Friday Rambles and Gamedev Update 2024-02-02

It’s the first Rambles of February, the second month, of 2024. This is where we look back on the endless potential we had in January, when we had a whole year ahead of us. I don’t even remember what my resolutions were.

Some games on my wishlist went on sale this week. Pizza Tower, being one of them.

Above: i’m really good at the game

To be perfectly fair to myself, I’ve been mostly getting A’s and B’s on the levels themselves. I enjoyed playing it, as I expected from literally everyone saying it’s like the best game ever. I didn’t have enough time to play it as much as I would have liked this week, though. I also got Pentiment and Refind Self. I’ll definitely play them at some point. After I play all the games I bought last week and the week before that I didn’t play yet.

This week was super busy, but you’ll only be interested if you are within the subset of people who want to play my game, but don’t want to play it in English, but also only want to play it in a specific different language that I happen to be working on supporting right now. The translated KR script was completed this week, so I spent most of the week doing localization work, which consisted mostly of making new sprites and fixing UI code so things don’t look crappy and broken. We’re doing playtests now to gather feedback and make edits and make sure everything looks good before calling it done.

Here are some screenshots:

And so on. It's a huge milestone, but now I'm just rushing around trying to get everything done and gather feedback and fix things found in playtesting and stuff. I feel so rushed even though there's no real reason to be, considering I'm blocked while having to wait for things to happen.

Other languages are coming along. CHS script first draft is almost done and should be delivered soon, and PT-BR is a little over halfway done on the script side, and all done on the sprite/UI side. PT-BR is a little interesting in that we did the playtest first with half the script, and then started translating the second half. So once that’s done PT-BR should be in a good spot.

One thing I learned from this whole experience is that I will never make a game with so many sprites with words in them ever again. (If I do, I’ll make it so I can just paste in the localized text separately if needed). The main issue is that I just love the hand-drawn handwritten aesthetic too much.

Still hoping for a mid-to-late Feb release for the “Localization Update” but it might end up slipping to March (with absolute deadline a week before Steam Spring Sale), which would kinda suck because that would mean I could have just done a weekly Steam Sale in January, which I didn’t do because I didn’t want to be in the 30 day cooldown period when the update was done in Feb. Ah, well, that just means more people will buy during the next sale. Right? :)

On top of that I’m preparing for a big move next month. I wanna relax and take things one at a time, but…

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. More busy = Less words, I guess. Sorry. Thanks for your support, as always!