Enmaku [Czech AnimeFest 2009]

[Cynebeald]

http://www.nantoka.info/enmaku/download/
Here's another game that was completed for the Czech AnimeFest 2009 - Enmaku. It tells the tale of two ninjas-in-training from two feuding villages and what happens after they meet one day in the woods. Some features:

• You can play the game from the point of view of both protagonists (after you unlock the second storyline by finishing the first)
• The protagonists speak different but mutually intelligible languages (Czech and Slovak)
• Five different story parts to explore
• Lots of mazes (navigate using a custom menu), each labyrinth having a distinct visual style
• A fight!
• A few puzzles
• Hand tracked XM music (maybe one of the last games, because XM support is going to be pulled)
• Backgrounds using photos from Beiz.jp and morgueFile
• Hand drawn and colored characters
• Playtime around 40 minutes (both storylines combined)
• Not everything is really what it seems

Dont expect:

• A typical nonlinear anime visual novel with lots of cute girls with lots of storylines and lots of endings where the point of each storyline is to "finish" a particular girl.
• Too much.

The game was originally planned as a graphical "text adventure" game, but we didn't have the time to implement meaningful things to do for each location, so we had to cut a lot of stuff (only movement and looking remain, but the relatively flexible menu system is still in place). It was our first game, maybe next year we'll start sooner and do better The game took about a month and a half from the first sourcecode commit to the final release branch. As for using XM music - we originally had ogg files, but then we wanted to share end edit the music, so we switched to xm files which are easier to share and edit via a source code repository (this happened quite some time after PyTom's poll regarding deprecation of module formats...)

We'd like to provide an english translation, but as mentioned above, each protagonist speaks a different language, and I feel that removing this aspect from the game takes away some of the fun. Unfortunately, none of us has the abilities to pull off a translation using several english dialects (I'm not even sure if brittish and american english would be different enough for this, not that we'd be able to do those).

[JQuartz]

Unfortunately, none of us has the abilities to pull off a translation using several english dialects (I'm not even sure if brittish and american english would be different enough for this, not that we'd be able to do those).

I think you could just keep the Czech and Slovak but it will be accompanied by translation(like Lord of the rings when they spoke in Elven) when the player plays the path. So when the player plays the Czech path, just the Czech will have translation. The Slovak will still be Slovak. Vice versa for the Slovak path.

[Cynebeald]

Unfortunately, none of us has the abilities to pull off a translation using several english dialects (I'm not even sure if brittish and american english would be different enough for this, not that we'd be able to do those).

I think you could just keep the Czech and Slovak but it will be accompanied by translation(like Lord of the rings when they spoke in Elven) when the player plays the path. So when the player plays the Czech path, just the Czech will have translation. The Slovak will still be Slovak. Vice versa for the Slovak path.

Interesting idea But for almost all Czech and Slovak people, both languages are equally understandable. And this is important, because vital clues may revealed from the dialogue between the two protagonists. So the game could be unplayable, because you wouldn't get the Slovak translation into English until you finished the Czech storyline, which will be hard to finish because you didn't get the cues in Slovak.

In the end, it will probably have to be sufficient to have a single translation, and just use radically different fonts or something like that (or maybe mirror the individual font symbols or use right-to-left text if renpy supports it) - somthing that makes it clear the other protagonist is talking in a language that's maybe a bit unusual or hard to follow, but nevertheless quite understandable. Originally, the idea wasn't to have two languages anyway, but the contest rules said "Czech or Slovak" and we thought, why not both, and since one of our team was Slovak... But it worked out really nicely, and adds a nice twist to a game that would otherwise may be a bit shallow.

The release of the english translation will have to wait at least until 10. May, because we're not allowed to publish any new versions until voting has finished - so we still have a lot of time to find a solution (the game doesn't have that much text).