derek (ateam)
Pluto Supporter
That pixel art is beautiful, great work!
- Thread starter Danthrax
- Start date
Danthrax
Established Member
Here's the latest...
Lacquerware has mixed together the voices and sound effects for Kina and Metical's endings. That makes for three endings whose audio is ready to get music re-added, along with Rupia's, which he mixed late last month. Lacquerware also recorded lines for the reporter seen in Leone's ending with a woman named Seerba, who is an actual reporter! She brings an authenticity to her performance~
Knight0fdragon and I worked on tweaking the twin stick controller graphic to fit within the space available in the game. Here it is in Yaba Sanshiro — the labels need to be repositioned on the screen and TYPE-D doesn't appear in the center where that 0 is still. Knight needs to write bespoke code to fix the labels, and he's moving all of the TYPE-[letter] sprites to a big blank space in the TITLE.ALL file so we have room to add a TYPE-D sprite.
We ended up having to change the original gamepad graphic to give us a bit more room, too — we removed the drop shadow, shortened the cyan lines and bumped a couple of the lines up so they'd only use one tile instead of two, which is more efficient in the first place.
I also began mocking up a U.S. style manual for Bulk Slash. Here's a sneak peak...
Lastly, Jiggle85 reports that he and his brother are still working to tweak the recreations of the endings' music tracks until they're just right.
Lacquerware has mixed together the voices and sound effects for Kina and Metical's endings. That makes for three endings whose audio is ready to get music re-added, along with Rupia's, which he mixed late last month. Lacquerware also recorded lines for the reporter seen in Leone's ending with a woman named Seerba, who is an actual reporter! She brings an authenticity to her performance~
Knight0fdragon and I worked on tweaking the twin stick controller graphic to fit within the space available in the game. Here it is in Yaba Sanshiro — the labels need to be repositioned on the screen and TYPE-D doesn't appear in the center where that 0 is still. Knight needs to write bespoke code to fix the labels, and he's moving all of the TYPE-[letter] sprites to a big blank space in the TITLE.ALL file so we have room to add a TYPE-D sprite.
We ended up having to change the original gamepad graphic to give us a bit more room, too — we removed the drop shadow, shortened the cyan lines and bumped a couple of the lines up so they'd only use one tile instead of two, which is more efficient in the first place.
I also began mocking up a U.S. style manual for Bulk Slash. Here's a sneak peak...
Lastly, Jiggle85 reports that he and his brother are still working to tweak the recreations of the endings' music tracks until they're just right.
awesome work #Respect
Danthrax
Established Member
Lots of progress on Bulk Slash in the last two weeks! Jiggle85 and Patrick have finished the romantic theme heard in Metical and Colòn's endings — you can check it out here:
Compare that to how the original sounds:
And they're basically finished with the music heard in the main ending — the synths at beginning of the track need a little more tweaking, and Shadowmask is working with them on that. Jiggle and Patrick also have a nearly finished rendition of the comedic tune heard in six out of seven navigators' endings — they're still trying to match synthesizers to the originals but they're very close.
Mampfus has applied some of Jiggle and Patrick's music to Metical's ending, Leone's ending and the general ending. He also finished converting Saskia's Colòn lines into Audacity's format so they can be mastered and inserted into the game, which Lacquerware proceeded to do, and we're now evaluating whether we want some retakes with Saskia so her performance matches the energy seen in Colòn's animations. Lacquerware also mixed together the voices and sound effects for Leone and Naira's endings — the only ones he hasn't done that for yet are Lira and Colòn.
I made an internal testing patch yesterday to incorporate recent changes, including the rough redubs of Leone and Metical's endings as well as the general ending. This makes it the first patch in which you can play the entire game in English from start to finish! It's a fun milestone.
I also decided to use the extended development time to draw a lowercase font and retileset all of the mission briefings. (I won't be redoing the credits, though, because that would be a *ton* of work that I don't feel up to.) Here's a comparison between how the first mission briefing looked and how it'll look now:
Not only are they now easier to read, but this font uses less space, enabling us to use Lacquerware's original translations — we had to truncate them to fit when we used the ALL CAPS font. So this is better all around. Here's an example of some extra detail we're able to add with this lowercase font:
In other news that's ancillary to the main patch project, I worked more on the U.S. manual, including making some changes to the cover so it would look more like a 1998 release (the "exclusive" text at the top instead of the silver logo at the bottom, no stripes along the left spine; thank you to SaturnDave for pointing that stuff out to me!)
