Hello Researchers!
This Devlog is about adding localisation to Research Story - it's a little more technical than our usual posts!
At this time, we can only confirm that we'll be localising the game to Simplified Chinese - we'll look into other languages in the future! Thank you to our Chinese fans who have been interested in the game and waiting for CN, it's on the way!~ ❤️
Localising the game - properly! 📝✨
Together with Electronic Sheep Games, who have been working on the localisation of the texts itself, I have been working on the implementation of the localised texts into the game. While our Demo has localisation, I wanted to do things in a better way for our Early Access version. This is so that when we plan to have more languages in the future, it wouldn't take as long to do so.
With over 5000 rows of texts in Excel and over 45,000 words (and counting), it's no simple task! This is a snippet of how Kipp's Dialogue data looks like:
It has a unique ID (state), English texts for normal dialogue and options, and the translated columns.
All other texts, from a single word in a UI such as "Research" to Item Names and Descriptions all require similar treatment.
I had to make sure that each line was read from the Excel Sheets instead of being written directly into the game engine itself. If there were any in the engine, I had to move it to the Excel Sheet and give it a unique ID to reference in the code. Even though a large part of the game was already written in the Excel, I still spent maybe 4-5 full days (8 hr+) replacing the remaining written texts with the unique IDs. I did so much Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and other Ctrl Shortcuts that my left pinkie started hurting even after a night's sleep 😰😰 Glad to say it's all good now, and most of the intense copy-pasting due to my prior lack of foresight have been completed 🎉🎉
Being a Chinese Singaporean, I feel particularly excited when seeing CN in the game! Since I can read a bit of Chinese, it feels like I'm playing RS for the first time again - the texts are so refreshing. And yes, I was influenced by my Chinese roots when creating the General Store and its characters! ❤️
Other Visuals 🔍
Other than the game title, there aren't many texts in-game that was drawn as an image (thankfully!). The Darts Minigame is one part of the game that has drawn texts, which would require appropriate localisation too:
Keeping optimisation in mind 💭
In our Demo, there were some optimisation issues where adding CN led to longer loading times when changing the language and when returning to the main menu. This was mainly due to the loading of fonts, and I've prevented those issues from happening in our Early Access build!
What's Next 📝
We'll be doing QA for the localised build before offering it in one of the future updates. Again, shoutout to Electronic Sheep who has been doing great work!! We're excited to share the update with you when it's ready.
I'll be going back to bugfixes + ramping up the next part of content updates, which I need some time to think about!
Hope everyone's been enjoying the v0.3 update so far!
Miki