not it will be localized, that is one question, but I built all of our systems with that plan. The only thing that I didn’t plan out yet was buttons, like the button text. I don’t have a lot of button text, so that will be something that will be fairly easy to go in and provide updates for. But all of the dialog I based around the ability to be able to localize it, because I knew that most localization companies like to use csv or xml files, and so I built our dialog system to be fed by xml files. I think when people are first making games, they’re sort of tempted to hard-code in their dialog, which is bad in so many ways, right? Like not only does it make your dialog much less accessible to anyone who is not technical, like you’re sending some poor writer in there, but it makes it very, very hard to localize because you have to cut and paste it all out and then send it over and then cut and paste everything back in. Whereas I have it where I could just export a bunch of csv files, send them in, and then… even the titles can change. Like they don’t even have to be like consistently named files. I could just throw them all in a folder and it magically works. It goes through, it processes all the keys, and I can then change elements such as the language very easily.

ALEX: But that’s like the ideal stage for a game that’s in the alpha stage, right? So that’s, that’s amazing. That’s good enough for an alpha stage game, almost beta, to have localization in mind from the very first moment. And then you can work your way around that. You’re certainly creating that space to make it easier for the future, right?

RENEE: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, setting up your csvs properly, using unique keys for triggering dialog events and things like that allow you a lot of flexibility to add an additional functionality apart from localization. So I have audio triggers that I can put into those files as well. I have the visuals for characters who are talking, and then I have prebuilt ability to like change their facial expression, even though right now everyone just has a simple dialog image. It’s built so that, if I want to have multiple dialog images so they can look like angry or happy or surprised, that’s very, very easy to integrate.

FLOR: I think that’s amazing that you are taking all these considerations beforehand and not having localization as an afterthought, like we like to say. But I’m curious on how you learned that lesson, and was it the hard way that you start hard-coding your first games? Or was it something that you learned by reaching out to colleagues and friends within the industry?

RENEE: Um… Gosh, I think I learned it just… Like I said, I really like problem-solving, and one of the things I wanted to do is make sure that I was future proofing without over future proofing. And because of that… You know, I believe in that very strongly. Any time you’re architecting any system, whether it is games, whether it is mechanical engineering, which actually that’s my background, you want to make sure that you’re building it in a way where you can expand upon it if you think it’s going to expand in a certain way with minimal cost. And, you know, right now I don’t have a localization system in Potions, but adding a localization system will be very easy because I structured my game to support that. And that’s how I have tried to develop the entire game and the games and projects that I work on as well. I make sure that I’m considering what directions the features, the product, the game might take, and that those are considered in the base architecture and design. And I think that is sometimes learned through the school of hard knocks, but you can prevent a lot of that school of hard knocks learning if you just, you know, really sit down and consider the features that you want to have.

FLOR: Oh, yeah, for sure. I think that’s great advice for everyone who is starting with their project and don’t know what to plan for. And well, going back to IGDA, because of course we’re eager to learn what you’re working on, and we also know that you work towards different initiatives related to video game localization. So I was very curious to know, is there anything specific that game developers are interested in when it comes to localization? Or are there any questions that are repeated over and over in terms of localization when it comes to developers?

RENEE: Um, I think that one of the biggest questions that I’ve seen among developers is sort of twofold. One is what languages should we be localizing into? And the second…

FLOR: The million dollar question, right?

RENEE: Right. And the second is, how do we ensure that on the game side we’re getting easy-to-integrate localization? And obviously having these modular systems, making sure you can integrate the dialog translations easily is one thing, but you actually even have to think about the UI you’re using, which text you’re using. I think a lot of people forget that your font might not support, you know, all the languages you’re localizing into, and so you also have to add, you know, additional functionality to change the fonts along with the languages, you know, you’re providing localized text. I actually… I saw… One of my friends had a… like a technical test or like a technical producer test for an interview they were having, and in that there were some like “gotchas” in all of the problems. And I noticed when they were… One of the problems was like, “Oh, we need to do a global launch. We wanna make sure that everything’s localized. We have it all localized in EFIGS.” And as you’re probably aware, EFIGS is not like the current standard. For those who are not familiar with EFIGS, it’s for English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Which is a whole bunch of languages that don’t work for pretty much a majority of the world, right? Like English has like…

FLOR: Exactly.

RENEE: But if you’re looking at like simplified Chinese, it’s gonna get you a far larger market than Italian is going to get you. No offense to Italians. Italians are great, but…

ALEX: No, but it’s very important to have, like, the proper market research, you know, and not just, let’s go EFIGS because that’s what you have to do, right? No. Know where you want to get your game published, then what languages does the gamer that you wanna reach out talk, right?

RENEE: Right, yeah. Doing research on similar games and seeing, you know, looking at Steam’s stats and seeing what languages they’re being played in, like what regions are playing them as well.

FLOR: Exactly. Yeah. I think that’s super important, to understand like what genres work on each specific market, right? Sorry, Ale, go ahead.

ALEX: No, please, Flor. It’s okay. I think that this may be like something that comes in the future of what we are talking like really. But if you had a chance to look into this future of the video game industry from your position as both things, right? As the IGDA CEO and as a developer, I don’t know, ten years from now, in the near future or whatever, what do you think or what would you absolutely love to see like happening on a regular basis that you think that there’s lacking right now?

RENEE: What I’m seeing the growth of and what I am excited to see grow more is the development of games from more regions. I mean, obviously there are game developers now everywhere, but we’re seeing a lot of enterprising game industry markets coming from regions that have previously not had that presence. You know, Africa is the big one that’s up and coming. We’re also seeing countries who have often provided outsourcing, like India, bringing more development in their in-house to develop their own projects instead of just providing assistance for other people’s. And I’d like to see that more and more, because obviously games are the largest entertainment industry in the world, but they have so much more room to grow in terms of supporting in all of these different regions and cultures because, they haven’t been fully global, at least not until more recently. And we absolutely can see more of that. And I’m seeing more of that up and coming every year. This is Calcifer. He says hi.

FLOR: Okay. Yes. We need a proper introduction.

RENEE: Go say hi, Calcifer.

ALEX: Hi, Calcifer!

FLOR: Oh, my goodness!

ALEX: He’s gonna make it to the episode, you know that, right?

FLOR: The fact that he’s called Calcifer is just great.

RENEE: Yes. Yes. Named after the Fire Demon in Howl’s Moving Castle.

ALEX: Yeah. It suits him.

RENEE: Yes.

FLOR: He’s like, “Mom, stop it.”

ALEX: Yes. “Mom, can I please go?”

RENEE: He likes being cradled, so he’s perfectly happy here.

FLOR: Well, welcome, Calcifer. So picking up on your last comments on the industry in general, it feels like you’re aiming towards more diversity, equity and inclusion within the gaming industry. And I know this has been a really hot topic in the last years, but this is something that you’ve been advocating and working towards for many, many years, regardless of the current status of the industry. And I know that there are many people out there trying to fully understand how they can collaborate and work together and create partnerships with different associations such as IGDA, even Women in Games and other associations that represent minorities within different markets and different countries. And is there any way or path you would recommend to game developers that want to get more involved in these initiatives and don’t know where to start?

RENEE: Yeah, absolutely. You know, the IGDA has many, many resources that can help on all different levels of that. If you’re interested in just learning more about creating an inclusive workspace and a healthy work culture, we actually published a paper during the summer called Guide for Game Companies: How to Create and Sustain a Positive Work Culture, which talks about tools for DEI, but also for, you know, just creating a healthy work culture that’s going to best support your employees and their mental health and their wellness and well-being. And of course, you know, equity and inclusion is a large part of that. We’re also just about to publish another paper that is called Inclusive Game Design and Development. It’s about how to create inclusive game development projects from building your initial team and, you know, concepting the gaming world all the way through the design of the game, accessibility considerations and all the way through marketing and community development. So those are gonna be great resources for anyone who is interested in learning more about those subjects. If you are passionate about, you know, improving the resources for the industry or helping others taking a stand, we have special interest groups, both affinity and discipline-based. So we have Women in Games, LGBTQ+, Muslims in Games, Blacks in Games, all the way through disciplines, such as game writers, game designers, quality assurance. And those communities come together from all over the world to help uplift each other and to provide support to these topics that they’re passionate about.

FLOR: Well, that’s amazing. And when do you think this paper is going to be published? Do you have a date for that?

RENEE: I do. It’s gonna be early December.

FLOR: Excellent. And what if someone from our audience wants to reach out to IGDA and get more information about how to become a member or even how to collaborate in these different initiatives or special groups that you’re mentioning?

RENEE: Yeah. All of that information is available at IGDA.org. If you’d like to become a member, of course we’ll welcome you, but you’re more than welcome to join our Discord communities. Even without membership, we have studio affiliation if you’re looking to get assistance for supporting all of your studio members. And, of course, we have all of these wonderful resources on our Resource Library that you can find right on that website as well.

ALEX: We’re gonna leave all the links below from the IGDA and from Potions: A Curious Tale at the Steam page as well.

RENEE: Thank you.

FLOR: Oh, yeah.

ALEX: Yep, yep, yep.

FLOR: All right. Well, how do we feel about going through the memes now? It’s about time, so I’m gonna share my screen. So “Doctors: Googling stuff online does not make you a doctor.” Programmers are like, mmm…”

RENEE: Oh, boy.

FLOR: Let me think twice about that.

RENEE: Yeah. I have to Google things all the time when I’m coding. I’ll forget something silly, like the exact formatting of switch statements or something like that, and I’ll just go, “All right, you know, the C-sharp switch statement. Easy enough, look it up.” But yeah, always, always looking up things, especially when you’re working in a game engine, you know, it requires so much documentation to understand how different calls are operating and what you’re getting back. So absolutely constantly Googling things.

ALEX: But please, everyone, go see your doctor. This is just for programmers. I don’t know.

FLOR: And now that you mentioned engines, what engine are you working on right now?

RENEE: So Potions: A Curious Tale is being made in Unity. I’ve found that its combination of 2D and 3D tools was really compelling, plus its ability to export easily to pretty much any platform.

ALEX: Nice.

FLOR: Excellent. “The two states of every programmer: I’m a God versus I have no idea what I’m doing.”

RENEE: The Googling comes in on one of these.

ALEX: Yeah. I can imagine that the guy on the left has a Google tab open somewhere.

FLOR: I think it can come in both.

RENEE: I have had to… So a funny thing about Unity is a lot of times the way that you write the code is you’re writing monobehaviours and they don’t run unless they exist in the scene. And so you’ll spend all this time writing new code and new functionality, and then you’ll test it and it’s not working. You put in print statements or you try debugging it and it’s not being called and it’s not printing. And I have spent, you know, up to 30 or 40 minutes trying to figure out what’s wrong. And I forgot to add the code to the scene. I just didn’t like drag and drop it. Oh, boy, yeah.

