Tokimeki Memorial 3 v0.14: room for your name

Patch v0.14 is built. The last TM3 post ended with name entry on the to-do list, so most of this one is about your name.

Room for your name

At the start of a new game, TM3 asks for your family name, your given name, and a nickname for the girls to call you. The original game allows four characters for the family name, three for the given name, and five for the nickname. In Japanese, that's plenty: Hayakawa is just two kanji. English names run out of room fast.

You now get 8 letters for each name and 6 for the nickname. The save file still has the same amount of space for names, so Claude and I changed how they're stored: an English letter takes half the room of a Japanese character, so twice as many fit. Then every spot in the game's code that reads a name had to be found and pointed at its new place.

Kana and kanji still work, and each one counts as two letters.

Your name in the story

Your name turns up in two places during scenes: the speaker label at the top of the text box, and inside lines whenever someone says it. The text box only knew how to draw Japanese characters, so an English name came out blank or cut off. Both places show it properly now, along with the confirmation screen.

The story text also got sharper. The game draws every letter as a little tile sized for a Japanese character, and English letters sit much closer together, so each tile overlapped the letters beside it and left dark nicks in them. Each English letter's tile is now trimmed to the letter's own width.

The story itself is still mostly Japanese. The opening scenes have draft English, which is what I test with.

Also since v0.10

• The buttons and labels on the name entry screen
• The Profile List name plates
• The club recruitment posters
• The Tokimeki Graph and the girls' monologue titles
• The site names and bookmarks in the in-game web browser
• The hobby labels

With those, every menu label that was drawn as a picture is in English. Most of these screens open up later in the game, so I'll get a proper look at them in play once a save of mine gets that far.

How far along

• Menus and screens: nearly all English. Two pictures with text are still waiting, plus the leftovers below.
• Story and choices: about 2% has a first draft, and none of it is final yet. TM3 has over a million characters of Japanese text, so this is the long part.

What's next

A few bits around name entry are still Japanese: the birthday label on the confirmation screen, the 月 and 日 on the birthday picker, and the voice name screen that comes right after. Then it's on to the story script.

There's no patch to download yet; when there is, it'll be announced here on Second Button.