Loc Notes

LOCALIZATION NOTES

Alriight, very happy to keep this wee projects going, now on my 3rd SquidGod game. This game had a wee bit more texts and more fun to be had to be honest. Since the descriptions for the fish were just a flavour text I could actually do some creative localizing, which just means doing silly jokes in portuguese. I won't go into my specific choices here because this is the english side of things. They are written about in the portuguese loc notes, but if you wanna know more let me know.

This project also exposed my limitation on design creation and knowledge. But since this is not a paid job and something I'm doing mostly to further my education and knowledge overall, If the texts/images look ok, I carry on so not to spend to much time being precious about that. I also know if this was a project I was hired to do I'd probably have all those infos before hand and usually would only worry about the text itself not the graphics. But maybe on future projects I might bother the dev about it. I just didn't felt super comfortable to annoy them about an old project. I looks good enough and is understandable which is the core of localization QA.

So this one I ended up wanting to learn a bit more and test some code stuff. Like for the subtitle that I have been doing to translate the title, this time I generated my own image and replicated the behaviour and code from the original titleText in titleScene.lua. I adjusted the y position, played a bit with the setScale function to undersand it and set a Z index to be sure the wave would go over it. I kinda ike that effect in the end, so left it like that.

Another thing for me to see and learn is were they create the new options in the Playdate menu, which is something I could get fom the sdk document I'm sure, but visualizing an example is how I learn better. So there it was, easy to just change the string for the portuguese version, and see they are always lower case.

From the scenes created I localized the instructions.png file by changing the text and replacing the file in the folder, but keeping the graphic part already made, which was handy.
Ad I did a little alteration in the SDK Corelibs to be able to have the crank text in portuguese. Just seeing where the image is placed inside the ui corelibs, and creating a portuguese text one. It worked fine.

The fishing log itself was nice to be able to go through to do the localization and testing to learn more about that and data sotring in the playdate.
The notebook is generated through a fish.json file where it gets the name, description, which image to go for and size. It also have the information for the game itself to know when to fish each class, but that's not my localizing issue.
For the name I decided to add a nameBr in the tables to not mess with the english name, since that usually is used in the code for other things, so didn't wanna risk (and also substitute in the code where appropriate to gnerate my translation). The description I saw was being generated as full caps so I left it like that for consistency and also readability. I did my silly jokes and for the testing it was easy. I had to see where the SDK store data as a data.json file and altered directly there so to have all the types of fish caught. That way I could see how they would be in game o make sure there were no cut offs or overlaps. With that done everything was fine, since in game when you catch a fish the same notebook thing gets generated so It ws already pulling from the right sources. ut yes I did test to see it. hahaha.

And that was it! Very fun and nice to get this done with! Excited for my next one.

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Any comments, suggestions, questions or anything just give me a wee shout on marcelo.terreiro@gmail.com

love
mama