FLOR: We all have those moments, like we’re both geniuses and this dog with no idea what they’re doing.

RENEE: Yeah. And it’s funny because I go straight from “I have no idea what I’m doing” to “I added in and it runs perfectly the first time,” then I’m, “I’m a God!”

FLOR: Never didn’t have it.

ALEX: These are interchangeable.

RENEE: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, 100%.

FLOR: Oh, okay.

ALEX: Shower thoughts.

FLOR: How often does this happen to you?

RENEE: Oh, boy. When I’m doing a lot of programing, it happens all the time. I think that what I really appreciate about this meme is that… This is not the original version. The original version, when she’s in panel four, is like… existential dread, you know. Hence the face. But it works perfectly for when you’re thinking about that bug as well.

FLOR: Also bugs can be existential dreads.

RENEE: Pretty much. Yeah. You know, the funny thing is, human brains work better when you’re not just constantly focused on a problem. So this is 100% happens. I can get too much into it, but there is actually a lot of reasons why, if you get stuck on a problem, you should go take a walk.

FLOR: Yes.

RENEE: Or shower or whatever you need. I recommend some light exercise because that feeds your brain. But yeah, get away from your problems instead of just bashing your face on your keyboard.

FLOR: Yeah, some fresh air, sunlight, and just get the blood flowing and then come back and everything will feel a little better.

RENEE: Mm-hmm. 100%.

FLOR: For sure. Okay, this one. Poor thing. She has no idea what’s going on.

ALEX: I have to say that I needed context. The first time I saw this, I needed an explanation. I thought it was just, like, the cutest thing, but no.

RENEE: It was cute. I… I really enjoy, like, dark humor that’s hidden, you know? I don’t like over the top dark humor or in-your-face dark humor, but I love dark humor that’s under a few layers of understanding. That just tickles me. And yes, this is very dark.

FLOR: Well, would you like to walk our audience through this? Because maybe some people need also an explanation.

RENEE: Yeah, I imagined. So if you’ve not watched “Fullmetal Alchemist,” this is a spoiler. So if you’re gonna watch it, don’t listen for the next like minute. This guy is like a scientist, he does experiments, but one of the things that he does is he combines his daughter with the family dog into a chimera and creates this horrific suffering creature that wants nothing more than to be put out of its misery. So this filter of, you know, seeing her like a dog…

FLOR: Yeah, it’s really dark.

ALEX: Yeah. It’s very dark.

FLOR: Of course, he has no idea what’s going on. He’s like, “Come on, I’m gonna take a picture of you.”

RENEE: Yeah.

FLOR: Again, Googling.

RENEE: It’s… Yeah.

ALEX: Again, interchangeable. One thing comes with the other.

FLOR: One thing can be two things, so.

ALEX: Yeah. Two things can happen at the same time.

RENEE: I would say the hardest thing about game development…. So I’ve actually mentored high school students before, and the hardest thing isn’t coming up with game ideas, it is figuring out how to solve problems you haven’t faced before. And 90% of that, aside from just like the initial approach of figuring out what the problem even is, is figuring out how to type it into Google. Because obviously, like, how do you phrase this? What sort of terminology do you use? If you’re a self-taught programmer, you know, I was a self-taught programmer or a self-taught game developer, a lot of times you don’t even know the terms that you should be using to describe the problem that you’re facing or what you’re looking to solve or the tool you’re looking to access. So being good at Googling is a very, very important skill to be a good game developer.

FLOR: Oh yeah, for sure. And the same applies to video game translators because most of the time, well, more often than we’d like to, we don’t have enough context. And if we’re lucky enough, we’re working on a franchise or something that we can Google. If not, we’ll have to go into the deep web and find how that specific term or word can be localized into your culture and into your language, right? So Googling is a really good skill.

RENEE: I have to ask about that. How do you handle names?

FLOR: Well, that depends on, of course, the game that you’re working on and the client, and if they have a style guide or if they… Because maybe you can open the discussion and decide together with them, because sometimes they have a clear vision and they know that they want their games to be fully localized, because the names may refer to something within the narrative or a characteristic of the…

ALEX: The character.

FLOR: The character. So you may want that to be localized and sometimes you don’t, but it’s a process that you go through together with the game developers or even the publisher, because of course, if you’re going to localize and look for the same impact, you have to come up with a whole new name sometimes. So it can be tricky.

RENEE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about with my game because I have characters who are literally named from lore, right? Like Tripitaka and Sun Wukong, the English translation version that is used in the “Journey to the West” copies that are really popular over here. But obviously, like, they are quite popular lore and they have different names in different regions that are attached to them. And I imagine a lot of the fairy tales or folklore from Europe that I use similarly probably have multiple different names based on what region that they’re being sold in.

ALEX: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we like to say…

FLOR: Yeah, that’s something…

ALEX: Sorry, Flor.

FLOR: Oh, go ahead.

ALEX: One of the things that we like to say every time that we have the opportunity is that video game translators, localizers, are the gatekeepers of their culture, right? So to have that safe space to talk with the developers, to see what’s the best thing for each market, for that particular game, to have that open communication and to have that knowledge to like, “Hey, this would be interesting to localize it for this market because it would be more approachable or easy to understand.” And that’s always like the best-case scenario, so to speak.

FLOR: Yeah. And in your case, like your game, if you make reference to so many… if you have so many cultural references, you definitely want to investigate and make sure that you’re using the right term, since there’s probably already a validated version in their language.

RENEE: Absolutely.

FLOR: That’s very important. And you’ll have to Google a lot for that.

RENEE: And that’s why you go to experts, right? This is why people need to go to experts who do localization versus just trying to like throw it all into Google Translate.

FLOR: Oh, yeah, absolutely. We Google, but we don’t Google translate. That’s the thing.

ALEX: If you’re gonna do that, then don’t.

FLOR: Unless you want a Frankenstein or something out of the translation. Okay. “When you see Superman using the car you’re still making payments on as a weapon.” Like, why?

ALEX: I love the fact that his face is smiling, but he’s like in terror.

FLOR: That expression, it’s like… oh, boy. “Four years after college and all of my peers are getting married, and I’m just sitting here making video games.” Well, and having cats.

ALEX: That’s your leading character, right?

RENEE: It is. It is. And the picture behind her is her familiar. It’s been edited in there, too. A subtle additional extra. Yeah.

FLOR: That’s so cool. I feel like it’s so interesting that memes are a new way for game developers to connect with their communities and to get their characters out there and more relatable. So this is great.

RENEE: Yeah. That’s also very old. I’m ten years out of college now, so…

ALEX: You’re gonna need to, like, erase the board. But it’s okay, you can get away with the four, don’t worry about it.

FLOR: “When you’re working really hard on code for an upcoming deadline.” And bugs.

RENEE: There is that wonderful song, “99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs. Take one down, patch it around, 117 bugs in the code.“

ALEX: Like I just feel sad for the poor little Charmander here.

FLOR: Yeah, his little sad face, like. Yeah, I can definitely relate. Well, I think like throughout all of our episodes and interviews, one of the most common memes was the one of the dog that says “This is fine” while everything is on fire. So I think this is everything is on fire, taken to a next level.

RENEE: So, yeah, you’re taking things, you’re trying to put out the fires causing more fires, right?

FLOR: And you are on fire.

RENEE: You are on fire. Yeah. Try as you might.

FLOR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s the end of our memes. Thank you so much, Renee, for sharing…

RENEE: Oh, it’s a pleasure.

FLOR: …those with us. I love to learn what makes our guests laugh. And thanks for making us laugh, too.

RENEE: Happy to share the laughs.

FLOR: Yeah, of course. It was so nice to have you, so nice to learn more about IGDA and about your project. We’re really looking forward to see when it’s gonna be released. So as soon as you have more information to share with us, please do, because we’re very excited to learn more about it. And thanks everyone for tuning in. See you on our next episode of Open World.

ALEX: Bye, everyone. Thank you.

Episode Transcription

ALEX: Hi, everyone! Welcome to another LocFact. This time we will be talking about card games!

LUCIO: Card games are my jam! I love building decks, learning strategies and combining unique cards to make the most out of a set of 40 to 60 cards.

ALEX: Being so classic, card games not only inherited a familiar format, but they also inherited certain limitations that are iconic, and that surely made more than one translator cry during those long, cold nights of work.

LUCIO: Character limitation is definitely one of the top challenges in video game localization, and the same can be said about card games.

ALEX: Now, for example, Yu-gi-oh! Duel Links is a great example of a game with very long text boxes. Printed versions might have been way too hard to read for most players, but thankfully, the game’s digital version allows players to scroll up and down the text box.

LUCIO: Hearthstone has gone one step ahead of this and has taken advantage of the pop-up features. We see a card with no more than 5 lines of text (although there are exceptions) with terms in bold. In such cases, the interface will show an annex text box detailing the abilities and rules necessary to understand each card.

ALEX: But there’s a more nightmarish challenge when translating card rules and effects: flavor text. Flavor text is not related to any game mechanics, but instead, it plays a main role in adding color and life to the game’s world. It usually contains descriptions, narrations, stories about the card in which it appears, and gives the players an additional element to understand the card other than just seeing the picture.

LUCIO: Flavor text is essential in most card games, but it’s not easy to include more text into the limited space of a text box. But worry not, there’s always a creative solution to this.

ALEX: In Hearthstone, game devs have come up with a great solution that surely makes the game experience more immersive: almost no in-game flavor text, but lots of voiced lines to add liveliness to the game!

LUCIO: Of course, any player can go into their library and check the details of any card, and a flavor pop-up text box will show next to it. But hearing your cards speak (or roar, grunt, hiss or chirp, depending on the card) just like a World of Warcraft character would surely get to those players who still remember the nostalgia of previous adventures. Those who actively play the game will surely find everything familiar as they explore the world.

ALEX: But let’s put a stop there and let’s save World of Warcraft for another LocFact. For now, that’s a wrap. See you on the next LocFact. Bye, guys.

FLOR: Hi, there! Welcome to another episode of Open World. Today here with us we had Vlad, one of the co-founders of Neon Doctrine. Welcome, Vlad. How are you today?

VLAD: Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s great. It is great to be here. It’s evening here, so, you know, we’re in the opposite sides of the world, but. Yeah. Yeah, thanks.

FLOR: Well, we finally managed to arrange our calendars and make this happen, so we’re pretty excited to have you here. Thanks for joining us. So this is a recurrent question in this video cast, but this is the reason why we brought you here and we bring all of our guests here, because we want to know about our guests’ beginnings in the video game industry. So how did you start working in this field, and would you like to share with us more about your story?