I gave it a unique code that follows Winter Heat's 81129. In my head canon, Bulk Slash would be published by Sega around September 1998, since Hudson never self-published in the West at that time.
I also finished clearing off one side of the Japanese-style fold-out manual (the more complicated side) and paginated our English translation onto it. I plan on 'shopping off the creases, so it'll look even better soon. Thanks to Ghaleon for the original high-res scan! Take a look at Bulk Slash's backstory and the navigators' bios:
Compare that to how the original sounds:
And they're basically finished with the music heard in the main ending — the synths at beginning of the track need a little more tweaking, and Shadowmask is working with them on that. Jiggle and Patrick also have a nearly finished rendition of the comedic tune heard in six out of seven navigators' endings — they're still trying to match synthesizers to the originals but they're very close.
Mampfus has applied some of Jiggle and Patrick's music to Metical's ending, Leone's ending and the general ending. He also finished converting Saskia's Colòn lines into Audacity's format so they can be mastered and inserted into the game, which Lacquerware proceeded to do, and we're now evaluating whether we want some retakes with Saskia so her performance matches the energy seen in Colòn's animations. Lacquerware also mixed together the voices and sound effects for Leone and Naira's endings — the only ones he hasn't done that for yet are Lira and Colòn.
I made an internal testing patch yesterday to incorporate recent changes, including the rough redubs of Leone and Metical's endings as well as the general ending. This makes it the first patch in which you can play the entire game in English from start to finish! It's a fun milestone.
I also decided to use the extended development time to draw a lowercase font and retileset all of the mission briefings. (I won't be redoing the credits, though, because that would be a *ton* of work that I don't feel up to.) Here's a comparison between how the first mission briefing looked and how it'll look now:
Not only are they now easier to read, but this font uses less space, enabling us to use Lacquerware's original translations — we had to truncate them to fit when we used the ALL CAPS font. So this is better all around. Here's an example of some extra detail we're able to add with this lowercase font:
In other news that's ancillary to the main patch project, I worked more on the U.S. manual, including making some changes to the cover so it would look more like a 1998 release (the "exclusive" text at the top instead of the silver logo at the bottom, no stripes along the left spine; thank you to SaturnDave for pointing that stuff out to me!)
I gave it a unique code that follows Winter Heat's 81129. In my head canon, Bulk Slash would be published by Sega around September 1998, since Hudson never self-published in the West at that time.
I also finished clearing off one side of the Japanese-style fold-out manual (the more complicated side) and paginated our English translation onto it. I plan on 'shopping off the creases, so it'll look even better soon. Thanks to Ghaleon for the original high-res scan! Take a look at Bulk Slash's backstory and the navigators' bios:
Amazing work!! Any ETA for release?
Awesome work, I simply can not wait for this to drop
Gah! I wish I'd seen this. I just watched Game Sack and it looks amazing. Anyway, I'm an actor (or at least I was for a couple of decades until I became a hermit) and would have been super keen to be involved. If there are any voices that still need doing, hit me up 😀
Well done, team!
Well done, team!
Knight0fDragon
Patron Supporter
The BS voice acting is 99% women, so if you did not qualify, you can at least know you did not miss out on an opportunity lol.
Danthrax
Established Member
No, but we're in the home stretch! We're hoping to release it before the end of the year, at least.
DID YOU JUST ASSUME MY GENDER?!?! 😛
Knight0fDragon
Patron Supporter
nope, just saying IF you did not qualify to meet the tone of a woman, you can at least know you did not miss out lol.
Last edited:
I see your IQ is much higher than mine.
Danthrax
Established Member
We're in the final stretch as we put the final pieces in place!
Knight0fDragon added a "TYPE-D" graphic to the twin stick controller screen and fixed the positioning of the labels on the controller screens.
He fixed the label positions on the other control schemes' screens, too. He's still working through some control bugs during gameplay, though — it seems the "ping your navigator" and "make your craft face the boss during boss fights" commands are separate within the code. Right now with the TYPE-D control scheme, it faces the boss and rotates whenever you press left or right on the right twin stick, while pressing the left stick button calls the navigator but doesn't make you face the boss. Knight is figuring out how to take the "face the boss" command off the right stick and put it only on the left button.
