Mastiff CEO on Gurumin 3D localization, 3DS challenges

MonsterVine have recently interviewed Bill Schwartz and David Bruno, whom are the President and CEO of Mastiff respectively, about their upcoming title Gurumin 3D: A Monstrous Adventure. The interview mostly covers the many details and nuances of translating a game from Japanese to English and how Mastiff in specific takes on localization jobs.

When asked about what factors Mastiff keeps in mind when localizing a game, Schwartz had this to say:

It was a really big project, with issues that you constantly have to kind of deal with. There’s a character who’s always locked in a cage, and says nothing, while there’s another character that translates for him. We had to come up with our own mistranslations for him to reflect the poor translations the character does, whether it was phrases or weird sounds.

There’s a monster dancing near his boombox near the beginning, and as the hero takes off, he says “I’ll support you with my dancing”, while in Japanese it was more or less just “do your best”, in a kind of vanilla way that isn’t too enthusiastic or passionate. So we couldn’t just use “do your best”, since that was too excited and supportive. So since he could have meant it or not, and he was dancing, we used “I’ll support you with my dancing”, which is true to the original meaning, but different in literal terms.

Answering a question about whether or not the limitations of the 3DS created any major challenges that the team had to overcome, Schwartz said:

The devil’s in the details. Everything falls into two buckets: controls and optimization. We tweaked it a bit and added a camera control and a better help system, but a game is a game. We spent a long time figuring out what to do with the lower screen, but it was really all about optimization. We could have just put it all in as-is so it ran at 20fps and was just “okay”, but I’m really proud of what we did. You have to make sure anything that’s graphically unnecessary has to be trimmed a bit, so polygons that aren’t seen on camera don’t need to be there unless they’re seen. We were really focused on putting this fantastic game out there, and we did it, and again, I’m proud of how solid it is.

You can read the full interview here.