VLAD: I mean, my first job was with EA in Spain, where I was a QA Manager at the team there. That’s when they still had the main headquarters, the European headquarters in the Madrid Peninsula. It wasn’t in the city, it was outside. I think now they moved to Belgium or something. Anyways. And yeah, I worked there for about almost two years, and after that, I didn’t work in the gaming industry for a while, did some other stuff. And then I ended up in China where I was doing my Masters, and I met one of our co-founders when I was in China. It was an evening at a bar where we were playing board games. And it turned out that they were living very close to where my apartment was, and they just got the first generation dev kits for Oculus and Samsung VR. So they were like, “Hey, you wanna come by and check out all this new VR stuff?” when it came out like eight years ago or something. I was like, “Oh yeah, hell yeah, I wanna check it out.” So I went there and kind of started hanging out, playing and, you know, the company kind of found it. Another indie at that time, but we re-branded to Neon Doctrine about half a year ago. So we all started in China. We’ve been there for like… The company started there about seven years ago, and about three years ago we opened up a new office here in Taiwan. So the majority of our team is now here in Taipei, but we still have our China team in Xiamen, in China, that handles all the China stuff, the publishing and the PR and all that jazz.

FLOR: And how many people are behind Neon Doctrine right now?

VLAD: I need do to the…

ALEX: Rough numbers. You don’t have to name them all.

VLAD: Seventeen, 16 people.

FLOR: Wow. That’s amazing.

VLAD: Yeah. We started with three of us working in our apartment.

FLOR: And everything started at a bar.

VLAD: Yeah. Yeah. And now we have grown.

ALEX: So what advice would you give someone who wants to get into the Asian market, who wants to publish their games in the Chinese market? Especially for a Western indie dev, right?

VLAD: Oh man, I…

ALEX: We don’t have so much knowledge about the Asian market, so… You do.

VLAD: When it comes to China, I did a bunch of speeches about this, and the short answer is, as a foreign developer, you really can’t do anything. The long answer is you need a partner. There’s two ways to go about it. You can either do it on local platforms, but for that you need a local entity and you need to give away your copyright ownership and IP ownership to that entity in China to help you get all the licensing and go through the government censorship. But because you’re a foreign developer, 99% of the chance, you will not be granted that license because they’re super strict, there’s a huge back catalog, and they’re prioritizing local Chinese developers to get the license, and all the games that get through are, you know, happy-go-lucky, very… non-political, non-religious, no blood, no gore, nothing like that can get through. The other way you can go is just, you know, do the proper localization of your game so it has good, simplified Chinese, and then you do all the PR and marketing and the social media and outreach. But again, if you have no connections, you need to either work with a PR firm in China or you sign with a Chinese publisher or a publisher that can publish in China, because, you know, all the social platforms are different because everything from the West is banned, so China has their own kind of Internet bubble. And plus, there’s cultural differences in how you approach press and media, how you approach influencers. So a lot of that thing is very… Well, it’s not the same as the way you do PR in the West, so you need to find somebody who knows their stuff.

FLOR: Like you guys, right?

VLAD: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s where we started. And, you know, nobody speaks English, so if you don’t speak Chinese, you’re kind of screwed as well. So, yeah, you need boots on the ground when it comes to China. It’s actually the same if you wanna publish your game in Korea, Japan and, you know… Southeast Asia is a little bit easier, but because it’s so fragmented, again, you need to find somebody who knows the market very well, that can target all these separate countries, because getting a PR firm for every different Southeast Asian country is very expensive. So for indie developers, it just doesn’t make sense. You’re better off with just a single entity handling this for you.

FLOR: And overwhelming as well, right?

VLAD: Yeah. Yeah. It’s so much.

FLOR: If you don’t handle the language, if you don’t speak Chinese or any other languages, for that matter, from the Asian market, it can be quite overwhelming.

VLAD: Yeah.

ALEX: Well, the answer wasn’t that long in the end. Get yourself a knowledgeable partner so they can do it for you.

VLAD: Yeah, that’s the short version. The long version is explaining why you should do it and why can’t you get the local license? Because you need to have a Chinese company, and you can’t found a Chinese company as a foreigner because a Chinese company in China can only be owned by Chinese people. So yeah, there’s just literally nothing you can do. Yeah.

FLOR: Yeah. We recommend or audience to follow Vlad on his socials because he usually, as he said, he’s a public speaker and he’s usually giving talks and sessions around different events and conferences, talking specifically about the Chinese market and how you can enter through this.

VLAD: I don’t call myself a public speaker, but yeah, when they ask me to talk about something, I usually say yes.

FLOR: Yeah. And your talks are very entertaining as well, so yeah.

ALEX: We don’t call ourselves YouTubers either, but hey, here we are.

FLOR: [Cut-off audio] to be.

ALEX: Yeah.

FLOR: So, since we are in the gaming industry, we would love to know, what are your favorite games? And if there’s anything that you’re playing right now that you would like to recommend to us and to our audience.

VLAD: Um, yeah, so that’s a tricky one because I always get stuck with this question when I get asked like, “Oh, what’s your favorite game?” Or, “What’s your most liked, most played game?” Like, I mean, I don’t know, I play so… Well, I used to play so many. Now, when I started working in the industry, I don’t get to play as many games as I thought I would.

ALEX: That’s a constant in all of our guest, in all of our teams.

VLAD: All of my friends who are not in the gaming industry are like, “Oh man, you must be playing video games all the time. It’s so awesome!”. I’m like, “Man, no.” Or the games I get to play are like unfinished prototypes or pitches from other developers, you know, not the full game.

ALEX: Yeah, it’s work.

VLAD: Yeah, it’s work. But I was actually a huge fan of MMOs when I was a kid, so I played a lot of World of Warcraft, played a lot of EverQuest, Guild Wars, the first one, then of course I played the second one. Final Fantasy XI and XIV, Lineage. So pretty much a bunch of MMOs that came out. Wildstar was one of my favorites, but that died. And yeah, a lot of Dragon Age, Mass Effect, like RPG type ones. CRPG ones like Torment, Pillars of Eternity. What else? A bunch of side-scrolling games, action games. Counter-Strike, a lot as a kid. We used to… So when I grew up, I didn’t have a PC when I was still a kid, so we had all these little internet cafes back in…

ALEX: Yeah. LAN parties.

FLOR: In Argentina, yeah.

ALEX: In Argentina, we had those too. By the way, I got caught up in World of Warcraft. What did you play, Horde? Alliance?

VLAD: I kept swapping back and forth. First, I used to start it with Horde, and then, when I was in Spain, my buddy recruited me into the Alliance because, like, they had this massive European guild, like Mano de Lobos, and so he was like, “Man, you gotta play with me.” So I started playing with them again. And then before that… Then I switched back to Horde and then… Just, for example, now in Taiwan, there’s this loophole. You don’t need to buy the game anymore. You just pay a subscription, you get all the latest expansions and everything.

FLOR: Cool. I didn’t know that.

VLAD: There was just some mishap between the two companies before. Yeah. But… Yeah, as a kid we used to rent out the internet cafes, so they would lock us up during the night in the Internet cafe for those like 8 hours, and we were, you know, a bunch of 11, 12-year-olds just sit there and like, play Dusk or, like, Mini Militia maps.

ALEX: All knife, please.

VLAD: Yeah, all knife. Or pistol or pistol versus… Yeah, all of that. You know, they had like those sniper maps and things like that. Yeah.

FLOR: I remember doing the same with Doom and, of course, also with Counter-Strike.

VLAD: Oh, yeah. Doom, Quake, Hexen.

ALEX: And Vlad, how much these games…? Because we’ve been talking before to our audience about Vlad’s favorite games and all, but I want to know how much all of these games that you played as a kid, right, inspire you nowadays in your line of work, right? If they have inspired how you choose the games that you work with.

VLAD: Funny thing, actually, because the games I used to play as a kid don’t really align with the ones that I like now or the direction we’re going with, because right now we’re really into, you know, metroidvania, horror, bloody gore, gory types of games. And as a kid, like, I couldn’t play those. Didn’t really had many of those available to us because, you know, we didn’t have Nintendos because it was all banned, so we got Chinese bootlegs like Dendy, those like thousand-in-one cartridges.

ALEX: Yeah, we had the same in Argentina, but it was called Family Games here in Argentina.

VLAD: Same stuff. Yeah. But I guess, I mean, I used to play a lot of Diablo and, like I said, like Doom, Hexen, these types of games, so I guess that did have some sort of effect on me. But because you were asking about right now. Right now… Playing what? The Ascent is pretty good. What Cyberpunk should have been. Our buddies at Akupara released Grime, so if you like, you know, hardcore 3D action, metroidvania type of games, that one’s really good as well.

FLOR: We’re gonna leave the link somewhere over there.

ALEX: Yeah. I downloaded The Ascent. I downloaded The Ascent on Game Pass…

VLAD: Pretty good.

ALEX: …a few days ago, but I haven’t got to it yet.

VLAD: It’s a bit more optimized on Steam than it is on X-Box.

ALEX: Okay, good to know.

VLAD: But it’s still pretty good. Yeah, quite, quite fun. Um, what else? No, no, nothing else. The rest is just our games right now, because we have so many games coming out and everybody is just…

ALEX: How many games do you have coming out in 2021?

VLAD: Well, the pandemic screwed everybody, so a bunch of games that we were supposed to release last year got pushed back because some of our developers got sick with COVID, so they got pushed back.

FLOR: I hope they’re okay.

VLAD: Oh, they’re better now. They’re fine. Yeah, because everybody’s kind of young and healthy, so. Still sucked, but nothing dangerous. So yeah, we have Lamentum coming out like at the end of this month, on the 31st of August, which is like an old-school survivor horror game. Then we have Jack Axe coming out the month after, which is a super hard co-op platformer. Well, single or multiplayer. I always mess up the description. You can play it alone or you can play it with up to four of your friends. And then, after that, we have the Legend of Tianding, which is the game developed with Taiwanese devs here, which is like a 2D kung-fu action game based on the colonial Taiwan when it was occupied by the Japanese in the early 20th Century. And then we have a bunch of games lined up like January, February, March as well. No fixed dates, but it’s just like… Because then there’s Hazel Sky is coming out, which is actually a studio from Brazil. Then we have… Oh, my brain is fried. Then we have My Lovely Wife, which is like a succubi visual novel, horror adult story. Then we have Project Altheia coming out, which is… I can’t really talk much about it because it’s still in development.

ALEX: Yeah. You left me hanging… Which was the conference that you were in showcasing all of the…?

VLAD: Guerrilla Collective?

