It’s Spring! The weather is finally thawing everything out, and with the warmth comes flowers and new beginnings. Our team is growing along with everything else! With our story finalized, we decided to enlist the help of a copy editor, Susan, to review our script and catch any grammatical issues. We also returned to Martii and OnionCuttingNinja for assistance with the German and French sections. We are incredibly grateful for their skills, which make our characters speak like the natives they are.
One of the joys of writing is having your characters do more than you yourself can. While ‘write what you know’ can be a useful piece of advice, there is also something to be said for writing outside of your comfort zone. One of the great pleasures in writing ‘Love and Country’ has been researching and learning new things about history and culture. Working with native speakers has helped improve our own middling language skills and taught us about some of the nuances of French and German culture in the process.
Writing in multiple languages wasn’t a choice we made only for the sake of learning, though. Our MC, Lillian, is a polyglot. It’s one of the reasons she was recruited as a spy in the first place. Language also provided us with some valuable story-telling tools: there is a dramatic tension when a character doesn’t understand the language being spoken by everyone else; there is an emotional impact when a character switches from a second language to their mother tongue in order to better express themselves.
Once we realized the impact of language, the question became how to present it to the player, which is a question of UI design and user experience. We played around with a few different solutions but ultimately decided to italicize non-English speech and follow it with the English translation after in parenthesis–almost like a subtitle. This allowed us to rely on the standard Ren’py dialogue box without much additional coding.
While we are proud to consider ourselves self-taught in the art of visual novel development, it’d be dumb not to invite help, of which we’re relieved to have plenty. Although Guhuhu is a two woman shop, we do bring in collaborators and our smart, beautiful friends to help us keep making things even better. You cannot create in a vacuum and expect perfection; perspective is key! So thank you to any and everyone who have provided feedback and ideas–we couldn’t have come this far without you <3
Well, that’s all for now, Lieblings! We will keep posting updates and art in progress on Twitter and Instagram, so don’t forget to follow us there. And keep letting us know what you think as you play–we love comments!
Love,
Guhuhu Games