|
||||||||||||||
Script Editing Tool Aids Magic School Lunar Fan TranslationThe programmer behind the Magic School Lunar fan translation patch released a meaty blog post Friday giving fans of the Lunar franchise , and Saturn RPGs, a look behind the scenes at a helpful script editing tool. Misty (aka Ms. Tea) posted about the blog post on Bluesky: New blog post! I threw together a little graphical script editing utility for the Magic School Lunar fan translation, which lets me visualize every line of dialogue as I write it in order to let me see how it'll look in-game.www.mistys-internet.website/blog/blog/20… — Misty De Méo (@cdrom.ca) 2026-03-28T00:57:12.140ZMagic School Lunar is Misty’s localized name for Mahou Gakuen Lunar ! , a 2D RPG released on the Saturn in Japan in November 1997. The project has been a nearly decade-long labor of love for Misty. When SHIRO! reported on the patch last summer , she had playtested approximately two-thirds of the game, but her latest blog post — “Forget Spreadsheets…” — hints that progress has been made since then. The blog post, while ostensibly about new tooling Misty developed to stave off the doldrums of script-editing, mentions that the project is nearing the finish line: “With technical and initial playtesting work wrapping up, that project is finally entering the late phases and I’m now reaching a point where I’m going to be doing a lot of rewriting of the English text.” Misty then lamented that spreadsheets are less-than-fun working environments, especially given the textbox constraints of Mahou Gakuen Lunar! “This game has a strict character limit per line and a maximum of three lines per text box, and I found myself wishing for a nice way to visualize how text will look in-game so I can ensure what I’m writing will actually look good in-game. A spreadsheet just wasn’t going to cut it. But then, of course, I realized… I am a programmer. Why don’t I just write my own? So I did.” It’s easier to catch mistakes and make aesthetic choices about text formatting using the script editor, Misty said. For more details on Misty’s “Visual Game Script Editor” — the source code for which is shared here — go read through her blog . In late 1997, Game Arts gave Japanese Saturn fans Mahou Gakuen Lunar!, the third entry — or first spin-off — in the Lunar franchise. Mahou Gakuen Lunar! is a significantly enhanced remake of Lunar: Sanpo-suru Gakuen , which released on the Game Gear exclusively in Japan the previous year. A fan translation of the Game Gear version is available here from Aeon Genesis . While Working Designs published the first two entries for the series — Lunar: The Silver Star (1993) and Lunar: Eternal Blue (1995) — on the Sega CD to critical and relative commercial success, the franchise would be Japan-locked until the PlayStation port of Lunar Silver Star Story (localized as Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete despite lacking the enhancements of the Saturn MPEG version of the same name) released in 1999. This left all three of the Lunar titles on Sega Saturn inaccessible to English-speaking audiences. That was until SegaXtreme community members, led by Mr Conan and TrekkiesUnite118 , stepped in to create English patches for Lunar Silver Star Story ( standard patch and Silver Star Story Complete MPEG enhanced patch ) and Lunar 2 Eternal Blue ( patch here ). Itching for more SHIRO! coverage on Mahou Gakuen Lunar! ? Check out Peter Malek’s thoughts on the game in this #BestOfSaturn .
|
||||||||||||||