ALEX: Yeah, I saw project Altheia. Looked great. And then you just said, “Oh, I can’t show you anything else.”

VLAD: Yeah, yeah. It’s so good, though. It is so good. But yeah, we can’t show anything yet. But next year we’ll have some stuff.

ALEX: Awesome.

VLAD: Yeah. Then we’re going to announce a new game during the Indie Houses event of later this month.

FLOR: Oh, that’s really cool.

VLAD: There’s gonna be a whole another kind of big presentation with us and a bunch of other publishers. Yeah, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy.

FLOR: Well, we’ll make sure that we follow you on your socials to keep up with all the news. So from what you’re saying, you’re collaborating with studios from all over the world, like projects from Brazil, also Latin America.

VLAD: Yeah. I mean, the majority of our developers are still from Asia, Southeast Asia, you know, China, mainly because there’s not many publishers here. Well, very few. Like I can count them on one hand, the people who are decent. And there is a lot of talent here, but most of the Western publishers don’t really look at Asia, so they all focus on Europe or, you know, North America, the States or Canada. So there’s a lot of missed opportunity. Actually, you know, when it comes to like South America, Middle East and Africa, still not a lot of exposure. So, yeah, most of our games are predominantly Southeast Asia, Asia, I’d say maybe like 75%, and then the rest we have some games from Europe and some from the States and some from South America.

FLOR: Great. So I want to go back to your early stages managing QA teams, because I’m very curious here, because you mentioned that you collaborated with big players such as EA games and also Microsoft, right?

VLAD: Oh, Microsoft had nothing to do with gaming. I was working… I was part of the team who did like networking for Windows 8, so there’s no crossover with that. I was engineering. Boring, boring engineering.

FLOR: But I bet you learned a lot about managing teams, right?

VLAD: Oh, no! It wasn’t that good. That’s why Windows 8 was so bad. When it released, a bunch of people quit because they were like, “We’re done with this.” Well, including me. And, you know, you got a month, two months later, when they released the 8.1 patch that fixed everything. So yeah. But yes, QA at EA.

FLOR: Yeah, okay, let’s hear all about…

ALEX: Focus on that one.

FLOR: Yeah. About your experience at EA Games as a QA manager, and I wanted to know if there are any best practices or any lessons that you learned from those times, because there’s not much information around QA specifically.

VLAD: Not to go into like technical details about, you know, storing your builds and setting up all the depots so that our teams who helped with the porting and QA and testing have access to those and you have the remote work set up so it’s easy to store your code and make it secure. But basically, our flow was like, the developers send us a build, and depending on how busy we are at the moment, normally like one, two weeks, then we provide them feedback. So the build is sent, and our QA team plays it, tests it, and then we pretty much set up a separate board for the developer that he can access. And all of our playthroughs are recorded, so we host it on our server. And then if we see like game-breaking bugs or like there’s like some general suggestions or like game balancing issues, all of that gets… the video gets cut, the clips gets uploaded, clips or screenshots, to tell the developers like, “Okay, this is broken, this is not working. Here’s some bugs, this is what you need to fix. Here is our general feedback. So you know, maybe this is better, maybe that is better.” And then they decide if they want to do it or not. And then regional suggestions for when it comes to, you know, Europe, America or China, for example, different controller inputs with the keyboard and mouse, and then the controller, because some of this stuff is not the same when it comes to Asia and the rest of the world, so some things need to be changed. And then we have a whole separate board when it comes to LQA. So for the localization part, it’s all separate. Because when we first get the build before we start localizing it, we do a little test on different languages to make sure that the text boxes and everything fits, especially when it’s like Russian or Chinese. The fonts that are being used can’t be converted in all these different languages because sometimes… Well, sometimes, most of the time it’s just a bloody mess. So make sure that is all in place before we start, you know, doing localization, implementing all the languages, because if you do that, then it just like breaks the game and it’s a headache. So make sure that that stuff works and, you know, the fonts are there, the Unity plugins or whatever you’re using is all correct and proper. And then we start implementing the text. And once the text is implemented, we do a separate QA for localization, so it kind of like branches out, like one is for the gameplay, controller, support, etc., etc., but when it comes to localization, it ends up being in a separate branch to see… just for the text, that it doesn’t break the text boxes, it’s all there proper, you can read normally, the spaces are normal because, you know, with Chinese, sometimes characters break, or you can’t read them or the phone doesn’t support. And with Russian, it also can be a mess because of the spacing, so sometimes it’s just five, six words that just merged together…

FLOR: And it breaks everything.

VLAD: Yeah. So it just ends up being a nightmare. So we do little tests before to make sure everything is fine and functioning, and then we dump the text and then start going through the game and checking out to make sure it all works. Another thing we do is we do a lot of open and closed betas, both on Steam and our Discord. So we have our own kind of like forms for people to fill out for their bug submissions and general feedback, and then we get all of those together, compile the reports and upload it to our, let’s say, Trello board and the developers can go through them and our QA team can go through that and see what makes sense or what doesn’t make sense, because not all feedback is good feedback. And another thing we have, well, this is not about kind of like QA, I guess it’s more of like bug fixing and stuff. We just have it set up in our Discord as well. When people play our games, if they encounter any bugs, we always suggest them to post it on Steam, but if they’re too lazy, we have a special channel in the server that they can post a little clip or screenshots or description of the bug there, and that automatically gets re-uploaded to our QA board with all the images and videos that get posted. So then it pings up directly for our QA team and the developer, so they can check out right away, so we don’t have to scroll through all the different feedbacks. Because, you know, we have a lot of games and there is just one channel, but it sorts by the game, so different developers don’t have to like, you know, scroll through other feedback, it automatically gets re-posted to their own specific board for their game, and then they can go from there.

FLOR: I think that it’s great that you involve the community and you listen to them and you apply…

VLAD: It’s been a massive help. And, you know, one thing we do is like everybody who participates in our open and closed betas and provide actually some tangible feedback, they always get added to the credits of the game as gestures or support. So people are happy, they get free games, they get to help out, they get to feel involved, and they give us some ideas and suggestions. And that keeps the community active and interesting as well.

FLOR: Absolutely.

ALEX: Well, you have over 10K members on your Discord server, right? If I’m not mistaken.

VLAD: There’s a counter on top.

ALEX: I know. That’s why I ask.

VLAD: Close to 11.

FLOR: Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah. We’re also going to leave the Discord link in the comment section as well.

VLAD: gg/nd. It’s very easy.

ALEX: Yeah. It’s super easy.

FLOR: Yeah. Everyone should join and check out all the games that Vlad has been mentioning, and also to check out the community because, yeah, it’s amazing how you can interact with them and take their feedback as you said. And this are some, well, the things that Vlad is mentioning are some of the benefits of working with a partner that knows what they’re doing, because sometimes indie devs don’t have the experience, the time, the money, the energy, or even the people to solve all these stages that you mentioned through the localization process, including QA.

VLAD: Yeah, because it’s just so much work when it all comes down to releasing a game. It’s not just, you know, making a game, but there’s a lot of other stuff behind closed doors, like a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork, especially if you’re dealing with the, you know, different platforms. And then, you know, they’re dealing with tax, with all the payments, like it’s your company’s property… All of that stuff is a nightmare to deal with. And there’s… If you’ve never done this before and you’re doing it for the first time, you’re probably gonna make mistakes and screw things up. So if you don’t want to deal with it, you know, just probably, normally, a good publisher will handle all of that for you, so you can just focus on making your game, and you don’t have to deal with anything else.

ALEX: On that note, is there any specific strategy that you apply when choosing the languages that you localize the games into? And to follow that up, are the devs involved, or do you get on a video call and you decide where you’re gonna target your game? How does that work?

VLAD: So in our case, you know, English and Chinese, we always do in-house. So there’s no question about it. And all the other languages, it really depends on what type of game it is and how many words there are and which state it’s releasing. For example, if it’s an early access title, we’re not gonna do a lot of languages because, with early access, there’s gonna be active releases of updates and all of that, and you can’t have like eight, ten languages for an early access title. It becomes a nightmare to QA and localize every little update you do. So you just focus on like a few major ones. Um, again, if the game has 250,000 words, then probably not gonna localize like in all the languages that we normally do. But a lot of it depends, like I said, like the genre of your game, the type of the game. So we kind of do some market research to see which regions perform well for these types of games. And we look at our previous titles and see where it’s sold, and then we compare the costs of the localization versus the actual revenue. And yeah, we sit down with the developers and then we figure out which languages we wanna do. Because, you know, a lot of the times we get requests for Spanish, but guess who doesn’t buy games? Spanish speakers. There’s a lot of them, they’re very vocal, but just the revenue’s in there, you know, you end up spending like 15,000, 20,000 dollars on localization… Okay, I’m exaggerating right now. It’s more like $4,000 or $5,000, so not a huge localization job. But then the revenue isn’t just there because everybody pirates the game, nobody buys it. You know, it’s the same story with a few languages. So we just have to kind of figure out where it makes sense. Obviously, if the developers are like from South America or Spain, like Spanish is gonna be there no matter what. Or, you know, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese. But unless there’s like a really good reason to localize in certain regions, then there’s just no point in wasting money because budgets are limited, you know? As much as we want to make it available to everybody, we also have to look at this through the marketing and business perspective. But normally we do… We try to do, you know, Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese. More or less.

ALEX: Yeah. You have your focus on the languages that you offer or that, after the market research, you recommend.

VLAD: Yeah. Where it makes sense, you know? And if the developers really wanna push a certain language, we’re not gonna say no. But yeah, just…

FLOR: Yeah. And going back to what you mentioned about piracy here in Latin America and in so many regions around the world, I believe, I mean, I’m hopeful that this is changing. I mean, especially since Steam localized their currency. At least in Argentina right now, they did it.

VLAD: To the regional currency. Yeah.

FLOR: Yeah. And I’ve seen a change in that as well. But yeah, it’s slowly, but hopefully surely changing.

VLAD: It was quite funny. You did the localization, and then everybody swapped to Argentina to buy cheaper games for cheaper.

FLOR: Yeah, I know. Well, I think you cannot do that anymore because it picks up, of course, where you are and if you do, like…

VLAD: You can still do it with a VPN.

ALEX: With a VPN. Yeah.

VLAD: And then there’s still ways to get the local currency on your account, which I’m not gonna talk about for obvious reasons.

FLOR: We’re not recommending this.

ALEX: We’re not recommending this at all.

