Lily's Day Off

Lily's Day Off is a visual novel which puts the player in the position of the main character. You will play through the game and make choices as you interact with Lily, the famous pop idol sensation.

You just ran into the famous idol, Lilypad Lily! Will you help her or hurt her?

You wake up on the side of the road. Upon opening your eyes, you find yourself looking directly at the famous pop idol, Lilypad Lily! But something is amiss. With each decision you make, personalities, histories, and outcomes take dramatic and wild turns. Will you help Lily find her home? Maybe you'll become her stalker? (Or perhaps she will become yours!?)

Try to uncover the true ending to figure out what is behind all of these strange happenings.

The game features 16 endings in total, each with a completely different theme, 6 different outfits for Lily to wear, replayable endings and music through the menu, and secret menus to be found!

I’d like to preface this section with a bit of trivia: Although I've never published games under my own name on major storefronts, I scrapped multiple projects I had spent months on simply because I felt they weren't good enough to release. In retrospect, a big part of that was my fear of criticism. Things are different now. I've come to realize that it's impossible to please everyone all the time. I now accept that not everyone will agree with what I do; instead of letting fear hold me back, I keep an open mind and treat criticism as an opportunity for personal growth. While adopting this mindset certainly isn't easy, it's something I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone.

Let’s get back to the main topic. If I remember correctly, I stumbled upon Lily's Day Off on the mobile app store by chance. The screenshots caught my eye, so I decided to give it a try. That experience left me wanting more from the developer and led me to check out their other work, which was just Lily's Night Off at the time.

I'm really glad to have worked on this project just as I did with Lily's Night Off. Since this was an earlier title, it naturally had a few technical quirks here and there. I did my best to help the developer diagnose what was causing them and proposed fixes wherever possible.

For Lily's Night Off, the developer already has a practical localization workflow: he shares a spreadsheet with translators, and once filled out, the game can directly parse and use the translated text without extra hassle. It’s an intuitive and efficient way to handle localization. However, when I moved on to Lily's Day Off, I discovered that no such system existed, meaning I initially had to translate the game by directly modifying parts of its source code.

While that wasn't an issue for me, it would definitely pose a barrier for non-technical translators. To solve this, I spent some time building a small tool that mimics the workflow from Lily's Night Off. This tool first parses the Lily's Day Off source code into a clean, structured spreadsheet for translators to work in. Once translation is complete, the tool imports the spreadsheet and converts it back into game-ready source code. My goal was to eliminate the need for future translators to touch the codebase directly, allowing them to focus entirely on the script in a familiar format.

I shared the full source code and documentation for this tool with the developer, and I hope it proves useful for future localization efforts.

With Lily's Day Off now complete, the personal goal I originally set out to achieve (translating both games in the series into Turkish) is officially fulfilled.