Dev blog #10

I've been really busy this past month getting the demo ready for the public. It was mostly polishing and fixing small issues here and there, as well as preparing some marketing material. I'm making a demo available for this game for the simple reason that I think players should be given the chance to try out a game before they buy it. If you don't like the demo, you probably won't like the full game either. And that's totally okay! It will also help me gather more feedback and shape the game into a better version of itself.

Now about localization. Work is currently ongoing to translate the game into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Turkish and Simplified Chinese with the help of professional translators! I'd like to add all the languages of the world of course, but that's gonna be another time. I do plan on opening up the translation of the game to everyone via a public google spreadsheet some time later this year and just have you guys, the community, add your own languages.

In the meantime, I've begun refactoring some of the code to support multiple languages. This is a bit time consuming because there are a few places in the UI where the size of UI elements were made to fix perfectly with a certain amount of characters in a given text. The problem is that some languages take more words to convey the same message. For example 'Wishlist!' which is a very short call to action verb, in French it would be something like 'Ajoutez à la liste de souhaits!'. That's a lot more characters to fit in a small place corner of the screen.

I've also been gathering all the player visible text and dumped in a Google Spreadsheet and used Google Translate to one click translate the whole game in French. I start with French because as a Canadian I speak French pretty well. Of course the translation isn't very good, so I will eventually either translate it myself or get some humans to do it. For now, I'm using this translation to prepare the code and make sure I didn't miss any text to translate. By the way, there are around 5'000 words of english text in the game currently.

Switching gears, I've also had some time to work on adding rain and thunder into the game. This doesn't really impact gameplay and can even be turned off in the settings if you really have some deep hatred for rain for whatever reason. But it does add a bit more mood and a certain vibe to the game that wasn't there before. There are basically 3 'weather patterns' for now: None, Rain, Thunder. None is the basic cloudy/sunny weather. Rain is a slow calming rainfall. Thunder is a more intense version of the same rainfall with some thunder sound effects.

In the future, I want to expand on weather mechanics to have an impact on the gameplay. I'm a really big fan of Rimworld and I loved its weather system. In Rimworld, you've got rain helping with crops and extinguishing fires. You've got snow slowing your colonists and your enemies down. And then you've got temperature affecting your colonists mood and other really cool and deep mechanics. You've also got natural disasters like volcano eruptions and tornadoes. For now I don't really have any concrete designs or even plans on how a deep weather system would work in Swarmdustry. At this it's just something to think and talk about.

So that's it for today's blog! Hope you guys are looking forward to playing this soon!