Anthony Fitzgerald will present an overview of game localization, and explain how it differs from software localization. He will bring you along on a journey from early development through final submission, highlighting all the fun in-between. He will also explain how to avoid much of the pain. "No pain, no gain" does not fit well in his book: games are fun to play and should be fun to work on too!

Anthony will describe what areas need to be analyzed early on in the project in order to have a successful, high quality, fully localized game, released on-schedule and without those crazy "crunch mode" weeks. (Well OK, one final crunch mode week is allowed.) Some of the topics that will be discussed include:

• cultural/linguistic considerations
  
• legal issues
  
• console manufacturer requirements
  
• hardware
  
• bug reporting
  
• UI and layout
  
• hotkey mapping
  
• Unicode and codepages
  
• text Input
  
• fonts
  
• cut scenes
  
• lip synching
  
• audio script and in-game subtitles
  
• PAL/NTSC/HD
  
• multi-player testing
  
• DLC (downloadable content)
  
• installers and patches
  
• copy protection
  
• and more...

Please join us for an interesting look into the world of Game Localization! Or "Games Localisation", if you prefer.

Anthony Fitzgerald holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Dublin City University. He is Manager, Engineering, Tools and Process at SimulTrans, L.L.C. and based in Ireland. Anthony has spent four years managing the SimulTrans Localization Engineering and CAT Teams from the Irish production office in Dublin. Previously, Anthony worked for Vivendi Universal Games for nine years, as a multimedia engineer and localization team lead. During these years, Anthony was also a localization consultant to Game Development companies based in the US, assisting developers on site during their localization planning stages. He has worked on many diverse titles, ranging from cute educational kids games such as the Knowledge Adventure reading and math titles, to hard core FPS (first-person shooter) games such as Half Life, Counter Strike and F.E.A.R.

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