The Tortoise, The Hare and The Wordfoxes

Once upon a time, there were two game developers, a tortoise and a hare. The hare loved speed, action and dynamism. She did quickfire brainstorming sessions with her team, wrote pages upon pages of lore daily and even asked her digital assistant, CatGPT, to summarize meetings that went on too long. The tortoise, conversely, was a methodical writer. She could spend hours on the same page of dialogue, knew the exact orthography rules for a semicolon, and never delivered a task earlier than the established deadline, preferring to use every bit of time for polish.

Their hired team of localization foxes had stern words for them both.

In this fabulistic representation of a game development pipeline, we see two extremes of time management that, funnily enough, can cause similar problems to teams downpipe (in this case, the localization team): bottlenecks, crunch and (gasp!) excessive spending.

The hare, a fast-paced, high-throughput producer, always has plenty of material for the teams to work with, and, as usually pay-per-volume professionals, we don't give an HR rat's ass how much of the text we work on gets used in the final version. You quote us and give us a deadline, we give you our rates, and we make a deal or we don't. More words? More money for us. Half of the workload is the same text from the previous batch that got revised and changed? No fur off our tails.

That is, until you're a month away from release and all the hastily produced text on the fifth round of reworks has turned into a blob of urgent work you're clutching at our paws and pleading we sort out on time. That's when we start to take issue with the writing team's efficiency. It’s no fun to have to rush a delivery or overwork ourselves because a “forgotten” batch of text turned up at the eleventh hour.

Not to say frequent batches and an active writing team is entirely a bad thing, of course. Starting early and working frequently gives us ample opportunity to get used to the style and terminology of a project, as well as to catch any potential mistranslations and misinterpretations of the content. Gods know you wackos send us some headscratchers sometimes!

Obviously, then, the tortoise must have the better approach? Well-polished text that doesn’t get reworked only needs to be translated once, and the tortoise eventually won the race in the original fable I’m drawing inspiration from. Right?

The thing is, when Aesop wrote that fable, people weren’t yet concerned with a different kind of race involving animals: the rat race. The Ugly Sonic controversy and “We got x before GTA 6” memes aside, when the higher-ups decide something is coming out on a given day, it’s coming out that day, damn the consequences.

And, unless a language is added post-gold, we’re just as constrained by that release date as the writing team. Having polished text to work on is awesome, it makes us want to deliver a translation that’s just as polished. Which we usually cannot do if we’re riding the razor’s edge of deadlines. When you smack us with a dense game bible, highly adaptable locale names and unreadable metadata (<gag!>), we’re going to need a while to parse through that before we can deliver something on the same level.

If you’re two-and-a-half-years into your three-year development cycle by that point, we’ll have an awful lot of catching up to do, and it’s not going to be a fun time for anyone.

Like the Buddha taught us, the middle path between two extremes tends to be the most fruitful one. We might be in different parts of the world, working for different companies and on different tasks, but it’s important to realize we are still. Working. Together. Take a holistic view of your project and consider the needs of those who will come afterwards. We prosper the most when everyone prospers.

We creatives are usually at the whims of executives (who are portrayed as mosquitoes in this tale, by the way. For no particular reason.), so the only thing we can do is our best with the time we're given. Know what to expect and demand from the teams downpipe, have a good curation framework and, most of all, understand your work has meaning beyond being something to be delivered on time.

Being community-minded and fighting alienation in our working spaces not only saves us from crunch and your projects from shoddy work, it also saves money. Hopefully your own. Go, indies.