VLAD: Yeah, please don’t do that. But also what happened is the big publishers, for example, like Capcom and Bandai and Namco, all their games, they just remove regional pricing. So, for example, if you go to Argentina or Russia or China and you check the price, the prices are still, you know, full $60 or $70 for that game no matter which region you’re in. So it kind of screwed some people over with that because, you know, people started abusing it. Um, yeah. When it comes to piracy, in our case, you know, we don’t really bother with it. I mean, if people were to buy the game, they would have bought the game. Like if they’re pirates, they will pirate and it doesn’t matter. Like it’s really hard to prove. Maybe they’ll pirate it, they’ll really like it and they’ll come and buy it. Great. But if not, it’s fine. You know, it’s just the way of life. It is what it is. And, you know, some people just can’t afford to pay full price for the games, and that’s also fine. So it’s not like it’s killing us or anything, so it’s fine.

FLOR: Yeah. It was way worse when we had the physical copies over here. I remember people gathering in parks and exchanging the pirates, the pirated copies.

VLAD: It was the underground metro station for me, where they would sell all these bootleg CDs and everything. Yeah.

FLOR: Yeah, same.

VLAD: In Russia, they had like these official piracy publishers, so they had their brand and they were like producing these pirated CDs and selling them in stores and everything. Since then they’ve gone official. I’m not gonna say who it is, but since then… They’re still a publisher, they’re still active, but they don’t do the piracy stuff anymore. They just publish games on Steam, things like that.

ALEX: Everyone has to start somewhere.

VLAD: Yeah. When I was a kid, they were the ones who were doing all the piracy discs and just selling those.

FLOR: [Cut-off audio] like us wouldn’t have had the chance to play games back then otherwise, so thanks to those folks. Good or bad, we got access to pretty good games back then, so yeah. So before going to the meme section, I want to ask you, young Vlad…

VLAD: Oh, God, what did I sent to you?

FLOR: Would young Vlad play the games that you’re actually publishing right now? What do you think?

VLAD: Well, some of them for sure, like the bloody, gory ones… So my parents wouldn’t see? Yeah. And… Yeah, probably… kid me would probably play the shit out of these games. Yeah.

ALEX: Maybe your parents wouldn’t approve, but at the same time…

VLAD: Oh, man, my parents still don’t approve.

FLOR: It would make it more fun, right?

VLAD: Compared to my previous jobs, they’re like, “Oh, what have you done with your life?”

ALEX: Well, we talk about with Flor sometimes that, in our line of work with video games and everything, when we, I mean, we get excited about things, right? And then we probably talk to our parents, and they don’t really comprehend the whole excitement behind it. So I think it’s a generational thing.

VLAD: Oh, yeah, definitely.

FLOR: Yeah, it’s like, I work in video games, I get paid to play video games. I make money out of it and it’s like…

ALEX: Right, yeah.

FLOR: Hey, I can’t complain. So let’s go to the meme section. So yeah, “With the new Switch version, we made the screen bigger. You fixed the Joy-Con drift issue, right?

ALEX: You fixed the Joy-Con drift issue, right?

FLOR: I love this one.

VLAD: I don’t think it… They took it apart, and some people said that they added a little phone cushion. So I don’t know if it fixed the issue or not, but like all of my left ones are [indistinct 36:57].

ALEX: They can always improve. “Where is my hand?“

VLAD: I had just finished binging “Loki” when you sent me that e-mail, so I was like, I need to put the little alligator in.

ALEX: I think everyone loves “Loki.” I mean, in my case, I love it even more now.

VLAD: It’s a good show, yeah. I really enjoyed it.

ALEX: “Dom, what are you doing here? You don’t want to do that to family.” The Vin Diesel family meme is everywhere right now.

VLAD: People hated it, but yeah, I was like, I found it quite funny. It was cringey, but it’s just something that always tickles me. You definitely don’t do that to family.

ALEX: It works in so many levels. That’s the thing.

FLOR: Exactly. “Sorry for bad English.”

ALEX: “If I make a mistake in English, please don’t correct me. I have no respect for this language.” Oh, that’s just me.

VLAD: Shots fired.

FLOR: Burn!

VLAD: Yeah, I know.

ALEX: That’s just me.

VLAD: It’s just… Yeah, it’s me.

FLOR: I always say like that, if you make mistakes is because it’s not the first language that you speak, your native language is something different, and it means that you speak more than one languages. And that is…

VLAD: Yeah. I never got the idea of people getting pissed off. I’m like, if somebody starts talking like in Estonian or in Russian to me, like if it’s like, you know, a bit messy and fucky, like, I don’t care, man. Good for you for learning, because it’s a pain in the ass to learn these. But we always get, you know, the native English speakers who are just being assholes. Especially here in Asia. Oh, man. The English teachers like I’ve met in China and here in Taiwan, sometimes it’s just…

FLOR: Oh, really?

VLAD: Too pretentious. Obviously, not all of them, but like the ones that are just here for the… Party. Yeah. Anyways. Moving on.

FLOR: It happened to me with German, actually, that I lived in Berlin for a couple of months and was learning German, and whenever they listened I was destroying their language, they automatically changed to English.

VLAD: Oh, yeah. See, they don’t do that in Spain. They’re just like, “Nope, you gotta speak French or Spanish,” and…

FLOR: Do your best, and your best is gonna be better than trying to speak in English, either in Spain or France.

VLAD: Yeah, the Wolverine. This one is because I only got one post that hit hot. It was a post about this promotion that China Telecom… China Mobile did like six, seven years ago, where they made a big-ass calculator that looks like an iPad. So we just took pictures and be like, “I ordered an iPad and this is what I got.” And then you turn it around, and it’s just like, it looks like an iPad, but it’s just like a massive calculator. Yeah.

ALEX: That’s your post that reached hot.

VLAD: Yeah. Yeah. Just the one. Wait, was this me? I don’t think it was me.

ALEX: No, no, no. We added a couple.

VLAD: I was like, what?

ALEX: Yeah. No, no, no, we added a couple.

VLAD: When the Queen wore that green thing, and then people started using it as a green screen and Photoshopping all sorts of stuff on it.

FLOR: Oh, man, that was great.

VLAD: I had to ask permission with one of our co-founders, because he’s from UK. I was like, “Can I, like, mess with this? Put like our company logo as her dress and stuff like that? Like, is it offensive?” He was like, “Nah, it’s fine.”

FLOR: [Cut-off audio]

VLAD: Yeah, yeah. I mean, he’s from Scotland, so he doesn’t like the Queen anyways.

FLOR: Oh, I see. Oh, this is another one from Lara and our team.

ALEX: “We play on the gaming chair,” for PC gamers. Console gamers play on the couch. Mobile gamers play in the john. Well, that’s pretty accurate.

FLOR: The throne.

ALEX: The throne.

VLAD: Yeah. I can’t even argue with this one.

ALEX: The face of the mobile gamer, poor guy. He’s like, why are you taking a picture of me right now?

FLOR: Yeah, it’s like, “Don’t bother me. I’m playing.”

ALEX: Yeah. This cracked me up even more than it should, I think. It just goes to show my sort of humor.

FLOR: …our meme round. We had so much fun.

ALEX: Thanks, Vlad, for sharing yours.

FLOR: Yeah. Thank you so much, Vlad, for joining us, and for sharing a bit more about your journey within this industry and your experience behind a publishing company. It was very useful for our audience.

VLAD: Yeah, no problem.

FLOR: And thanks again for staying up this late. I mean, I know it’s Friday night and…

VLAD: It’s not super late. Yeah, we’ve got lots of work to do, so it’s not like I’m going out to bars and partying, you know. Still kind of can’t… Well, actually, we can now, yeah. They lifted the whole thing, so I could be outside drinking, but…

FLOR: Well, I hope you get some rest, and we can’t wait to hear more about the new games you’re going to be publishing in the next couple months.

VLAD: I’d say, just mark your calendars for August 31st, because that’s when we’re gonna have the Indie Houses event with Neon Doctrine and then six other publishers. We got Akupara, Raw Fury, White Thorne, Fellow Traveller, Those Awesome Guys, and Toge Productions. It’s ’cause we’re gonna have a massive…

FLOR: A lot of friends!

VLAD: Yeah, yeah. Seven publishers.

FLOR: That’s incredible.

VLAD: There’s gonna be an hour-long segment, more or less. Probably more, hour and a half. So each of the publishers is gonna have their own, like, ten, 15-minute video or oral presentation thing about what’s upcoming. Then we’re gonna have a big event on Steam with a bunch of keynotes from the developers, you know, like free-to-play demos… well, demos to play for everybody. And then new game announcements, games on sale, things like that. So if you wanna know what’s gonna be next for us and our other friends, then just tune in for that, and you can see all the crazy stuff. And it’s gonna be me with a cat this time in the video. During Guerrilla Collective, it was…

ALEX: What’s the name of your cat? I don’t remember. I believe you showed it…

VLAD: RT.

FLOR: He has two cats. And the other one?

VLAD: Let me see if I can get the fat one.

FLOR: Yes! Mission accomplished. Cat cameo.

ALEX: We made it.

VLAD: Oh! Here we go.

FLOR: Oh! Look at that fluffy ball.

VLAD: Yeah.

ALEX: Oh, my God!

VLAD: Almost seven KG.

ALEX: He’s a lazy one. Wow!

VLAD: Yeah, yeah. Almost seven KG. Okay, bye.

ALEX: I have no idea how much that is in pounds.

VLAD: Uh, I…

FLOR: Kilograms is fine.

ALEX: Seven kilograms. Yeah.

FLOR: Oh, thanks for sharing RT with us, too. Everyone tune in August 31st, you’ll hear more news about Neon Doctrine and all the amazing publishers that will be joining Vlad. And thanks again, Vlad, for joining Open World. Thanks everyone for tuning in. See you on our next episode.

ALEX: Thank you, everyone.

VLAD: Thanks for having me.

FLOR: Take care!

ALEX: Thanks, Vlad. Bye, everyone!

VLAD: Bye-bye!

Episode Transcription

ALEX: Hi, everybody! Welcome to another episode of Open World. Today we will be interviewing Yuhei Nasu, from Bonus Stage. But before we go to the interview, let’s check out the LocFact of today.

LORE: Hi, guys! Welcome to a new Open Word LocFact!

FLOR: Hi, everyone!

LORE: This time we are going to be talking about one of the most famous franchises of all time: Pokémon!

SINGER: Pokémon! Gotta catch them all! It’s you and me I know it’s my destiny!

FLOR: More specifically, we’ll be discussing how Pokémon are named in different languages.

LORE: Exactly. Did you know that not every country knows these cute and incredible little creatures by the same names? So where do their names come from, and what can they tell us about each creature?

FLOR: Well, there are a few exceptions, though, such as Pikachu, which is the most iconic Pokémon, as everyone knows, whose name has never been transcreated even though it might sound weird in some languages.

PIKACHU: I’ve been so lonely!

