Devblog #83 (Patreon)

Hey Wizards! Shady Character One here!

So, last week, driven mostly by some very compelling arguments from both fellow developers and some fans, I finally decided to add machine translations for some languages to the game. I still believe that there are some major drawbacks to this approach, but if it helps to get more people to notice the project, and maybe even find someone who will be willing to read and potentially fix the broken translations — well, maybe the ends do justify the means.

I decided to begin with Chinese, partly because that’s one of the most requested translations to date, partly because Chinese is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, partly because I noticed that Deepseek is very proficient at translating into Chinese specifically, and possibly partly because of my recent visit to China. But regardless, that’s the one I decided to start with. What I didn’t consider when planning this undertaking is that Chinese would not work with the fonts that we are using for our western languages. Which makes total sense in retrospect, but which was a surprise for me when I finished several translation files and went into the game to see how everything looked, and found myself staring at a bunch of squares.

Yep, that didn’t look Chinese no matter how you slice it.

So I went into the rabbit hole of adding different fonts for different game languages, which Ren'Py processes in a very backwards way. You see, Ren'Py has this system of assigning different styles to different text elements in the game, and it looks something like:

For buttons “use Font 1, at size 24” For menus “use the same font as for buttons, but blue, and at size 28” For titles “use the same as menus, but at size 32”

And so on and so forth. You get the idea. So when I am setting up a font for the game, I just need to tell the game which font “the buttons” use, and it proliferates all the way down. Basically, I need to make a new entry for the font only when I want to deviate from this basic structure. But for “translated fonts” everything is not so simple.

The engine just ignores all of these dependencies and demands that I specify a font for every single type of text in the game. It would be relatively easy still if I didn’t need to scour the code for every single possible style of text, find out what font was needed for it and then add a new line to the growing array of “style A, B, C — Font 1” lines. Well, long story short, it took me the bigger part of Saturday to figure all the fonts out and run all the text in the game through the translation engine. Even with the setback I had with the fonts, it took me way less time than I expected. It really does show how much time it takes me to check after the LLM whenever I do other translations. It usually takes me as much time to go through 1/20th of the text.

So this is how the game looks like in Chinese now. I know that most of you won’t really care for this addition to the game, but I also know that some people were already waiting for it, and maybe many more will be happy too. Also, if anyone is waiting for their language to be added, even in this machine form — it might be next.

Localization isn’t the only thing that I was preoccupied with last week however. Even though I didn’t write as much as I was hoping, I did finish another event for the Beastology class. And more importantly I did prepare the groundwork for the fourth part-time job, which will be crucial for Elizabeth’s storyline. Though you can get the job without following Elizabeth’s story of course. “Helping at the Faculty office” will be a knowledge focused job, which will potentially be the most lucrative of the five part-time jobs, but will require all the stats to maximize the income. Which makes it decent for Knowledge focused characters in the early game, but would make it one of the best end-game jobs. I still need to write the introductory event for getting the job, but I am pretty sure it’ll be done by the next update.

Shady Two spent most of her time on the introductory artwork for Elizabeth, which happens to have another spiral staircase in the background. This time, it is the giant staircase of the Dunagall House. This one is even bigger and even more prominent than the one in the Ruachan House which gave Shady Two so much trouble when making Gwen’s artwork. Why are spiral staircases so difficult to draw? Why should we be hurt so much by things we love? We might never know…

If we do, I'll tell you in the next devblog.

Shady Character One, out!