Bug Boy Summer: The UI is on a roll....
Hey folks, today I hopped into Gamemaker and started uploading the UI artwork! Feels great to be coding again after a three-week dry spell. This is the only cool visual I have so far, as right now I'm building out how the bugs spawn in and animate. I was hoping by working in a modular fashion, I'd have to make less art, but its getting kind of fidgety in the code😭. BUT my goal tomorrow is have all the bugs loaded in, and that will probably look AWESOME, so stay tuned for that!
Bonus: experimenting with a translator tool
About once a month I browse through a list of girly DS and 3ds games that only released in Japan, and feel surly about how no one in the west thought they were worth porting. I started dreaming about some kind of translation tool that you could use as an overlay on a game window that read text and translated in real time, like how google translate or certain apps on your phone can do with a camera.
And then I realized that is a tool that someone probably already has built, I just never bothered to look for it. And lo and behold, a couple of searches later...I found one for Windows!
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pjd2fdzqxm3?hl=en-US&gl=US
This is a locally run program that you literally link to another window in your desktop, and it sends a quick screencap of it to Google Translate, and then overlays the translation (just make sure in settings to switch it to Google Translate, otherwise you may accidentally be using an LLM booooo).
Anyway it just....works. Here it is over a screenshot of "Tangari Boushi to Oshare na Mahou Tsukai" one of the sequels to the EXCELLENT Magician's Quest. Magician's Quest had 3 sequels, but only the original game was ever ported to English. I have been YEARNING to play the sequels, something I worried wouldnt be possible for years because my japanese isn't good enough. But...yep! here it is, in delightfully wonky english.
I am waaaaay too busy to be playing games and getting sucked down rabbit holes like this haha, but next year I'd love to take a shot at some of my white whales with this tool (hopefully it still works by then). What do you guys think? would y'all be interested in watching me play some obscure japanese girly games?
Well, that's all for today! Here's your sign-off joke:
Q: which bug is the hardest to understand?
A: The mumble-bee
Comments (4)
i would definitely watch more gameplay videos! i would also look into the tool translationly as it's a free translation tool that i've used before and really like, if you're looking for an alternative to google. bug boy summer looks great!!
*vibrating with excitement*
Yea so cool.
The UI looks great! I adore all the jokes too, they bring me a smile each time. On another note… I didn’t know magician’s quest even had sequels!! I occasionally spend weeks trying to remember this game with only the vague memory of it with great things like “you had to answer quiz questions in class”