LORE: Right. So let’s get into it. Our first case is the legendary bird trio Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres. Their English names clearly show a combination of Spanish numbers, well, to those who know the Spanish numbers, “uno” (one), “dos” (two) and “tres” (three), but since the game is originally in Japanese, what are their original names?

FLOR: Well, their Japanese names are Freezer (フリーザー), as you can see in the screen, Thunder (サンダー) and Fire (ファイヤー). Quite straightforward names, right? And in German, these powerful bird Pokémon are called Arktos (and in German, “Arktis” is “Arctic”), Zapdos and Lavados. In German, as I said, “Arktis” means “Arctic” and Lavados comes from “lava,” of course. Other than that, the names have remained quite similar to English and have been adapted to rhyme to “tos-dos-dos.”

LORE: Right. Lickitung is another Pokémon that has a peculiar name in German: it’s Shlurp. This is the German onomatopoeia of a lick, which makes the creature’s name a clear definition of what it actually does. Another case of onomatopoeia in Pokémon names is Golduck’s French equivalent: Akwakwak. This is a really adorable name since it’s more or less how a child would pronounce a duck’s quack. So cute!

FLOR: Yeah, it is so cute. But these names are really creative and easy for children to remember, so I wonder if that’s the main reason behind their etymology. But enough with old school generation. What about Gen 8 Pokémon? Corviknight is as awesome as it is scary. Here on the screen, you can see how Corviknight is called in Japanese. Which is pronounced as, and I’m sorry if I’m pronouncing it wrong, “amaga” and literally means “armor.”

LORE: Right. In English, “corvi” comes from “corvus,” a big variety of crow, and “knight,” which makes complete sense since this fearful crow Pokémon possesses steel body, feathers and a steel peck, which make up its armor. In German, it’s called “Krarmor.” The “Kr” stands for “Krähe”— “Es tut mir leid” [I’m sorry, in German]. I’m not a German speaker. Please, please, please correct us on this. Somebody comment and tell us how to pronounce this correctly next time. A small sized body crow variety and, well, the “armor” part of it is obvious.

FLOR: As many of you may know, there are more than 800 Pokémon now. We could go on for days with these names, but I think you’ve got the idea. There’s a lot of transcreation going on behind these adorable creatures.

LORE: Absolutely. So thank you so much for joining us today. Add a comment about what other Pokémon names are unique in your languages so we can keep up the conversation about this iconic franchise. And see you next time on another Open World LocFact! Bye!

FLOR: See you next time!

SINGER: Gotta catch them all! Pokémon!

FLOR: Hi, everyone! Welcome to the new episode of Open World. Today here with us, we have Yuhei Nasu. Hi, Yuhei! How are you?

ALEX: Hey, Yuhei!

YUHEI: I’m very good. Thank you for having me.

FLOR: Welcome. So we wanted to introduce you to this amazing guest that we have today here with us. Yuhei is a veteran of the game localization industry with 12 years of experience under his belt, most recently as a localization producer for EA. Born in Japan and raised in England, Germany and the US, Yuhei returned to Japan in 2006 to pursue a career in localization. Yuhei has had a healthy obsession with videogames since he received his first Game Boy at the age of five, and when he’s not gaming, Yuhei spends his time on music and skateboarding. So, hi, Yuhei. Welcome. How are you today?

YUHEI: Hello. I’m very good and thank you for the introduction.

FLOR: Oh, please. We are super excited to have you. And well, first of all, I wanted to start like, well, I wanted to learn how does a localization producer day look like? I mean, what does it take to be a localization producer? And if there were any tools or specific skills that you had to learn to master this role.

YUHEI: Right. Very good question. The day of a localization producer really depends on which part of the localization process or the game development process the project is in at that moment, because the localization producer is involved in almost every step of the dev cycle. So, for example, you know, early on in the game development cycle, the developer might come to us for consultation regarding some of the game content. So, for example, you know, if there’s some kind of artwork that they want to check would be culturally suitable for Japan, they would check with us. Or even, you know, it might be a question regarding the Japanese ratings board, if any content is suitable for, you know, the rating that they want, they would come to us. We’re also involved in the translation and review process quite heavily. And we’re also… we also supervise audio recording sessions. So it can be quite a busy day, taking into account that we’re not always necessarily working on one project at a time. At times, it can be hectic, but it’s always a fun day, which is most important to me.

FLOR: Oh, yeah. Definitely.

YUHEI: Yeah. In terms of the skill sets necessary for a localization producer, I would say that communication skills is quite crucial, whether it be verbal or through text, because we… basically, most of our work involves communicating with multiple teams, whether it be the devs, the testing team, the audio recording studio, the ratings board. We communicate with a lot of teams. So it’s crucial that, when we do communicate, we communicate the necessary information in one go. This is especially the case if you’re working with someone in a different time zone, because one bad email could be night and day, quite literally, because you could lose one entire day.

ALEX: One entire day.

FLOR: Oh, yeah. Just in a question of minutes, you lose an entire day.

YUHEI: Yeah, exactly. Especially, you know, if, for example, the time difference is 12 hours, you barely have any overlap. So maybe you send an email at the end of your day, the reply comes in your morning. If the email was perfect, that’s fine, right? Because you gave the necessary info and you would receive the required feedback. But if that email is bad, you have to wait an additional 12 hours to follow up on that email. So I think, yeah, communication skills is key. It’s one of the big things that I learned in my 13 years as a localization producer.

FLOR: Right. Well, thank you so much for that insight. And I wanted to follow up on the rating system, because I’m familiar with that, but I’m pretty sure that many of the people that are gonna be watching this are not familiar with the rating system that you have in place in Japan. So would you mind explaining that in more detail?

YUHEI: Sure. So the Japanese rating system is an organization called CERO. It’s spelled C-E-R-O. And whenever you release a game on a console in Japan, this CERO rating is required. And so the challenge, I think, for indie devs or actually any triple-A, maybe, devs that want to release their games in Japan, I think the challenge is that CERO only operates in Japanese, so it can be a big challenge to really communicate with them in the first place. So I think that’s a big hurdle that, you know, the devs have to overcome when they want to get a rating in Japan. Yeah. What else? Yeah. And compared to ratings boards like ESRB, maybe, the Japanese ratings board is known to be a little more strict. “A little more” might be an understatement. It’s quite a bit more strict than what you would see in the West, you know? Without going into too much detail, the Japanese… In Japan, we tend to be more strict in regards to gore. So, you know, games like The Last of Us, you know, it can be quite gory.

FLOR: Yeah. For sure.

YUHEI: In some cases, a lot of softening. Softening is when you take out certain content that wouldn’t be accepted by the Japanese rating board. This softening is required for a lot of games that release in Japan.

FLOR: Yeah. And I was wondering, how do the players react to that in Japan? Are they used to it? Because I know that, as you mentioned, that there’s a board that actually evaluates and assesses the content of each game. But how do players react to that softening?

YUHEI: So I think a handful of players understand that something was done to their game. As in, like, some content was taken out because it had to comply with the ratings board. So obviously, you know, for a game like maybe Doom or something like that, the violence is, you know, a pretty big part of that game. So, once you tone that down, I understand that some users aren’t happy with, you know, that they would rather buy the Western version.

FLOR: Yeah, it’s funny that you brought up Doom because it’s basically the essence of it, you know?

ALEX: Violence.

YUHEI: Exactly. And in some cases, you know, for example, Mortal Kombat, that’s a game that cannot be released in Japan because, if you soften that game, you don’t have a game.

FLOR: Exactly.

ALEX: You have players doing friendships all the time.

FLOR: Yeah. No more fatality for you.

ALEX: No. No more fatality.

YUHEI: Yeah. So it’s a shame because there’s a lot of games that I personally love, Dead Space being one of them. And, you know.

ALEX: That’s a franchise that needs to come back.

YUHEI: Yeah, definitely. I’d love to see a Dead Space sequel. But, yeah, it’s a shame that we don’t see these games released in Japan just because of the gore. Which is quite unusual, seeing that a lot of anime in Japan is very gory.

FLOR: Yeah, exactly.

YUHEI: Like, compared to cartoons or even movies, they’re very gory and graphic. So, yeah, it’s… I can’t say I understand the decision fully, but, yeah, it’s there and we have to follow it, so… Yeah.

FLOR: Do you ever see this changing or those rules to be less strict in the near future?

YUHEI: In the near future… I can’t say I do, unfortunately. CERO has been around for a long time and… you know. Yeah, and I’ve worked with them a lot, too. And I understand, you know, some of the decisions they make, because, yes, some content should not be played by, you know, younger audiences.

FLOR: Oh, yeah, definitely.

YUHEI: So I completely agree with them on some of it.

FLOR: Yeah, there’s a thin line of looking after the players and the young audience and actually censoring or maybe losing the whole essence of a game.

YUHEI: Exactly. Yes.

FLOR: Thank you so much for your insight on that.

YUHEI: No problem.

FLOR: I took over because I was so interested in what you were saying.

LORE: Fascinating.

ALEX: Yeah, we didn’t prepare any questions about that. But yeah, I’m glad that you took that away.

YUHEI: Yeah, no. Surprise me.

ALEX: Well, here’s another surprise for you. No. I want to know…. Well, you worked for EA, right? But now you have your own company, you have your own baby. So can you please tell me what it’s like to run your own company? How was that change for you, right? If you’re still there like an octopus managing many different things. And how was that process? I mean, was it something that you just jumped for it, or did you have it in your mind for a while? Can you please elaborate a little bit on that?

YUHEI: Of course. So I was in EA Japan for 12 years, and then unfortunately, in 2019, EA Japan closed its doors. And, yeah, so it was… I started Bonus Stage basically the day after EA Japan closed down.

FLOR: Wow!

ALEX: You didn’t lose any time.

YUHEI: No, I didn’t wanna lose time. I just wanted to go for it straight away. So I pretty much dove into it headfirst into the deep end. And of course, there’s a lot of challenges with running a company, you know. So it’s very different from my experience at EAJ. But, at the same time, you know, the 12 years of experience I had at EA really helped me start the localization company because, you know, I’ve gone through the entire localization process while I was at EA. So as well as running the company, because we’re such a small team, I still am the localization producer as well. So sometimes juggling that can be a challenge for sure, because, you know, back when I was, you know, didn’t have my company, I didn’t really have to worry about taxes or, you know, the boring side of running a company. But that is a big, big part of what you have to do when you run a company. You have to, you know, worry about taxes and, you know, bookkeeping and accounting and everything like that. So, yeah, and it’s like juggling a few things.

FLOR: Yeah, and at the same time, taking care of your team, right? It’s not just you anymore.

YUHEI: That’s a huge difference for sure.

