Games Report 08/28/23

Hello Sunspots! We know that last week's devlog didn't happen, but we hope that you'll be excited about some of the latest updates to Sunny Day Jack and Sleepy Time Jack, courtesy of our Unity programmers.

Sunny Day Jack

Among some of the things the Unity programmer has done since joining are optimizing the game and thinking ahead for the various localization teams.

Optimizations for players with older computers:

• Greatly improved how images are stored to use less computer memory

• Removing and replacing the videos in the game with engine-rendered text, making the game start faster (the main menu alone had 4GB of videos files to load!)

• Added a new agreement for players to accept when starting the game, which helps us avoid remaking certain videos

• Hooking up the new sprites to script

As for how the new text localization system works:

1. We first add the conversation in English. This English content is used to generate localization spreadsheet files for translation.

2. Translators use Excel or any other spreadsheet program to provide translations. These translations are then added back to the game by re-importing the files. If we add more English content, we just repeat from step 2, without losing any existing translations.

It's that simple! For the audio side of things, the only thing we change is the name of the audio file. If the English audio has names like Jack_Greeting_01a.wav, then the translated audio adds a language code Jack_Greeting_01a_ES.wav to the end. The game automatically finds the audio using its name, making things simple for us.

Finally, on the players' end, they can choose the language of both the written words and the spoken words (eg. English text and Spanish audio).

Sleepy Time Jack

A significant amount of work on STJ has been done since our last devlog on it, but after asking for some feedback, we took notes about the times where Jack would have pretty significant tonal whiplash between lines, or repeat certain phrases consecutively or repeat them more often than others. There isn't any real underlying randomization logic in the Ren'Py version, so we're making the switch to Unity for more robust quality of life features.

• These include the localization functionality from above, as well as the following:

• Organized conversations by mood to support logic to make them flow better.

• Players can set their own minimum and maximum limits for the dialogue delay timer instead of choosing from the presets

• Grouped conversations based on mood and what the characters are wearing, Allowing for new dialogue to be easily added in the future if need be

• Improved conversation variety by making sure the same lines don't get repeated often

• Made the same image improvements as in Sunny Day Jack

This new framework also allows for new alternative outfits/combinations and characters to be added much more easily in the future. For instance, you can even choose to take off Jack's pants or shirt individually without affecting the audio now.

As a final bonus, we even looked into adding some mouth movement to Jack as he speaks.

It might not work well as a .gif since there's no audio and we're using existing mouth shapes, but is this something that's possible to do more robustly in Unity. What do you all think?

Regarding The Status of Localization

We are aware of a post that was circulating on social media claiming that the foreign language translations/dubs were going to be canceled, and we'd like to reassure our Latin Spanish, Japanese, and Russian audiences that this is not the case. We still intend to translate SDJ and STJ into our target languages as you can see by our work above and apologize for the panic this caused in our international community. We value your continued support as always.