Meanwhile, Saskia worked with Lacquerware to redo some of Colòn's lines yesterday so we can tweak some lines we wrote for the character that just weren't working in practice, and Lacquerware mastered those lines and inserted them into the game for testing. We now have all seven navigators' English voices in Bulk Slash!
We're pulling together a lot of the remaining sound clips we still need to redub the endings. I recorded myself reading a line from a faceless Lira fan in the crowd shouting at Chris during Lira's ending. Mampfus, Lacquerware and Burntends are recording themselves shouting stuff like "Lira!" "Hey!" "Woo!" to add to the crowd noise during Lira's ending when Chris and Lira are descending in the Guardual craft.
Shadowmask, Lacquerware and Mampfus worked on mixing the voices, sound effects and music for all eight ending cinematics. The seven navigators' endings are now finished, with just the main ending to go. Here's a peek at Rupia's redubbed ending, if you don't mind a spoiler:
Shadowmask and Patrick have continued to refine the general ending's remade music. We still need to do final recordings of one of the bullies saying a couple lines, and Luuzine will record the young Riesen lines heard during the main ending.
Lastly, I redid the M.I.S.S. hint portions of each mission's briefing in lowercase font, replacing the previous ALL CAPS treatment. Once again, this allows us more space to add a little extra detail to them.
Our internal progress checklist shows we're 88% finished with all the tasks to complete the patch, with most of the outstanding ones in progress. Thank you to everyone for your patience! You'll all be able to play Bulk Slash in English very soon.
Knight0fDragon added a "TYPE-D" graphic to the twin stick controller screen and fixed the positioning of the labels on the controller screens.
He fixed the label positions on the other control schemes' screens, too. He's still working through some control bugs during gameplay, though — it seems the "ping your navigator" and "make your craft face the boss during boss fights" commands are separate within the code. Right now with the TYPE-D control scheme, it faces the boss and rotates whenever you press left or right on the right twin stick, while pressing the left stick button calls the navigator but doesn't make you face the boss. Knight is figuring out how to take the "face the boss" command off the right stick and put it only on the left button.
Meanwhile, Saskia worked with Lacquerware to redo some of Colòn's lines yesterday so we can tweak some lines we wrote for the character that just weren't working in practice, and Lacquerware mastered those lines and inserted them into the game for testing. We now have all seven navigators' English voices in Bulk Slash!
We're pulling together a lot of the remaining sound clips we still need to redub the endings. I recorded myself reading a line from a faceless Lira fan in the crowd shouting at Chris during Lira's ending. Mampfus, Lacquerware and Burntends are recording themselves shouting stuff like "Lira!" "Hey!" "Woo!" to add to the crowd noise during Lira's ending when Chris and Lira are descending in the Guardual craft.
Shadowmask, Lacquerware and Mampfus worked on mixing the voices, sound effects and music for all eight ending cinematics. The seven navigators' endings are now finished, with just the main ending to go. Here's a peek at Rupia's redubbed ending, if you don't mind a spoiler:
Shadowmask and Patrick have continued to refine the general ending's remade music. We still need to do final recordings of one of the bullies saying a couple lines, and Luuzine will record the young Riesen lines heard during the main ending.
Lastly, I redid the M.I.S.S. hint portions of each mission's briefing in lowercase font, replacing the previous ALL CAPS treatment. Once again, this allows us more space to add a little extra detail to them.
Our internal progress checklist shows we're 88% finished with all the tasks to complete the patch, with most of the outstanding ones in progress. Thank you to everyone for your patience! You'll all be able to play Bulk Slash in English very soon.
Segata Sanshiro
Ban Hammered
This is a good effort and I am looking forward to this release. Bulk Slash is one of my favourite releases for the Sega Saturn. As players, we are so lucky to have so many excellent and exclusive games
Here's the JP disc art for anyone that wants it (personally I like to print labels for my Saturn CD-Rs). For a moment I considered trying to mock up a "USA-style" disc art, but that JP disc is too gorgeous so I don't see the point haha.
I'm another that became aware of this thanks to Game Sack. I just got a Saturn earlier in the year so I've been diving into all things Saturn, bookmarking every website, crawling every forum... and especially checking out existing translations. But I guess this one wasn't on my radar since it hasn't been completed yet.
