The ramblings of an 18-year old Computer Science undergraduate living in Jakarta. An English Vocaloid Community administrator, Nico Nico Douga addict, JRPG lover (especially the Atelier series!), and future software engineer. Usually writes in English, occasionally in Indonesian, rarely in Deutsch, but 日本語もおｋ.
This could be pretty good - it could let me learn how to type in Japanese faster and make me memorize the Japanese names of Pokémon! Such as "Acamo" for Torchic in the image above. Well, it's just another Pokémon side game for Nintendo DS, though. I wonder how they will combine "typing" with "battles"?
The Dream Fulfilled - September 28, 2010Today we have an announcement to make.
Four weeks to the day after we began selling copies of Recettear (as preorders), we are ready to announce Recettear's sales figures.
Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale has sold over 26,000 copies between all distributors as of this news posting.
And it continues to sell.
Everyone at Carpe Fulgur is... humbled? Amazed? It's difficult to put a name to what we feel. Recettear has done what we had barely dared to hope it would do: in a month it has secured the future of Carpe Fulgur by allowing all of its members to make wages comparable to "proper" jobs in the industry for an entire year, and has provided EasyGameStation with a massive new stream of revenue that they did not previously have access to.
The reviews of Recettear have been near-universal in their praise. Talk about the game all over the internet has been positive. The Recettear project is an unqualified success at this juncture - everything Carpe Fulgur set out to do has been accomplished. Recettear is available in English, people enjoy the localization and the game itself, and we've made enough money to continue with other projects with very little concern for the immediate future.
I, personally, feel the need to thank every single person who reviewed the game, talked about it in various places across the Internet, downloaded the demo, and most importantly bought the game. There are tens of thousands of you out there, from all across the planet. You made this possible. You fulfilled our dream - our dream of making a living from bringing the best indie games Japan has to offer to the English-speaking world.
I even want to thank the pirates, really - I know some of you have been "demoing" the game and then purchasing it, and I thank you for that. From our data via Steam and whatnot, our official demo-to-full conversion rate is somewhere between 25 and 30%... a number that I suspect is inflated in part by former pirates deciding to support us.
Of course, we still want people to continue purchasing the game. Remember, the more copies of Recettear we sell, the more cool stuff we'll be able to do in the future. A Carpe Fulgur with a nice, full war chest is going to be capable of doing a lot - and expanding our capabilities immensely.
So thank you again, everyone. 26,000 copies in four weeks is an incredible success in the indie scene, especially for an unknown Japanese game nobody had ever heard of a few months ago from a couple of dudes with no previous work to their name.
But even with all this, one should not think this is the end. We hope to announce a couple of very exciting projects in the near future, and we've begun to look at a number of future potential titles for localization.
This isn't the end. This is the beginning.
And there's a lot of lightning bolts to be seized.
- Andrew "SpaceDrake" Dice
Project Director, Carpe Fulgur LLC
I'm so glad Recettear got what it deserved. 26,000 copies is an amazing amount when you consider that this is an indie doujin RPG which most people haven't heard of being translated by a translation company who people haven't heard of and haven't translated anything before Recettear. Well, it's great that it continues to sell, and here's hoping Carpe Fulgur continues to translate more amazing doujin games, perhaps something like Fortune Summoners. If you haven't heard of Recettear before, it's an amazing item-shop-managing dungeon-crawler-RPG. Download the demo and support them by buying it if you liked it! I personally loved the game.
Hi there! Long time no see - I haven't posted for a while, huh? Let me start by saying that I... wasn't expecting this. Okay, first, let me tell you a little bit of my past with the Atelier series. Atelier Iris was one of the first games I've ever bought for the PS2, and it's the game that made me love JRPGs so much. I'm talking about the first Atelier Iris. The soundtrack, the gameplay... I love every one thing about the game. While I do love the subsequent Atelier games, none of them (especially in the soundtrack section) was really better (or even as good as) Atelier Iris' soundtrack. Even Rorona's soundtrack wasn't too stellar even though it had a few awesome tracks such as "Falling, the Star Light". The battle theme was nothing special. That... changed with Atelier Totori, the direct sequel to Atelier Rorona. It's been a while since a direct sequel was made to an Atelier game.
Hi everyone! It's been a while since I last posted here. I hope someone still read this small blog - I haven't made a post ever since I started out my Tumblr. I thought Tumblr can replace this blog, but it turns out it can't - they're two completely different place, and I can only talk about my life freely in here. So I've been missing for the past month or so - with this post, I'll tell you the gist of what happened in the last month. This article is mainly a rant about Speedy, the infamous Indonesian ISP.
This just gets better and better. Turns out the sequel to Atelier Rorona IS Atelier Totori. In this game, Rorona is 22. Totori is her first disciple. I loved Rorona and it looks like I'm going to love Totori as well. Totori is 13, by the way. Release Date: 24th June 2010. Atelier Rorona will be released this summer in English, thanks to NIS America. I hope they'll localize Atelier Totori as well. They've said that the game is made more "challenging" since many people complained that Atelier Rorona is too easy.
