hcnone

Friday Rambles and Gamedev Update 2024-01-26

Added 2024-01-26 17:03:00 +0000 UTC

Another week, another Rambles. It was a productive week this time around. The last Rambles of January, if you can believe it. Wow! The inexorable march of time inexorably marches on.

I’m sure you have friends you haven’t talked to in a while, but keep thinking about. I have a few friends in gamedev from a past life that I’ve wanted to reconnect with but kept putting off messaging, but I finally did and it was a great conversation and catching up time.

Above: no case should remain unsolved. i miss tweetdeck lol

I played No Case Should Remain Unsolved and Before Your Eyes. All I can say is that indie games rule. No Case Should Remain Unsolved is particularly inspirational being a short and sweet story game made by one person. One day I’ll have a cool back catalogue too. I also played some Apollo Justice Trilogy, which was released on Wednesday night (I already bought these games on my 3DS many years ago, but hey, I’m not gonna oppose a HD remaster of the game for Steam).

I also bought Chants of Senaar and Eternights (interesting combo…), but didn’t get a chance to play them yet.

Game Dev Stuff

Two big game company layoffs this week. It hit a lot closer to home this time around. Sucks that you can devote your life to a big company making your favorite games for 10 years and they’re just like, okay you’re not generating enough value for the shareholders, see ya!

… Well, all I can say is that I could never go back to working for any game company now that I’ve tasted the forbidden fruit of being able to support myself doing my own thing, drawing and writing my own stories. I’m gonna enjoy it while it lasts, anyway. After all, the only employee I can lay off is myself, and the only shareholders I am beholden to are my own family. And my landlord. Oh, uh, and you, my dear supporter. :D

Speaking of it lasting, I’ve started rewriting the mythical Dreams and Deadlines “story update” as I mentioned last week, but this time around I’m feeling it! Really! For real, this time! I actually laughed while playing it! The screenshots look really cool too. I won’t post them because they’re massive spoilers, so just trust me lol. Oh, but also, don’t expect too much.

In other game dev stuff, the PT-BR translation has been promoted to “official” status, and I spent all week localizing all in-game sprites and UI. The big “Localization Update” is coming along nicely! Well, hopefully. The other languages (Korean and Simplified Chinese) are still scheduled for end of the month, after which I can do the sprites and UI work for those. Hopefully I'll have lots of cool screenshots for those next week.

Above: all sprites are now localized in pt-br, an unexpected localization that ended up moving along the fastest. Thanks to this I was able to pre-add all the code needed to easily drop in the other in-progress languages in advance

As for other languages, I’ve said this a million times already but man I just don’t have the brain energy right now to try to organize and support any big community efforts, and I’m also not interested in half-assing anything (localization being one of those things where I strongly believe you either do it right, or don’t do it at all). So I’m prioritizing official translations by: “who will absolutely refuse to play the game if it’s only in English” and from the data available online it’s basically CJK by a long shot, so my main focus is there for now. Even though I want everyone in the entire world to be able to play my game, my biggest issue is that due to the text-heavy nature of my game, every language I add takes a lot of my own time and effort and resources, and the added sales might not make up the cost, and is another language I have to support for my next story update and possibly my next game lol… blah blah blah excuses excuses

Anyway, the point is I really really want to move on and work on my next story and next game.