Friday Rambles and Gamedev Update 2024-02-23

It's the last Rambles of February 2024. So it goes.

This week was focused on getting the Korean localization of Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines out the door. I was planning on it being part of a larger "Localization Update" with Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese, but they're still a few weeks out from completion and I wanted an excuse for a sale in February before the Steam Spring Sale in mid-March so I can make rent this month (hyperbole)

Above: Sale pic. They learned Korean. For those who can't read it: Penny: Miss Whiskey, why don't we do a bigger discount? Whiskey: We gotta eat too, Penn. And Korean classes are expensive. [TL Note: "Miss Whiskey" is "Whiskey Seonbae" in the Korean version (which is a title denoting someone senior to you, like "sempai" in Japanese)].

It also allows me to do a kind of "soft launch" for the update, which contains a lot of different changes made to support localizations, and I'll want to fix any issues that I missed with that before a bigger sale with more localizations available.

Above: Credits 

I was fortunate enough to be able to work with Hyang Jung of Lingocraft for the translation, and I'm super happy with the final result. I really hope people will like it.

Above: Localized Steam Page

With all that ready I'm gonna post the trailer announcement later today when it's not like 3 am in Korea.

A lot of real life stuff going on as well, and I've been lacking sleep lately. Feeling bad that I'm neglecting my "social media presence" and not "engaging" with my "audience" or "sharing" anything that brings "impressions" and "clickthroughs". That's the thing, right? The people who bought my game are the people followed me because they liked my art, and now I'm not drawing any art because I'm too busy working on the game. What a pickle!

Once the rest of the languages are out and done and the Steam Spring Sale is over I'll finally be able to move on from EMDND and work on the next thing. Wait a minute! The next thing is more EMDND stuff! Agh! I've been hoisted by my own petard!

Anyway, since I'm mostly in the "waiting" stage of the localization process for the other languages, I guess I could use this opportunity to draw some funny Skye faces.

Above: Here's a funny Skye face I just drew after writing that last sentence

Okay my next week's resolution is to post funny Skye face at least 3 times so people remember why they followed me in the first place. And then buy my game.

Oh yeah, I forgot I actually do have some TMI gamedev stuff to talk about, like the olden days. The 1.0.10 update that released yesterday also included a bunch of minor changes to fix some stuff that I found were bothering me while watching VODs and streams of the game, like how everyone kept accidentally bringing up the settings menu, like all the time. So I disabled right click bringing up the settings menu. The reason I put that in in the first place was because it was a common VN standard thing, like in Ren'py games and etc, but I think it was more annoying than useful for this game in particular. Like who needs to bring up the settings menu that quickly. The menu is not that important for this game.

Above: No one really need a mouse shortcut for this. Esc key and the icon button still work

I also added a little cursor for mouse control in the Laser Battery sequence. Previously the targeting reticule would Lerp to the cursor location, but due to the delay it would be difficult to control and know exactly where the mouse cursor itself was, causing people to click out the window often. So the little dot cursor is meant to address that, so people know where exactly the mouse cursor is, independent of the targeting reticule.

Above: the little green dot is the mouse cursor, and the targeting reticule moves towards it

Other stuff in this sequence: I made the "Armor" and "Mothership" texts use a font instead of my handwriting so it can be easily localized. I made the last pip in the health bar flash when the mothership is taking damage, so players know you're supposed to attack it, because I found that it took people a while to notice it was taking damage, and they just kept shooting the smaller UFOs instead.

I fixed a bunch of other stuff in the dialogue script itself like formatting and typos, and I removed the choice to go to the club after the phone call right after the Kini inspiration, so players can just make that choice later after saving, instead of making them go through half the Kini sequence again if they choose wrong and get a game over.

I also added a pity counter to Lumber Lass, so you can't go over X amount of trees without a powerup, and you can't go over Y amount of trees without a Skye Cabin. That makes it far more predictable to know how long it would take to get the Lumber Lass achievements, and even with the worst RNG it shouldn't take an extremely long time. Speaking of those, I'm probably not going to add similar achievements to the Lumber Lass achievements in future games because a lot of people think they're grindy and annoying to get, which I kinda agree. 

Above: I added functionality in Lumber Lass to add a "subtitle" for the localized title of the game. In this case it's "나무꾼 아가씨", which generally translates to "Lumber Lass" in Korean. We'll also be doing that for the Chinese localization too. We refer to the game in the main script with the localized title, so I wanted to make sure that was reflected in the Lumber Lass game itself.

So for next week I'm hoping I'll be able to work more on the remaining localizations, as long as there's something to work on, on my end.

Okie Dokie. Time for me to go away. Thanks for your support, as always. See you next week!