It has been a rollercoaster week since we got our mention in Rock Paper Shotgun, with tons of new subscribers, followers, and people saying they can't wait to get their hands on the demo. More importantly, we also mustered up some financial support and have some more assets coming in to put a truly evil spin on a game that should be oozing theme. Also, we discovered that a lot of international gamers are huge fans of the genre, so as to not let them down we've added localization support to the entire project (which took some painful time) so our release will come with at least 3 languages fully supported and open to fan contributions.
You've probably seen this on our header already, but if not gaze in horror at these Cthulhu-esque abomination savoring the world as he wraps his shadowy tendrils about it. We love it. It was drawn by the fantastic Julio Iglesias whose art you can checkout here.
Upgrading GUI Assets
In addition to going through the project itself and optimizing a lot of code, we can now begin to finalize our GUI since we've had plenty of demo feedback. We started at the top, with the Scenario Generation sequence.
We took the original idea of a "void" that allows you to pick from any of the Scenarios and Mods you have loaded on your machine and utilized some assets to make a more thematic experience. As you begin the glyphs around the screen light up, until all of the questions are complete at which point a more dramatic sequence welcomes you into the game itself. Minimal effort but it certainly helps the theme some - the sequence itself is still very fast, nothing I hate more in a strategy game than having to waste time with something unnecessary.
This scene should look a little more familiar - the player has selected the scenario and has moved on to Old One Selection. We streamlined the display by putting the number of agents, and the length of sleep, for each Old One and his two abilities beneath him - a tooltip provides further information on each of them. It's possible we need to darken the background of the text some, it can be a little hard to read - but that's simply a tweak at this point - we consideer the overall structure of the GUI to be Final.
Localizing, the Joy of Language
Localizing was not something that I had considered for initial release, but two factors swayed me. One being the international press coverage and attention we were receiving and the other being this reddit post which really went the distance to change my mind. I did a little research and discovered several tools to make my life easier and make localization a reality for us. We settled on this unity asset package which led to the spreadsheet you see above you. It lets you store your strings on Google Docs, get them autotranslated, and then we can have them properly handled once we have found the relevant translator. A pretty fantastic solution I have to say, but the amount of time it took me to go through and change all my string settings was exhausting.
We also had to modify the way we handle XML, separate language XML documents can be stored with MOD files to allow support for your creations across the world.
Wrapup
Lots of behind the scenes and marketing work over the last two weeks, much more than I would like but the reward was worth it - we have optimized our engine and are now bringing in our final GUI elements to make the game as fun to look at as it is to play. Still, I am excited to get back to working on the AI and the End Game scenarios that can play out.
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This is looking extremely interesting. Good luck!
Thanks Gn0meSlice! On the topic of Gnomes, they were cut very early in development, but we do have a lot of Slicing so there's always that...
Based on user feedback we've added a darker background to the fading menu options - it could be difficult to read the text on higher resolutions. I'll be uploading a new version sometime this week.
Do you need free help in Russian localization?