Game development is partially completed and they're already finalizing the game. There will be 1.25 times more voice over Atelier Rorona. Battles have been improved and the game style would be more Atelier-like. "We're aiming to make an Atelier game that is challenging like how the Atelier series originally was like". Yeah, I loved the old Atelier games - Atelier Iris was one of the first games I played on the PS2. The other two main characters in this game is Mimi, 14, a rich tsundere and Geno, 14, a childhood friend. Some pictures below.
I saw one on TV yesterday. The only time I get to watch TV is on dinner time, so I was pretty surprised when I saw an iPhone 3GS advertisement on TV. In Indonesian. All of the billboards on the streets advertising the iPhone 3GS are in English, so... why did they have to do such an awkward, stupid translation for their TV advertisement? The one I saw wasn't the one above (if they want to be Indonesian they should've used the word "mengunduh" instead of "men-download" in that commercial above), it was the "Cut, Copy and Paste" one. To get an idea of how awkward the translation was, see the video above.
「ただいま。わたしも少し大人になれたかな・・・」. "I'm home. I wonder... I've grown up a little". An advertisement found on Dengeki Playstation. Who's the girl on the picture? Why, it's Rorona, of course. Albeit an older version of her. This is Déjà Vu, because Gust did the exact same thing last year to promote Atelier Rorona. Does this mean Gust is hinting a sequel to Atelier Rorona? I have yet to play the first Atelier Rorona. I asked Nippon Ichi Software America about it, and they said that they're currently localizing the game, and it's planned to arrive this Summer to the PS3.
So of course, I'm currently really look forward to it. That's why I haven't been playing the Japanese version of the game. Besides, I'll have more fun if I can actually understand what's going on perfectly. Rorona is my favorite character in any PS3 game. It has been like that ever since the first time I saw pictures of her about a year ago, I think. Anyways, definitely looking forward to this even though I haven't played the first game. Can't wait till I get to play it this Summer. Awaiting more details about this supposed sequel, which will be available in two weeks, according to the advertisement. As well as awaiting for more news about Atelier Totori.
Atelier Totori coming in June for the PS3
Should be announced in famitsu or dengeki in the coming weeks
This should be interesting. I have still yet to try Atelier Rorona for the PS3 (since NIS America said that they're currently localizing the game and that the English version would come out this Summer for the PS3 when I asked them about a possible Atelier Rorona English Localization via their Twitter last year), but I'm still looking forward to this announcement of Atelier Totori. Will be keeping an eye on Famitsu or Dengeki in the coming weeks. Atelier games have always been special to me. I still remember the days when me and my cousin used to play Atelier Iris on my PS2. And now my brother is playing Atelier Annie on my DS. Hope Totori is an interesting character.
HTML5, a groundbreaking upgrade to the prominent Web presentation specification, could become a game-changer in Web application development, one that might even make obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.
HTML5 is amazing, I played around with it for a while. It can kill Flash and Silverlight - I'm sure of it. Read this interesting article for more. I'll just be glad when Flash is gone because... most of the times, my Firefox freezes for a few minutes because of Flash. I don't need Flash anyways. Well... This problem would also be fixed when Firefox 4.0 comes out, I guess? Since they would run the plugins in a different process later on, kind of like what Google Chrome is doing now. I also don't need Java, or any of those stuff. Java freezes my Firefox for a few minutes everytime I try to load it up. Silverlight? Ugh, that only works properly on Internet Explorer. My iPhone browser would support HTML5 too. Can't wait till HTML5 rules the web.
It's been a while since I went to this train station. I think the last time I went here was to pick up @acesofthesky when he came to Jakarta to play. I never realized how much of a nice place it is. So I decided to take a picture of it and around Monas. I'm picking up my mom. She worked at Cirebon (where @acesofthesky lives at) and her train is scheduled to arrive at 6.00 PM. Cirebon Express. That's the same train as what @acesofthesky rode. So of course, since I knew that train will definitely get delayed.
And it got delayed. For 45 minutes. I watched some train come and go, and I noticed most of them are Japanese trains and I don't know why didn't they bother to change the displays in the train. I can still read 山手線 (Yamanote Line) in one of the trains. Either they're too lazy to bother with it or they don't know how to change the displays. Well, they can just take it off the train though. Well, in any case, it's there. There are also electronic faregates like the ones in Singapore, but no-one used it because the e-ticketing system is not in place, as far as I know. There are only a few stations in Jakarta anyways so riding a train to travel in the city is impractical. Most of the trains are intercity trains. So here you go, some pictures I took there while waiting for my mom's train. One interesting thing to note is I saw a lot of BlackBerry phones. It just seems out of place; poor people waiting for their trains are BlackBerry Messengering their friends. And yes, trains are associated with poor people over here, because normal people would take planes and go to the airport instead. Well, except when there's no airport in the destination city (like in Cirebon), but I saw that guy with the BlackBerry phone entering a train to Surabaya. Normal people would take a plane if they want to go to Surabaya. And AirAsia Indonesia made the tickets so cheap that even poor people are taking the planes now. I guess it's possible that he rode the train for entertainment... Heh, I shouldn't talk about other people like that. Anyways, here are some pictures I took over there with my iPhone.
