It's been 4 years already?!

Yep, that's right! It's been four years since the Tingle's Balloon Trip translation project began! I'd like to take a little time to put things in perspective and explain what happened over those 4 years, and then I'll deliver that progress update that I promised in my last post.

I started working on this on July 31st, 2012. At that time it was all about laying the technical groundwork for the translation. Around January 2013, yellow (known as ytdash here) joined me and we made a lot of progress with the graphics and text. 

This went on for about a year, with no actual translation being done, save for the intro and title screen. However, due to severe technical limitations, the text had to be condensed and the title couldn't be inserted into the game. (Some may recall this from the video posted a few years ago by ytdash).
This changed in February 2014, when DarthNemesis, a member of GBAtemp, coded us a text editor for the game. This program made editing the text as simple as editing a .txt file. Shortly after DaVince joined and translated the first page of the game. 

Progress was slow over the next few months, as both me and DaVince were busy frequently and couldn't work on the translation as often. This changed later that year in August, when waldrumpus joined. Having written a walkthrough for the game before, waldrumpus was very familiar with the game and quickly began to make progress in the script. 

Throughout 2015, I was able to figure out the games graphics system, and could now edit ingame graphics. So, me and ytdash began to work on translating the graphical text in the game. 

Finally, in July 2016, zell0s joined us as a graphics editor, helping to speed up the progress on that side even more.

So that's it, it's certainly been a while. But how much longer will it be?

I'm happy to announce that the patch is projected to be released within the next year! The script is nearing completion, and the graphics should be done in the next few months. Then there's just proofreading and beta testing, (which may or may not be public, we haven't decided). 

That's just an estimate though, please don't be disappointed if it takes a little longer ;)

Until next time!