ALEX: But now, you started your own company the day after you left EA. EA closed down, right? You didn’t left. EA left you.

LORE: Oh!

ALEX: So how did you get into EA like 30-something years ago. How was the backstory of it?

YUHEI: Right. That is a very interesting story, actually.

FLOR: We’re all about interesting stories.

YUHEI: I was always into games. Like you mentioned in my profile, I got my first Game Boy when I was five.

ALEX: And your healthy obsession.

YUHEI: My healthy obsession with games. So I loved games all my life, basically, but I never really considered making it my career. So I like music almost as equally as I like games. So I used to work at a music venue as a… just at the bar, making, you know, serving beer to the customers and things like that. And this is when my mom contacted me saying she’d found an ad…

ALEX: Go, Mom.

YUHEI: Yeah, my… Thank you, Mom, if you’re watching.

LORE: Oh!

YUHEI: And the ad was about…

ALEX: Hi, Yuhei’s mom!

YUHEI: Hi, Mom! And the ad was for a position at EA, and it required some linguistic skills. And since I was bilingual, she thought, you know, it would be a good fit for me. So… Yeah, that’s when I just thought I should go for this, because working at a music venue, you really don’t make much money.

ALEX: Right.

FLOR: Unfortunately.

YUHEI: Unfortunately. So I took the opportunity. I wanted to test my linguistic skills as well. So yeah, I joined EA as a translator in the beginning.And then, you know, a position for assistant localization producer opened, so I applied. And that’s basically, you know, then the dominos started falling in and here I am now.

ALEX: That’s amazing.

FLOR: How old were you when your mom showed you this ad?

YUHEI: Uh, I think I was 21.

FLOR: Oh, you were just a baby.

YUHEI: It was a very long time ago. I think I was 21. Yeah, it was a long time ago.

ALEX: That’s the coolest story ever.

LORE: You were right, that’s a good story.

ALEX: “How did you start working at EA? Thanks to my mom.” It’s amazing!

FLOR: Yeah, she saw video games, like, bilingual skills, and she was like, “Yeah, this is for Yuhei.”

ALEX: “This is for my kid.”

YUHEI: Yeah. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of that earlier, and I had to rely on my mom to come up with that for me.

ALEX: You’re not alone, man. I mean, plenty of us didn’t think about pursuing a career in the localization industry or in the video game industry until we were much older than 21. Well, not much.

FLOR: Yeah, but it’s amazing that your mom saw that there was potential in the video game industry. It wasn’t just a hobby or a healthy obsession, right?

YUHEI: Yeah. Yeah. I think she saw me playing the Nintendo 64 for like six, eight hours a day, and she must have thought, “This is the job for you.”

FLOR: This needs to pay off.

LORE: Did she ever play any games with you or did she when you were younger?

YUHEI: Oh, she actually, she used to play Animal Crossing on the Nintendo 64.

LORE: Love it.

YUHEI: That’s an old game.

ALEX: Lore is a huge Animal Crossing fan.

LORE: Yes, I spent a lot of the, again, early stages of lockdown playing that one.

YUHEI: The Switch version?

LORE: Yeah, when it just came out on the Switch. Absolutely.

YUHEI: Yeah. Can’t buy a Switch anymore. In Japan, at least.

FLOR: Oh, really?

YUHEI: Yeah, it sold out. Yeah.

FLOR: Well, thank you for, well, that story. We loved it. I mean… What’s the name of your mom, by the way? Because she’s amazing.

YUHEI: My mom’s name is Taiko.

ALEX: Taiko.

LORE: We love you.

FLOR: Hi, Tiko. Thank you for…

ALEX: Thank you, Taiko, for what you did way back then.

FLOR: …bringing Yuhei to the industry.

YUHEI: That’s an unexpected cameo.

FLOR: But a cute one, though.

LORE: We’ll be interviewing her next week.

YUHEI: Oh, great. Great. She’ll love that.

LORE: Well, I wanted to take it back a little bit to the culture discussion that we were having earlier, because I have heard from a few different people in the localization industry that it’s often easier to localize games from Japanese into English rather than from English into Japanese, since the English speaking world just kind of eats up the entire Japanese esthetic and culture. So what do you think it is about Japanese gaming or Japanese entertainment in general that appeals so strongly to English speaking audiences?

YUHEI: I think the major difference is the exposure the Western audience has to Japanese material when they were young. I lived in the U.K. when I was very small. I went to the UK when I was four and I stayed there seven years, so I experienced this firsthand as well. But in Europe, there aren’t many domestic animations, so a lot of what comes into Europe is exports from the US or Japan. For example, Power Rangers was huge when I was a kid, and that is a Japanese export.

LORE: Same.

YUHEI: And Dragon Ball, of course, and animes like that. Oh, you wore a T-shirt. Okay.

FLOR: We’re big fans of Dragon Ball as well. We grew up with Dragon Ball.

ALEX: Yes, that’s right.

YUHEI: And yeah, I heard from my friends in Italy and France, you know, they told me that Dragon Ball was on TV, you know, on Saturday mornings. So I think, compared to, you know, Japanese people, I think the Western audience had a lot of opportunities to be exposed to this new culture, which is Japanese culture, when they were small. So, you know, now they’re grown up and, you know, if a game contains very Japanese things like, for example, you know, Persona 5, that’s a very Japanese game. That’s a very Japanese game because… And they’re not even, you know, they don’t try to domesticate the content. They don’t hide the fact that everyone is Japanese and they go to this Japanese school and they live in Shibuya.

ALEX: Shibuya, yeah.

YUHEI: Shibuya, yeah. And so I think the Western audience, they can take that in more than a Japanese person can with Western content because they’ve been exposed to these kinds of Japanese culture since they were young. Now, on the flip side, not a lot of cartoons make it over to Japan, so everything, almost everything is foreign to a Japanese audience, mostly because there’s so much domestic content, games, anime, movies. So, you know, they didn’t really grow up watching anything outside Japanese things. So I think that’s the major difference.

LORE: That’s interesting. I guess it makes a lot of sense when you put it like that. I mean, you’re naming shows and things, and I’m like, “Oh yeah, that was from my childhood. Oh, yeah! I remember that!” So yeah, I guess it really was… having that Japanese entertainment was a big part of our childhoods here in the U.S. And we do still love it as adults.

YUHEI: Yeah, that’s a big… that’s a big thing.

LORE: So thank you. And thank you to Japan for all the awesome games and shows.

ALEX: Yes. Yes, because it might be like, “Oh, yeah, this was whatever I did, whatever I watched when I was a kid,” but it was the same thing that we watched as kids as well. So your export quality is top notch, Yuhei. Thank you very much. Thank you.

YUHEI: Well, yeah. I’m not sure if I can take credit for all of that.

LORE: Take it! Yuhei is personally responsible for all the good games and shows coming from Japan. You heard it here first.

ALEX: Well, he has been for quite a while right now, for all of his work at EA and now at his own company. So yeah, man, take it.

YUHEI: Yeah, I’ll take what I can. Thank you very much. I’m responsible for everything.

LORE: Well done.

FLOR: But yeah, we wanted to know, what do you think are the main challenges? Because we already talked about going from Japanese into English. So what are the main challenges for indie devs to go from English into Japanese and to localize their game? Are there any specific adaptations? I mean, you talked about the rating system and all, but from your experience, have you seen any specific mistakes or common mistakes throughout the years that people make when they develop their games? Not thinking about, of course, the target audience.

YUHEI: Right. So yeah, a common challenge is dialect, you know? Obviously, English has so many dialects, you know, and each of them are specific to that region, and that specific dialect has its own specific slang. So it’s really difficult for a translator to be able to understand all these different English dialects and slang terminology. So, yeah. You know, for example, if a character has a, you know, a very heavy Cockney accent, let’s say the character’s from, you know, London or something, a lot of the things that he’s saying the translator will miss because they haven’t grown up around, you know, this kind of English. A lot of times, people who study to become translators, they, you know, read the English from books, they hear the English from tapes. Obviously, no one is gonna start swearing in a textbook or on the tape. But, you know, a game isn’t a textbook. The characters speak like normal people. And normal people, you know, they swear and they don’t use clean English. So, yeah, one challenge I faced is just searching for translators that can understand this kind of language. I’d like to think that we have a strength there because, you know, everyone on the team, very diverse backgrounds. I grew up in London and moved to Germany, then Illinois. So if you’re wondering…

ALEX: Very diverse.

LORE: That’s quite a shift.

YUHEI: So you might be thinking my accent is hard to put a finger on. That’s because it’s American Midwestern British, I would say.

LORE: Midwest!

YUHEI: Midwest. Oh, really?

LORE: Yeah. I’m in Wisconsin right now.

YUHEI: Oh, nice.

LORE: Nice. That just came out by accident. I’m sorry.

YUHEI: So, yeah. Finding a translator that can do that is very challenging. So having a team that is diverse, you know? My team has people from the States, England, Ireland, New Zealand. So in terms of slang and dialects, we have quite a few of the bases covered, I would say.

FLOR: That’s amazing.

YUHEI: Yeah. And on the topic of dialects, it’s always challenging to translate a dialect when the devs want the dialect to be portrayed in Japanese. So let’s say a character speaks in a Scottish accent, and the devs want us to portray that in Japanese. There is no Scottish Japanese accent. So what do we do?

ALEX: How do you translate it?

YUHEI: Yeah. So, you know, does it simply mean, you know, Scotland is the northern region of England… Not England, the UK. The northern region of the UK. So do we just pick a dialect that is the northern region of Japan? And of course, it’s not that simple.

FLOR: Not at all.

YUHEI: No. So, you know, in our case, what we do is we try and figure out why the devs chose this particular dialect for this character. The Scottish accent, it’s usually seen as, you know, a little rough. You know, obviously, it’s an archetype. It’s not true, not every Scottish person is rough. But when you think about why the devs chose it, you can kind of see the characteristic they were trying to go for. So we try and focus on that characteristic as opposed to the actual dialect, because translating that dialect directly is impossible. So just focus on the character and make that come through in the translation. And then, I think, you know, we can translate it the way that devs wanted.

FLOR: And that takes us back to communication. Communication is key to fully understand the backstory of each character and then try to portray it the best you can for the target audience to get the same feel, you know?

YUHEI: Right. So it’s always a discussion with the devs, because in the end we need to, you know, deliver what’s best for the players, yes, but we also need to deliver the message that the devs were going for. So it’s… Yeah. We always ask questions to the devs, and they always give us really good answers and information. So, you know, based on that information, we try to translate and localize the content the best we can.

LORE: Well, that was a nicely diplomatic answer at the end there. “We always get good answers back.”

YUHEI: Always. Always. 100% of the time.

