Hello Survival Typists,
We know it’s been a while since our last update, but we wanted to make sure you know we are hard at work and some of the stuff we’re working on right now.
We will have a much deeper dive into the mechanics of the game in a future post, but for now we wanna talk about languages! That’s right, we’re adding more languages to Glyphica so that more survival typists can enjoy the game!
Japanese
First off, a huge shout out to our Japanese fans. We’re really blown away by how well you have responded to the game, and shown us the possibilities of Glyphica in other languages. We added Japanese localization as kind of an experiment, and then when it took off we were in that weird position of “oh wow, they really like it! Oh no. Now we actually have to do a good job at it.”
With the success of Japanese in mind, we started thinking about other languages to localize to. You’d think Simplified Chinese would be the first target both because of reach and because XM actually speaks and reads Chinese, but there was a little problem…
Language Limitations
The game was designed with the English language and Roman alphabet in mind, and some key mechanics were defined by this. For example, our typical wordlist is 1300 words, but it’s not as simple as downloading a random wordlist from the internet because we use word length as a balancing tool. So for our wordlists we have 5 sets of words from 4 characters up to 8 characters in length.
Some of our weapons are also triggered by words starting out with a specific letter. Again this is for balancing purposes. So for each set of say, 4 letter words, we need at least 10 words for each letter.
That seems reasonable when you have a phonetic alphabet of 26 letters, but how does that work when you have Chinese characters that, even in the simplified form, use around 8000 characters?
Japanese writing is equally or even more complicated, with its three sets of characters ranging from kanji descended from Chinese characters up to hiragana and katakana which are alphabets used for japanese words and foreign loan words. Our saving grace with Japanese is that because of their complicated writing system, japanese keyboard use has adapted such that entering romaji (roman alphabet letters) which are then converted to japanese syllabary is a common enough thing that we could piggy back on it. This led to our current form of the Japanese version of the game which uses romaji input.
It’s not perfect, as on top of having three systems of writing, there are different methods of writing Japanese in romaji, and most Japanese games that focus on typing adapt to how the player types. This was far too difficult for us to implement in the game so we have had to resort to choosing what the most popular method is, based on consultation with our Japanese players.
While China has pinyin script and Korea has its own alphabet, culturally neither of them uses the Latin Alphabet in a similar way as Japanese. We have experimented with Korean and when we brought the game to BICFest it seemed to be ok, so we’ll investigate that further.
We’re also somewhat limited by our font, which doesn’t have cyrillic, thai, or vietnamese versions of its characters, so languages that use those letters are off our list for the immediate future.
Our Target Languages
That leaves us with a limited set of languages to choose from, which use the Roman alphabet. In the end, we’ve decided on supporting the following languages for our Early Access launch:
- English
- Spanish
- LatAm Spanish
- Portuguese
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Italian
- German
- French
- Turkish
- Japanese
- Polish
- Indonesian
These represent both the easiest languages we could find, those with what we feel are a significant enough market to do localization, and in the case of Indonesian, we're making a bet into a Southeast Asian language that is supported by Steam.
In line with some other marketing efforts, I've been making some ASMR/Gameplay videos for Glyphica. And since I am learning spanish and have a Spanish keyboard lying around, I thought I would make another video showing off the Spanish localization right now, made by our localizer Valentín Sánchez.
Our demo now has Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Turkish in the demo so if you speak those languages please let us know how it is!