Hi,
I hope you all are having a nice summer despite the warm weather.
In today's update I'd like to focus on plans. I avoided looking past Adventure mode for quite some time but version 1.1 is now relatively stable and so I can turn my gaze to the future.
What comes next
By adding adventure mode I have finished that part of my backlog labelled 'big features'. Now it finally comes to doing all the various tweaks, optimizations and improvements. For that reason, game updates will no longer be focused on one major topic but instead will contain various chunks and bits.
Smaller Irregular updates
This means a little dilemma for me. Whether to release a small update every say two months, doing all the associated testing myself, OR glue one or two such updates together, release every 3-4 months and run a two-week BETA test beforehand as was my approach until now.
This is something that I will have to decide but expect that updates may be coming in different sizes and frequency than before (now that the game is moving into it's more mature stage).
A little holiday
Because I have been 100% on the game for versions 1.0 AND 1.1 without a break between I decided to take the rest of summer off and spend more it with my family. I will still be doing bugfixes and normal support but won't work on any new features. I'll resume feature building from September.
Updates in 4-8 weeks
Same as the version updates, I think it will be more practical for me to compress our monthly Monday updates to a longer and more flexible range. I won't always have a presentable piece of the game each 4 weeks so this will give me a little more breathing room. I would still do at least one worthy update each 2 months where I can actually SHOW SOMETHING not just promise it.
There is a long list of extensions and descoped ideas and I want to make sure they come in a properly designed and tested bundles instead of throwing them in randomly one by one.
Localization
One VERY BIG feature I plan to look into next is localization. It is one of the debts I have towards the community and I have been delaying this for too long already. Doing localization at this stage really means four things:
1) Externalization of texts
Currently the game code is written without translations in mind. It was one of my early decisions not to worry myself too much about localizations. Early development for me had already VAST amount of risks and problems so I decided to put this one off to future me.
What this means is that I need to go through each single code line which outputs a text to the screen and change it so that it correctly goes through a new code component which handles translation. This is roughly in hundreds maybe thousands lines and pretty much just means it needs to be adjusted to a slightly different format (probably not needing manual change everywhere).
This part of work will enable adding translation files and will ensure that one text actually gets changed into its translated variant.
2) Layout
After translations can be physically done on the level of 'one text gets automagically replaced by other text' I'll have to look into text layouts and overlaps (which are already annoying in English). Translated texts will very often be longer and so areas where no line wrapping was designed might need some UI redesign.
This means going through all screens and updating text layouts so that we can either display longer texts by lower font size or by adding proper text wrapping.
3) Fonts
Given above two points I am quite certain that the main game font will need an update especially for better sizing and contrast. Additionally it will need to cover more accented characters and this sort of stuff for some of the main languages.
4) Actual translations
In the last phase I'll need to make a decision who to contract with translations for which language, run tests and eventually release updates of the game with localization done.
I currently do not have any estimation how big the first three parts will be. There is of course some maneuvering space with 'how good the user experience has to be' in each specific language.
The fourth part depends on the text file sizes (result of part 1) and also is not going to be done by me so can't estimate at all right now.
My hope is that we will have some of the main translations available before the end of the year. But at this moment this is too early to make any real schedule. So I'll keep you all updated as the work progresses.
That's all for this update,
Have a nice day
Ondrej
