Following our question about how Carpe Fulgur got started, we asked co-founder, Andrew Dice, about their relationship with their first development partner, EasyGameStation, the doujin team behind Recettear.
“Well, because [Carpe co-founder] Robin has essentially native-speaker Japanese proficiency, communicating our intent was easy,” Andrew told Siliconera. “Convincing EGS that a bunch of complete nobodies without any real, demonstrable previous experience in the industry were the best guys to bring Recettear to the world? That was hard.”
EasyGameStation were actually looking for an English-language publishing partner for Recettear at the time. They had just declined to have a previous partner of theirs take the project on, , so Carpe Fulgur’s negotiations were well-timed. Even so, the process to convince EGS that Carpe had the necessary skill to give the game a quality localization took months.
Now, the two parties share a collaborative working relationship and work closely on Recettear’s localization. We asked Andrew if there were plans to take this further. For Carpe Fulgur to, perhaps, act as conduit for EasyGameStation to communicate with their overseas fans, which is something not a lot of doujin developers get to do.
“Well, strictly speaking our contract only covers the localization of Recettear,” he replied.
“We have been trying to make sure that EGS understands how things are working on this side if the pond, though, and we even contacted them recently so they could help out someone who wanted to cosplay as Recettear’s main character,” he continued. “If EGS wants to communicate more with their Western fans in the future, we’re perfectly willing to help out!”
Our ongoing interview with Carpe Fulgur is currently centered around the localization of Recettear. CP have graciously agreed to take on reader questions, so if there’s anything you’re curious about, this is the post to ask in, and we’ll include the best questions in our discussion.
