Fan Made Stuff

This is where I share some of my free time works inspired by the video games in my collection. They're mostly the things that I made for my own use for fun and then forgot in time. A little of this, a little of that, but mostly Age of Empires stuff :) Since these are all "inspired" works, they are on display here with the respect to the creators of the original versions and their copyright owners.

Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome - Tech Tree

Description:
Legends never get old! AoE 1 is a classic that I enjoy playing even today. If you own a retail Age of Empires box, no doubt you remember the Tech Tree foldout. Sadly they've never made an updated one for The Rise of Rome expansion pack -- but I have.

Completion:
100%

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Age of Empires: ECG - Boxes Retouch

Description:
Age of Empires has a nice collectible card game made in early 2000s, and it's out of print ever since. All available cards can be seen in my Collections / AoE: ECG section. While the cards themselves are already quite rare to find nowadays, their boxes are even more. I managed to acquire them over the years with great difficulty. As most of these boxes were quite damaged when I got, I decided to resurrect them on computer. First I dissolved the glued areas, repaired the faulty parts, straightened, and then scanned and recreated from scratch.

Completion:
100%

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Age of Empires 3 - Ship Model Retouch

Description:
This is a very rare Age of Empires 3 cardboard ship model (Counter Display) from around 2005. I don't know anything about it except that it was available only in the USA and was only given to some game shops as a promotion with the release of Age of Empires 3. I've seen its images on internet a couple of times only, and come across on ebay just once by chance. It was half assembled when I bought it, and it arrived unfortunately quite crushed, a bit misfolded and teared. I first disassembled it, dissolved the glued areas, repaired the faulty parts, straightened, and then scanned and retouched. Original model can be seen in my Collections / Merchandise section.

Completion:
100%

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Age of Empires 1 & 2 Turkish Translation

Description:
This is a hobby project that I've put more time and devotion than all others. I translated the entire Age of Empires, Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome, Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings, and Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors one by one into Turkish. These first four games were not provided with official Turkish language support by Microsoft, and the few unofficial fan-made language patches I've come across since the early 2000s were all unfortunately too amateur and incomplete. Based on this fact, my love for AoE series, and the experience I gained from my previous book, computer software, and mini-video game translations, I started translating the very first Age of Empires game.

If you're experienced and if you enjoy what you do, translation itself is not that difficult. Parsing, editing, and recompiling the game files is not a big deal either, if you know the technical methods. But keeping the integrity between scenarios, preserving the obsolete theme of the language, maintaining the accuracy of historical information provided, and blending them all into a neat game translation that conforms to the current grammar rules was tricky. Adding the Turkish characters into default fonts, editing some ingame textures, packing everything into a single executable installer file etc. were bonusses.

Another proud feature of this project is that I have translated all 4 games "completely" that includes buttons, unit/technology names, help texts, historical infos, campaign prologue/epilogues, scenario instructions, taunts and messages, map editor, credits and more. For those wondering how big translation project this could be, here's the total number of words translated per game and approximately corresponding number of book pages:

Age of Empires, 30.000+ words (67 pages)

Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome, 12.000+ words (27 pages)

Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings, 66.000+ words (147 pages)

Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors, 32.000+ words (71 pages)

Completion:
100%

Images:

Fan Made Stuff

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