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Looking back at Beggar Prince
Posted on March 30th, 2009 8 commentsI always wanted to make video games when I was a kid. My friends and I designed RPG board games using notebooks and graphing tools. I learned more about programming in high school, and mistakenly selected it as my first university major.
A major in programming does nothing to prepare you for making games, and nearly every graduate dreaming of being paid to make games never gets to.
It was by sheer accident I ended up being called to work on a game—and I’m sure that chaps the collective asses of many would-have-been-colleagues.
In 2003, Brandon Cobb of Super Fighter Team ran across my work. He sent me an email to tell me his company was working on a C&E Soft game called Beggar Prince and needed a programmer to develop the tools to handle the text side of translation.
By that time, I had been working on game translations for seven years, so I accepted.
The game would be more accurately titled The New Prince & the Pauper, given the Chinese title is 新乞丐王子, a common Chinese rendering of Mark Twain’s famous novel, but that wasn’t the trademark his company had registered. Ah well.
Either way, it was better than C&E’s official name for the game: Myth on Light.
My job was to write a text inserter and an extractor to handle the script. Luckily, the Sega Megadrive tends to use 32-bit addressing, which made finding text locations quite easy. I wrote tools to use the script as a lookup point to track down code blocks that called string addresses. I also wrote some simple tools to work with the graphics.
There were a lot of difficulties with the pointer lookup method, and things got more and more complicated toward the end when English text flowed beyond the limited buffer to overwrite program code.
The English translation was handled by Yu “Techmaster” Chen-shih, a Chinese guy from Taiwan who lives in Ontario, Canada. He did a good job on the script, but Cobb had to do a lot of rewriting. Like most RPGs from that era, especially the Japanese versions of Final Fantasy, it had a fantastically flat, terrible script.
If you ever complained about games being rewritten for US release, count your blessings that you cannot read Japanese. “Woolseyisms” were the only things making Square’s later Super Nintendo releases readable.
Beggar Prince took two years to pull together, and it was released for sale in early 2006. It was the first official Sega Megadrive release in the US and Europe in at least six years, and completely sold out three runs of cartridges, with the final cartridge sold on June 19, 2007.
The second run of cartridges fixes a bug which causes the Save Game option to fail on Sega Nomad units.
If you own the game and finish it, watch for my name in the credits. I appear as the first name in the “Programming” section.
I made this!
This post replaces a section which used to be filed under my professional work.
8 responses to “Looking back at Beggar Prince”
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Wow so cool.. I’m jealous now!
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oh yes, and I love that little blue bird. Makes me think of the BigBuckBunny bird actually, his cousin?
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No clue. At first I was worried that it was pilfered from Twitter, but after some searching on Google Images it doesn’t look like it.
The bird came as an alternate in the Gears template, but I thought it really fit for how I used it. Decided to just leave him.
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Hmm, that’s pretty cool, Derrick. Quite a feather in your cap to have…
I admit I too once had that dream, even hoping I’d one day perhaps find myself working for Squaresoft or something (yes, I know, fanboy foolishness of years past), but given all the programming that was required even just for something like a translation project, I’d say it’s WAY more than what I would ever wanna have to deal with at a paying job on a daily basis… No thanks.
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I’m not sure how hard it is to get a job at Squaresoft, but I did get an interview with their local branch. I bailed because after thinking about it; working for a Japanese company (endless, unpaid OT) would not be in the interests of my health.
And this, I am sure, will just have ROM hackers foaming at the mouth, but the resume I sent them–which got me a call back–included all my fun breaches of the Berne convention and actually listed a few Square games among my projects.
So yeah. There’s really no reason to be worried about saying you work on that kind of stuff. Even when applying to a game company.
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Next Gen Cowboy May 9th, 2009 at 04:41
May I ask which was more difficult, the translations you worked on as a hobby, or the this one, in which you were being paid for your time as a professional?
Or perhaps, were there key differences between the way you handled “projects”, and the way you handled the job.
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Next Gen Cowboy:
This one was arguably more frustrating, because my control was limited to one area. The hardest part was the months before release, when bugs were suddenly discovered in hacks I had made two years prior. Going back to fix those was tough.
The game itself was quite easy to work on.
After surviving Der Langrisser, “hard” has taken on a whole new meaning.
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those “woolseyisms” are what ruined the script in the first place. not sure what youre talking about, the original japanese scripts tend to be a lot more dramatic and interesting. i only ever play rpg’s in japanese anymore
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The author
Derrick Sobodash is a copy editor and freelance journalist covering culture, history and technology in Beijing, China.
Originally from the Detroit, Michigan area, he has worked at weekly and daily community newspapers as reporter and copy editor in both the US and China, and has covered niche topics for nationally published magazines.
His photographs have been used in Schmapp!! and are often used in NowPublic stories related to Beijing life.
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