Based on what I saw on Game Sack though, this might be the most amazing translation project I've seen yet - and as you know, any translation is a big deal. They're no small feat! So thank you for this.
Danthrax
Established Member
Here's our project's progress over the last two weeks...
Knight0fDragon fixed all remaining bugs with the Twin Stick controls. The Twin Stick controller is now fully implemented in Bulk Slash for the first time ever, adding to the Sega Saturn's small library of Twin Stick-optimized games.
Luuzine recorded the young Riesen line heard at the end of the main ending and our team put it into our redub of the ending. And a person named Eugene sent in a take of Bully #1 in the main ending and we liked enough to go with it.
Shadowmask mixed and mastered audio for the character specific endings FMVs with additional editing from Mampfus and Lacquerware. All that's left is adding more to the crowd noise during Lira's ending and we'll have all eight ending cinematics fully redubbed!
I found where the sprites are for the title screen, so I changed it to say "OPTION" instead of "CONFIG" (there unfortunately is not room in the sprite to say "OPTIONS") and I made the copyright symbol at the bottom wider, both to look better and to make the spacing consistent.
I capped off (heh) my replacement of the all-caps text in-game with lowercase text by switching out all of the navigator intros when you meet them during a mission.
Plus, Knight0fDragon found the code that determines where the game pauses the character's mouth movements and text scroll after each Japanese sentence. So I was able to change those pauses to match our English script instead, resulting in much nicer looking layouts. Here's a look at our internal PNG files for Rupia's intro with the spacing we had to use before and the adjusted spacing we can use now:
In case you missed it, we debuted the localized voice for Colòn, as performed by Saskia, on the Shiro Show back on Nov. 12:
I recreated the back side of the Japanese manual with our English translation on it. (It was easier than 'shopping a scan of the Japanese original and paginating over it.) Check it out:
I also took a bunch of new screenshots to replace the blurrier scanned ones of the Japanese manual with crisper English ones for our U.S.-style manual.
PDFs of these manuals will be included with the patch when it launches — and we're getting very close to being ready to do that. We just need to finish that redubbed Lira ending, finish inserting the localization team's credits and insert translated text for the RAM error screens and backup select screen, then test a finalized patch and release it unto the world!
Knight0fDragon fixed all remaining bugs with the Twin Stick controls. The Twin Stick controller is now fully implemented in Bulk Slash for the first time ever, adding to the Sega Saturn's small library of Twin Stick-optimized games.
Luuzine recorded the young Riesen line heard at the end of the main ending and our team put it into our redub of the ending. And a person named Eugene sent in a take of Bully #1 in the main ending and we liked enough to go with it.
Shadowmask mixed and mastered audio for the character specific endings FMVs with additional editing from Mampfus and Lacquerware. All that's left is adding more to the crowd noise during Lira's ending and we'll have all eight ending cinematics fully redubbed!
I found where the sprites are for the title screen, so I changed it to say "OPTION" instead of "CONFIG" (there unfortunately is not room in the sprite to say "OPTIONS") and I made the copyright symbol at the bottom wider, both to look better and to make the spacing consistent.
I capped off (heh) my replacement of the all-caps text in-game with lowercase text by switching out all of the navigator intros when you meet them during a mission.
Plus, Knight0fDragon found the code that determines where the game pauses the character's mouth movements and text scroll after each Japanese sentence. So I was able to change those pauses to match our English script instead, resulting in much nicer looking layouts. Here's a look at our internal PNG files for Rupia's intro with the spacing we had to use before and the adjusted spacing we can use now:
In case you missed it, we debuted the localized voice for Colòn, as performed by Saskia, on the Shiro Show back on Nov. 12:
I recreated the back side of the Japanese manual with our English translation on it. (It was easier than 'shopping a scan of the Japanese original and paginating over it.) Check it out:
I also took a bunch of new screenshots to replace the blurrier scanned ones of the Japanese manual with crisper English ones for our U.S.-style manual.
PDFs of these manuals will be included with the patch when it launches — and we're getting very close to being ready to do that. We just need to finish that redubbed Lira ending, finish inserting the localization team's credits and insert translated text for the RAM error screens and backup select screen, then test a finalized patch and release it unto the world!
