Projects

I have admit I quite lazy about doing things. Mostly I like spent my sparetime with passive thing with watching series/film or reading books. But I'm running some projects pararell in my active sparetime, and I'd like to tell some words about them in my blog. I put it them different categories.

Boardgame

Because my whole family is a gameboad geek nest, it's almost obvious I'll try to do something like that. In my previous post I wrote about the bedtime tales spiced with a small portion roll/role-playing. I came to the conclusion I'd like to improve it further, with creating a map, with random events and 'children-friendly monsters'. It's a little bit funny, because many bad, horrible thing happens in the tales. There you can find hereos and the enemies of the heroes (villains, monsters, other bad things). There are many confrontations which have to solve with force or use of the cunningness of the mind. I'd like to implements these items and factors to my boardgame. I'm in the very beginning of it, but I have many good ideas and concepts.

Translation

At the past I translated many computer games from English to Hungarian. Translating things to my native language is not so hard thing, it only depends on the understanding of the original texts, and write them on Hungarian. Usually I have freedom enough to from the things as I'd like. There were some non-official translation (I did them voluntary without any payment from anyone) where I didn't translate everything words by words, and I Hungarising the texts not translating.

My last official translation was the Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, which is an Diablo-clone. The creators of the game were German, which means the original texts were German too. First the developers translated the texts to English then sent them to the translators of many countries to modify the texts to their language such as French, Italian or Hungarian. It was interesting because we got the original German texts are well, and we saw there are many difference compared to the English. So we had some hard, cumbersome time with the translation of the game, but the final product was really great. At the end my colleauge and me translated nearly 1 million English words to Hungarian.

Unfortunatelly the Hungarian distributor didn't agreed the term of distributing of the expansion of the game, so you can't buy Sacred 2 Ice & Blood and Gold from the local shops. We didn't get any support from the developers of th troubled company. We had offered them to translated the texts of the expansion for free, if we got translation tools but they refused.

But a German team wanted to pimp the game for the fans. They added to the game new monsters, quests and texts which means they've got a translation tool. Fortunatelly I got it from them, so I can export and import the texts I like. Now I'm at the 2/3 of the texts of the expansion. I hope I'll finish it this year.

(Here you can find my 'translategraphy')

Novell

I deceided to participate a novell-writing contest. I have to write a short novell with 5000-20000 words in fantasy or sci-fi genre, but in western style (like Firefly). In the story itself must be a sheriff, a priest and a dynamite. I almost finished with it, but there lot things to do with it. BUT, I knowing myself well enough to rewrite the story every time, when I look into it.

Bedtime tales... in my own way

I usually tell bedtime tales to my children. I used to read something from a book, or projecting something from my childhood collection, I had many classic tales from famous writters as Grimm, Andersen or from the Hungarian folklore. We - my wife and me - projected them the slide show with my nearly 20-years-old Russian projektor. But found something new...

I have started to tell them the classi bedtime stories in my own way, which means I spiced the tales with rolling dice. When I'm telling them the story of Little Red Ridding Hood, there is the possibility the little girl found another animal in the woods. And after a successful diceroll she miss the encounter, or it turns out the another animal is just a rabbit (not from the movie Monthy Python and the Holy Grail.) :)

The kids enjoy very much these kind of tales. They like rolling the colorful dice. I have many tiny 6-sided dice in many colors, as I have d4, d10, d12, d20 and d100 as well. So I have many opportunity to change the way of the tales. I think - in that way - the line is very thin between the roll-playing game and role-playing game. After I have finished a tale I mix the dice, and suggest to my daughter and son to collect together the same colors as Cinderella did in the tale. 

Unfortunately my wife doesn't like these kind of games, and kids are too young for a complex game yet, but maybe about 2-3 years later they will play with me. Maybe not Dungeons & Dragons or M.A.G.U.S, but something similar rpg.

A little bit strange, but my wife loves my stories which I tell the children. I'm trying to not put freaky or too bad things to the tales. But I think many tales of Grimm and the Hungarian folklore are simple horror stories. They can frighten the children.

What do you think about the horror content of the classic bedtime tales? What do you think about my 'new-style-bedtime-storytelling'?