LORE: Love it.

ALEX: Yuhei, you might have given a bit of something away for what I mean to ask next. But as you know, many indie devs usually want to get their games known worldwide, right? But they just don’t know where to start when it comes to localization, right? So what sort of advice could you give indie devs when it comes to localization?

YUHEI: Yeah. The main advice I would give to indie developers is negotiation. Indie devs, you know, compared to triple-A or double-A companies, they have a limit on the budget, more often than not. So I think some indie devs might stop there. They might just say, “We don’t have money to localize it, so we can’t.” But that’s a shame because you could be missing out on a very big market and a very big player base. So I would have to say, you know, just negotiate with the localization team you wanna work with, you know? Let’s say you don’t have a budget, then maybe you have something else to offer. Let’s say, for example, we localize your game, so maybe you can put our logo on the splash screen or something like that, you know? That could be a win-win scenario without involving money. So I would say just ask for a quote and see if it fits your budget. And if it doesn’t, just negotiate, you know, because there’s really… you won’t lose anything from negotiating. So.

ALEX: Right.

YUHEI: So that would be one advice.

ALEX: Communication, again. Talk.

YUHEI: Communication, yes.

LORE: Time and time again.

YUHEI: Yeah, sorry. I’ll stop talking about communication now.

ALEX: No, please.

LORE: That would be against our rule of communication, communication.

ALEX: No, but you’re shedding so much light into something that it sounds like it should be just common change, right? But it doesn’t…. It’s not that common, I mean.

FLOR: Yeah, if it was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because sometimes indie devs, for example, are super… maybe there’s just a one team person or maybe two or three, if they’re lucky, and they don’t even know where to start. And sometimes it’s good to share these stories for them to know that there are other ways.

LORE: Yeah, don’t just rule it out.

YUHEI: I would say, like, if you Google “localization,” you know, a lot of companies come up. And as an indie dev, you might be intimidated by that because, you know, obviously the ones that come up on the top, they’ve handled all these triple-A games, you know? Maybe they worked with NASA or something like that. So it’s easy to get intimidated by that. And, of course, if you ask for a quote, it might be on the high end. But I think it’s important to search outside of, you know, the big names as well, because there are a lot of small indie studios that would be willing to negotiate a little more than the, you know, the more bigger companies would. So a good starting point, I think, would be to join, just join an indie community. There’s a very good one in Japan called Asobu. They have a huge presence on Discord as well. And it’s just a group of indie devs coming together, talking about their own games, asking for help. So just, yeah, just join a group and then make connections. And then you’d be surprised like how many people, how many, you know, localization studios there might be.

FLOR: Yeah, that’s great advice. Thank you.

ALEX: That’s great advice, Yuhei. Thanks.

LORE: It really is such a nice community, too. So like you said, reaching out I think is a really good idea.

YUHEI: Yeah, it is. Yeah.

LORE: So in addition to gaming, we know you also dabble in music and skateboarding. Is it snowboarding as well or just skateboarding?

YUHEI: Oh, it’s just skateboarding.

LORE: And skateboarding. Which are, I mean, both just very classic cool guy attributes that I’m totally digging. And we know that you’ve assembled a team at Bonus Stage that have backgrounds in music and other arts as well, in addition to their gaming background. So as somebody with negative musical talent myself, I’m wondering… Admittedly. Does the music in games tend to work regardless of the international audience, or is that something that you find really benefits from the localization treatment, you know, specializing it for a certain linguistic group in every game?

YUHEI: Let me first clarify that I got into music and skateboarding for the pure reason of looking cool.

LORE: Yeah. Makes sense.

FLOR: Don’t we all?

YUHEI: Um… So, sorry, your question was music and video games?

LORE: Yeah. So the music in games, when you’re localizing these games, you know, music is often such a big part of the games that we play. And so, is that something that generally translates well when you’re localizing a game to an international audience?

YUHEI: Yeah. I mean, Japan tends to follow the trend of the US in terms of musical, you know, what’s big right now. So… For example, I’m gonna sound out of touch with guys. You know, obviously dubstep was very big a few years ago. Maybe not a few years ago, maybe quite a while ago. And then, you know, a few months later, it’s big in Japan as well. So, you know, back when dubstep was big, a lot of video games were incorporating dubstep into their soundtrack. So the Japanese audience, you know, they didn’t really have any trouble getting into that either, because we tend to like a similar genre to what everyone in the US likes.

LORE: That’s nice, then. You kind of… You don’t have to completely come up with a new soundtrack every time you’re localizing a game.

YUHEI: That would be a whole new additional step to the localization process if we had to re-write the music. It might be fun, though.

LORE: Could be just for some games. Maybe not every game.

YUHEI: Yeah, not every game, please.

ALEX: Please. It’s too much work.

LORE: I won’t make you do it.

FLOR: Yeah. And now that you said “fun,” we’re gonna go to the fun part of our interview. Even though I had a great time during this session.

YUHEI: Yeah, me too.

FLOR: We asked you to share with us a set of memes, your favorite memes. So I’m gonna share my screen now. Yes. So, well, thank you so much, Yuhei, for sharing your memes. So this is the first one.

YUHEI: Oh, I love memes.

ALEX: “Nope.”

FLOR: “No, no. I didn’t get anything.”

ALEX: The guy was loaded.

YUHEI: This is a true story. My friends do this to me all the time.

FLOR: Oh, really?

YUHEI: My “friends” do this to me.

ALEX: Yeah. With friends like that, you don’t need enemies.

YUHEI: Exactly.

FLOR: I know, right? And what are you playing with your friends right now?

YUHEI: I’m playing Apex Legends, like everyone else in Japan. Even if I wanted to play anything else, my friends are playing Apex, so I don’t really have much of a choice.

LORE: It’s Apex or Apex.

YUHEI: Apex or Apex, yeah. I mean, any time I play Apex… By the way, I’m terrible at Apex.

ALEX: Oh, I suck at Apex.

YUHEI: It’s such a difficult game. But every time I go into a game, I end up running around with two scopes and no gun while my friends are just decked out in the best gear, so…

FLOR: So everyone can tell whenever you got something from the vault.

YUHEI: Yeah, exactly. And I have to keep reminding them that this is a team game, you now? So maybe help me?

ALEX: By the way, who… what character do you pick, usually?

YUHEI: Bangalore, because I don’t have… Anyone else is locked. You know, the new legends? I don’t have them unlocked, so I usually stick to Bangalore because she’s one of the closest characters to like, you know, a common FPS, you know, where the abilities are, you know, relatively simple compared to the other legends. So I tend to stick with her because she’s the only one I can use.

LORE: It narrows down the options, as well.

ALEX: Yeah.

FLOR: So the next one.

YUHEI: Oh, I love this one. “Donuts are great.”

LORE: I did always want to eat the food watching this show, though. Like, for some reason, the food always looked so good.

FLOR: Every single time.

YUHEI: Japanese sweets, maybe? They look good, don’t they? Yeah.

FLOR: Well, it happened to me a lot with Dragon Ball as well. Every single time that they are eating, it’s like, “I’m hungry.”

YUHEI: Oh, Dragon Ball, yeah.

FLOR: Having those huge feasts.

YUHEI: The huge, like, the dinosaur tails.

ALEX: The dinosaur tail. Yeah.

FLOR: And that brings us to the next one.

LORE: Oh! I love it!

ALEX: Yep!

YUHEI: I had to ask Alex to sneak this one in because it’s not related to games and it’s not related to localization. But I like Dragon Ball, so.

ALEX: I believe that Goku has a free pass.

LORE: Yeah. Always. Always. And I had to sneak one for the sake of it, because when I saw that you’re a big fan of Dragon Ball, I had to include this one as well.

ALEX: I wasn’t expecting this one!

FLOR: I know. Surprise factor.

YUHEI: Poor Yamcha.

ALEX: Wait, that’s the pronunciation in Japanese? Like the proper one?

YUHEI: Well, the proper one would be “Yamucha.” What is it in your region?

ALEX: No, “Yamcha.” But I thought I heard something… I thought I heard “Yamca”?

YUHEI: No, that might be somewhere different. It’s “Yamucha” in Japan. And “Yamucha” actually means a Chinese dish or a Chinese buffet. Dragon Ball names. Dragon ball names are all based on food or clothing items.

FLOR: That’s why I love them so much.

ALEX: “Gohan” is “rice” or something like that?

LORE: We’re gonna have to have a separate talk about this, ’cause I was not aware and I would like to get educated on this.

YUHEI: Oh, I would love to talk about Dragon Ball for another 3 hours or something.

FLOR: Yeah.

YUHEI: “Gohan” literally…

LORE: Next week.

YUHEI: Next week, let’s do that.

LORE: I’d happily interview your mom.

YUHEI: Oh, yeah. I forgot my mom. Yeah.

FLOR: Yeah. After her session, we’ll have our Dragon Ball session.

YUHEI: Okay. Okay.

ALEX: But I wanna know what Gohan… if I got Gohan right.

YUHEI: Gohan is right. And that literally means “food.” Well, not “food,” but “dinner.”

FLOR: Oh! I love it. I love it. When I thought I couldn’t love Dragon Ball any more, like, you come and share this information and it’s like, of course their names are related to food.

YUHEI: The names are fascinating. Yes.

FLOR: Well, that’s the end. Oh, and Mr. Business came to say hi!

YUHEI: Hello.

LORE: He’s trying to put his paw in my coffee, so now he gets to sit on my lap and time out.

FLOR: Perfect timing.

ALEX: Time out.

FLOR: Look at his face, he’s all grumpy. “I need my coffee.”

ALEX: “I want coffee.”

LORE: This poor, abused cat. I’m so sorry you had to see this here at the end of the session.

FLOR: Well, Yuhei, it was lovely to have you with us today.

YUHEI: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much.

FLOR: And, well, we hope to continue discussing Goku or any other characters or Gohan. Or even the names, I would love to learn more about that. And as you said, I could be talking for hours about Dragon Ball. So, hopefully, we can meet again and… meet in person, maybe? Next year.

YUHEI: Yeah, that would be wonderful.

ALEX: That would be amazing.

FLOR: Absolutely.

YUHEI: I’ll bring my mom.

LORE: We love her already.

FLOR: Yeah. We already love her, and say hi and thank her for bringing you to the localization industry. And, well, we hope you have a lovely weekend, because we’re recording this on a Friday. So thank you for staying up this late for us.

YUHEI: Oh, no problem. No problem. Thank you so much.

FLOR: It was amazing to have you. So stay safe. And thank you, everyone, for watching. Stay tuned for the next episode.

YUHEI: Thank you, everyone!

FLOR: Bye!

ALEX: See you next time!