Dear Retailers We have made some progress during the last week, although a bit slowed, as Tympanix (One of the two devs) has been focusing on his final project at the university. He is also the one working on the translation system we told about in our last letter.

The Translation Issue

It is no secret that a large portion of the players are German-speaking. This is why this was our test-language (along with Danish which are our native language) to see how difficult it is to manage multiple languages. We found out that programming and implementing a language was relatively easy (after some cleanup in the code), however all the logistics surrounding it was tough to deal with. First of all currently the game contains rougly 10.000 words that needs to be translated, which in itself takes quite some time even if you are fluent in the language. Secondly, the game continually evolves. This means that between each patch, some words are removed, some are changed and new words are added, meaning that after a couple of weeks a new revision would be needed. Third of all, the text needs to be understood correctly. So when all these texts are exported, they show up as the pure text only, and nothing more. So the translator might have to translate "Rent" properly. But does this mean the price you pay to rent something, or performing the action of wanting to rent it, which in danish is two very different things. Having to manage these things for each patch is very time consuming, and is why we in the later patches have resorted to Google Translate. Many of you have very kindly offered your help in assisting with the translations in various languages which we are very grateful of. However we didn't know how to organize this in a way that makes it easy and efficient. The thought of handling several translators via mail or facebook, having to merge translations into the same document and so on seemed like an excessive workload, which would redice the time spent on developing a lot. But we still wanted to allow for several languages, so what to do?

The Community Translation System

We evaluated several options online that could assist with this, however they required a (for us) hefty monthly fee. So in december we decided to make our own instead, and this is what Tympanix has been spending his time on (along with university) since then. The bonus of this program should then be that every player can contribute to the translation of the game. Firstly by a webpage that you can log in to using your Steam-account, and secondly within the game itself. Here you can search for existing sentences, mark them as wrong, submit your own translation, or vote for an already submitted one. We can then review these translations make the necessary changes and upload them to the game. This also allows for translations in event more languages. Hopefully this makes for better translation without it taking up to much time.
We expect to have the webpage-solution ready near the end of the month :)

Progress since last letter

I have then been working on the game itself, making progress with the HQ. I am also happy to say that almost everything has been implemented, with a few things missing. You now control each concept on each individual floor, on several whiteboards, making it easier to quickly see how it goes. At the ground floor you manage the unassigned buildings, and at the reception you can request the building of an additional floor. As the floors now serve as the concept limit, the allowed number of floors in an area tells how many concepts you can have. This also means that the first office you rent at the City Hall has been removed. As this also seemed it was a too hard to find, it seemed better to make accessing all HQ's similar and as such they are now all at the city map. It has also been connected to the flow of the game, such that applications to the HQ comes and goes, negotiation and renegotiating is possible, as well as swapping managers, and promoting staff from the stores to the HQ.
The only thing left, is to make optimism changes of your managers, based off the events in your corporation, such that you actively need to manage the personnel at your HQ.

The bug list

This week also made us aware of some new bugs. The loan system is relatively new, and we know there are somme issues with games having been created at a time of the old system, and is played in the new one. However this concealed another issue, doubling loans each time a store is loaded, making the game contain more loans than the 3 there are showed, eventually requiring an insane amount of repayment funds. These should be taken care of in the update, along with fixing the savegames themselves. We have also fixed an issue of stores not being sold correctly, and other issues reported to us here at steam. Please let us know of other bugs you might find, as the period leading up to the release of the next update will focus on playtesting and bug removal. Happy sales out there :) //Dohlar

[ 2020-01-14 14:30:04 CET ] [ Original post ]