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Weekly Update - Working on Alpha Test 2 Feedback

2 years ago919 words

Ehh, I've had a weird week. Still a lot of tension and paralysis due to indecisiveness or a general feeling of crisis about the life path I've found myself on, but I feel it's at least started calming maybe after getting - and beginning to act on - some feedback about Atonal Dreams?

I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday just waiting for that feedback - or using that as an excuse to shirk work - replying and considering it as it came in, but not acting on it. Eventually though I compiled what people had mentioned into a list of 'actionable' (ugh, I hate that word) tasks so then I could carve the overwhelming imagined mountain ahead of me into small steps I could tackle one by one.

A lot were things like simple typos or minor bugs, which took seconds or minutes to fix, so I've done most of those. Others were more effortful and imposing, so I'll need to seriously tackle those starting next week.

I did at least make some in-my-opinion clarifying improvements to things like the battle UI though, which are visual so I can include that here. Here's what the 'statues' looked like before:





And here's what I've changed them to:




I like addressing things like this because they require relatively little effort compared to some other things - like rewriting dialogue scenes - but the changes are visual and obvious, so I can enjoy just looking at the results and feel like I'm making at least SOME forward progress!



I wrote last week about being unable to decide on what game to play, and since then I've begun Final Fantasy VII for the first time in years. I wrote ∞ an exhaustingly long post about it already ∞, but some additional thoughts I want to get out:

Some aspects of the less-than-stellar translation have been getting to me. I vaguely recall reading once that it was released during a period when video games in general were taken less seriously, and companies assumed The West wouldn't much care for Japanese RPGs, so not much care was put into the translation. Some scenes are fine enough, but others - especially NPC dialogue, or bits where your chosen allies briefly interject (meaning lines have to be provided for all possible characters) - read like the translator just took a file containing all the dialogue and translated each line literally with zero regard for its context. Interesting to me though how the bizarre wording never registered to me as such when I was a child.

For example, this unimportant NPC says these two consecutive lines:




That should probably say "Why? A lot of reasons", or something. Though looking through the many screenshots I took to find an example, most dialogue lines seem fine, so maybe the translation's not THAT bad, but only seems like it is due to a few mangled lines here and there?

I think it might have been FF7 that really brought JRPGs to the West? Again, I feel I read that somewhere once, and it certainly earned a place as the archetypal JRPG for many years. Which is why the subsequent ones had more care put into their translations. Maybe?

I also find the aspects of Shinra and Sephiroth as villains - like why the protagonists decide to go after them, and vice versa - to be sloppy and weird, though I suppose it's not all that different from the hand-wavy reasons a lot of stories give for the characters they've designed to butt heads ("somehow Palpatine returned").



I'm enjoying it and looking forward to playing it each day... but I typically can't for long because I get into a state of anxious tension, which manifests as headaches, hunched shoulders, chewing my lip, etc. When I become aware of it, I can intentionally relax my muscles, but it's an ongoing battle which is draining in itself. I'm not even entirely sure why it affects me as much as it does during what should be a relaxing activity - I get these sensations whenever I play any game - other than it's just yet another manifestation of my anxiety condition. Maybe some subconscious thoughts about how I 'should be doing something better with my time'? Or it could even be a result of my brain tumour/damage for all I know (eg the relatively unusual distance between my eyes and the screen strains them, causing pain, fuelling an anxious response or something). I don't know.

∞ This reddit post that made it to r/all ∞ stood out to me as a particularly striking manifestation of an overactive amygdala (a girl is so overwhelmed all she can do is lie in the driveway in the rain while waiting for it to pass). I suppose it's easy if you don't have anxiety issues yourself to see others held back by them as lazy, or 'not trying hard enough' or whatever. I wish it were that simple! (I've never had anyone who'd understand and be there with me like that girl's mum was for her.)