Progress Report - 7-21-2024 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! So first off, I apologize for skipping last week's update. As you'll see in a bit with the daily updates, I didn't get a damn thing done that week with my depression flaring up, and I avoided making a post purely out of shame. The good news is, despite how terrible that week went, I managed to shake it off and picked up a lot more steam this week, so I'm feeling quite a bit better now.

This past week, I was planning on getting to work on implementing the new/altered cutscenes, but as I started on that, I realized that since I needed to import a lot of new text, it'd be way more practical to implement localization support first, so I've been focusing on that. I've talked about this before, but just to be upfront, we aren't currently doing any official translations - at least not until the game is nearly complete, we'll revisit the possibility then - but with this next update, we plan on having full support for fan translations.

I'm currently working on moving all of the ingame text from being hard-coded, to being loaded from an external file. There were some technical hurdles, as well as needing to figure out the best way to format the data for GMS1, but I've settled on something that's basically like a json, to make sure it's easily human readable. I've finished with the majority of menus now, so I plan on starting on cutscenes next week.

Once I'm done moving all of the text, making translations will be as simple as opening the file and editing it. Translating an entire game worth of text will still be a lot of work, of course, but my goal is to make the technical side of implementing a fan translation as easy as possible, so anyone with the knowledge of both languages could easily do it. Since the file will be easily accessible, it'll also be extremely easy to spoil yourself - both on the story, and things like future upgrades - by opening it and reading text, so unless you plan on making translations I suggest not poking around in there. I figure the tradeoff of making it easy to make fan translations is worth it, though!

In any case, here's the daily updates from the past two weeks, since I missed last week's update:

Sorry again for missing the post last week. I'm trying to stop myself from burying my head in the sand like that, but it's easy to fall back into the bad habit sometimes. Still, I'm glad I was able to recover from it and have a much more productive week, and I'm looking forward to keeping the momentum going.

I think we'll start the next recolor poll next week, so until then, thank you all for reading, and we'll see you again soon with the next progress report and the start of the second community recolor poll!