Danthrax
Established Member
Every other Wednesday, I've tweeted updates about our progress on the Bulk Slash English project. But today I have a different update: A patch release day!
I'm excited to announce we plan to finally release the patch to the public this Friday during the Shiro Show! We'll also be debuting the English voice of the final navigator, Kina, as performed by CrouchingMouse. She did a great job and we can't wait to show off her work. She'll be joining chat during the show, too!
The patch will be made available here on SegaXtreme sometime during this Friday's Shiro Show, which will serve as kind of a launch party as well. It's been a long 10 months since work began on this localization and we're ready to celebrate getting it into people's hands!
The last week or so hasn't been easy, though — we ran into serious issues getting the localized credits into the game. Adding our own credits to the original Japanese staff's was apparently filling up the Saturn's VRAM, resulting in a crash when the ending cinematic would load up after completing stage seven.
After some more tweaking, we got the ending movie to load, but there were pieces of graphical text tiles all over the screen, and the credits afterward were completely garbled. We ended up deciding to remove our localization team's credits and keeping just the Japanese staff's.
We called on Knight0fDragon for help yet again, and he built a tool to help get the credits in a proper state. It required me to basically retileset all of the Japanese credits by hand into a huge PNG, then it automatically matched the tiles in the PNG with the ones we'd put into the game's font file, looking for repeated tiles to save VRAM. For some reason, it still had a few tiles pointing at the wrong places, so Mampfus hand-edited the font file where those tiles were to show the correct graphics.
After several days of furious testing, lots of team communication and hours late at night staring at hexadecimal numbers, we finally got the credits — and the ending cinematic — looking good.
We still want to try to find a way to get the localization team's credits into the game, so that may come with a version 1.1 of the patch. But for now, the entire game is playable in English from start to finish, and we think it's more important to get this thing out so everyone can enjoy it.
The patch will come with a readme file that will include the whole team's credits as well as a U.S.-style manual with the team's credits. A total of 29 people contributed to this project and they all deserve to be recognized. I'm thankful for everyone who helped make it possible.
So yeah, that's all I've got! I hope everyone who downloads the patch comes to love Bulk Slash as much as the team and I do. Please tune in to the Shiro Show at 6 p.m. EST this Friday, Dec. 10 and party with us!
I'm excited to announce we plan to finally release the patch to the public this Friday during the Shiro Show! We'll also be debuting the English voice of the final navigator, Kina, as performed by CrouchingMouse. She did a great job and we can't wait to show off her work. She'll be joining chat during the show, too!
The patch will be made available here on SegaXtreme sometime during this Friday's Shiro Show, which will serve as kind of a launch party as well. It's been a long 10 months since work began on this localization and we're ready to celebrate getting it into people's hands!
The last week or so hasn't been easy, though — we ran into serious issues getting the localized credits into the game. Adding our own credits to the original Japanese staff's was apparently filling up the Saturn's VRAM, resulting in a crash when the ending cinematic would load up after completing stage seven.
After some more tweaking, we got the ending movie to load, but there were pieces of graphical text tiles all over the screen, and the credits afterward were completely garbled. We ended up deciding to remove our localization team's credits and keeping just the Japanese staff's.
We called on Knight0fDragon for help yet again, and he built a tool to help get the credits in a proper state. It required me to basically retileset all of the Japanese credits by hand into a huge PNG, then it automatically matched the tiles in the PNG with the ones we'd put into the game's font file, looking for repeated tiles to save VRAM. For some reason, it still had a few tiles pointing at the wrong places, so Mampfus hand-edited the font file where those tiles were to show the correct graphics.
After several days of furious testing, lots of team communication and hours late at night staring at hexadecimal numbers, we finally got the credits — and the ending cinematic — looking good.
We still want to try to find a way to get the localization team's credits into the game, so that may come with a version 1.1 of the patch. But for now, the entire game is playable in English from start to finish, and we think it's more important to get this thing out so everyone can enjoy it.
The patch will come with a readme file that will include the whole team's credits as well as a U.S.-style manual with the team's credits. A total of 29 people contributed to this project and they all deserve to be recognized. I'm thankful for everyone who helped make it possible.
So yeah, that's all I've got! I hope everyone who downloads the patch comes to love Bulk Slash as much as the team and I do. Please tune in to the Shiro Show at 6 p.m. EST this Friday, Dec. 10 and party with us!
