New Projects For 2016
New Years is the time to make promises for the new year, which may or may not happen. So here are two projects I am already starting to work on that hopefully will get done sometime this year.
Date Ariane International
I have had a few requests from volunteers to translate Date Ariane into other languages. Renpy has already translated the game interface into the following languages: Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and both simplified and traditional Chinese. Basically, I am looking for some bi-lingual volunteers to translate Date Ariane into as many of these languages as possible, especially French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese as my games biggest fan bases are in countries that speak those languages. Japanese would be interesting, too as this kind of “Bishojo” game is already popular there. I can’t pay anyone, but you’ll get your name in the credits of all future versions.
For my part of this project, I am creating a branch version of the game with less randomized text and less slang to make the game easier to translate, and putting together two “fill in the blank” files with English lines and blank foreign language lines, that when completed will result in a translated game. I am trying to work out a way to provide these translation files online so anyone who wants to help can do so, either via Google Docs or set up a Wiki. I may resort to machine translation on some versions if I can’t get enough volunteers.
I also have not decided if I will release each language version individually or one big international version where you can select your language in the settings menu.
To show you how big the project this file contains around 70% of the text in the game, not including text stored in variables and lists.
Rachel Meets Ariane: The Game
As a second project, I want to make a game out of the Rachel Meets Ariane story I wrote back in October. I’ve been inspired by the game Life is Strange to do a 3rd party perspective visual novel, or more accurately a visual short story. Unlike Date Ariane and Something’s In The Air, the player will not play a role in the game but may make decisions for the characters that change the outcomes.
The Halloween meeting will serve as an introduction and the bulk of the game will cover their “second date” set in November as Rachel visits Ariane’s house. It will be a lot shorter than any game I have done; maybe 50 to 60 pictures total and maybe around 4 endings.
This is sort of an experiment. I want to see how well a short game with a 3rd party perspective can work and how difficult it is. If it proves both fun to make and fun to play, there may be more of them. I got an idea for a Heidi and Wendy story if it works out.
Date Ariane Games 
I don’t think you need to take out the slang, most languages probably have similar expressions and if not… well, the translators should be able to work around that.
Speaking of which: I’d try my hand on the german translation.
I love these games! Just recently discovered them, and I’m almost getting all endings. It’s an amazing experience that all gamers would love! I can hardly wait for more projects!
Just sayin’… Ariane has a fan here in Brazil too! 😉
I loved both games! They are a real master piece! I just discovered them recently, but I’m almost getting all the endings already.
It’s a really amazing experience that all gamers would love!
By the way, Ariane just got a new fan outside USA, I’m from Brazil 😉
PS: sorry for the doubleposts :p
Hi Ariane!
tl;dr; I refactored most part of date ariane’s code to learn renpy and got rid of tons of line of code (also found bugs).
I am a coder. Per year I take two weeks of from work to learn stuff, thats totaly new to me. I do not remember why renpy crossed my google searches, but I decided to learn this gaming engine; some totally new to me. I did not want to do graphics or write plot, but just learn the language. So I took a random game (yours), looked at the sources and tried to understood.
Than I started a complete new project, copied part by part of arianes code, understood it, refactored it and build gaming units.
I spend 3 full days, rewriting and refactoring code before I had to go to work again. I finished predinner and dinner stuff and most of afterdinner scenes. I removed nearly all redundances like kiss/poem, dinner_talk/dinner_compliment, rps, makeout, dance, beach and stuff, introduce short shared labels, automated hints and did a lot of stuff that is possible when you enter a tabula rasa and have access to other ones work.
If you are interested to see my learning project, tell me how I can make it available to you. I understand, that you do not want to share contact information. If you want, post a pgp key and I answer with a pgp encrypted link that is hosted by myself.
Even if my code has a different code base, you could use at least the predinner stuff to get rid of some problems (for example the wine/notwine versions of house locations and all the redundance of dialogs).
I also found some very few bugs. At least two where I am sure and more where I am not sure if you want it this way or not.
Thanks, I know the code is very inefficient. My goal was to make it play as much as possible like the online version, and sometimes that involved eiter copying the sloppy javascript code or playing the online version and copying and pasting the results in the code.
While the new Renpy/Python code is much better than the javascript code, there are still plenty of redundancies I need to one day clean up. In fact I kind of wished I would have done that before working on the translation project.
The biggest redundancies are in the 5 dinner scenes and the makeout scenes. I should be able to rewrite those and cut those in half. The pre-dinner vs post dinner redundancies I’m not sure I want to touch as that is likely to introduce more bugs.
Ariane wrote:
›While the new Renpy/Python code is much better than the javascript code, there are still plenty of redundancies I need to one day clean up. In fact I kind of wished I would have done that before working on the translation project.
The biggest redundancies are in the 5 dinner scenes […]‹
It would take me 3 hours work to port back my predinner/dinner stuff into your codebase. I would really like to see this alive, since I already did all the work.
This would give you a version, without (as far as I remember) a single line of duplicate text or Code; and it does not change any behavior. I think this would really help for at least translation.
I should be able to arrange it via the wiki. I could post the current code and make it editable, then you can copy past your version of the code in.
I would like to help with the portuguese translation. My english is very good, but I don’t know anything about coding. In any case, I’d like to help somehow, just tell me how to do it 🙂
I got at least a couple of people already working on the Portuguese version, but feel free to help out. http://virtualunderworld.net/datearianewiki/pmwiki.php?n=DateAriane.Portuguese
I have a question, I noticed they are translating the word “you” to portuguese as “tu” which is how it is spoken in Portugal, but in Brazil it translates to “você”, which country’s language the game will be translate to? Should I go along and use “tu” as well?
I’m not familiar enough with Portuguese to make that call. I know that in French and Spanish there is a a “familiar you” tu and a “formal you” vous (French) and usted (Spanish).
The rule I am trying to follow in Spanish (with limited luck because the machine translation method does not distinguish) is for the conversations between “Ariane” and “You” are done in the familiar tu form, while narration, action, and interaction with other characters (Rebecca, waitresses, etc.) are done in formal usted.
If Portuguese is more lenient with using “você” in all situations, I’m OK with it, too.
Also, it asks for a password, I don’t know it, what should I do?
Oops forgot to set attributes on some of the pages. Just fixed ScriptPart2a, if there is a page you can’t edit that you should be able to, tell me, I’ll fix it.
Hi there,
I can probably help you with translation in Urdu. Let me know if you ever needed it, (I’ll check back here as well after a while).
Regards,
Roobie
examples:
“Give her a compliment” during dates increments admire, but eat is checked (if eat >= 3)
NudeOff/NudeOn after trivia is never called, because right is checked, instead of tqright (if right < 3:)
Thanks.
As an aspiring game dev just getting into 3d work, I have to say you are really inspiring. I love the way you create story arcs and branches, and the amount of thought and attention to detail that goes into your projects.
Also, might I suggest Dropbox as a quick, free and anonymous way to share files without sharing your information. I don’t work for them or anything, haha. Have found it to be very reliable though and may help in sharing the files for translation.
It would be really slick if in the future RealTouch or Vorze scripts could be launched during the sex scenes. That would be taking it to the next level! Ric
I leave the source code in the game folder precisely to allow for future technology.
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This is amazing ArianeB !!! You is the Best, make games witch butterfly effect is realy cool!