Forget Spreadsheets, I Wrote My Own Visual Game Script Editor

Summary

People who have been following me on social media may know that, for the past few years, I’ve been working on a fan translation project for a Sega Saturn RPG called Magic School Lunar. 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. The traditional approach, in both professional localizations and fan translations, involves working in a spreadsheet with access to the original language and translation side by side. (In fan translations, it’s not even rare to work by editing raw text files.) It’s not the most convenient or fun to be writing entirely within a spreadsheet though, especially when there are technical constaints to be thinking about. 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. My work is based around CSV files that contain the script and metadata for every line of text in the game, and between the script itself and metadata such as what character is speaking, I had in principle enough data to mock up what any given line should look like in-game. My basic goal was to reproduce a spreadsheet-like workflow but with added screenshot visualization that updates in realtime as I work. Now that I’ve had the chance to try it out, I can say it definitely works just as well as I’d hoped. It’s much easier to catch mistakes should I find myself overflowing lines, and it’s very useful for making aesthetic decisions about text formatting too. I decided to write a GUI app rather than a web app, for no particular reason other than because I happen to like desktop apps, and ended up using Tk as the...