How important are translations in a game?
-
wrote last edited by [email protected]
I'm working on a small project that I hope to be able to share soon.
I created a game engine for point-and-click adventure games and I'm working on three different games for it. Two are near completion, the final one is just getting started.
I plan on sharing this (on Lemmy and elsewhere) once the last game is ready.Now, I am an English speaker and have little insight from the outside world.
The game engine does not support translation/localization at all.- I'm somewhat interested in adding this as it means more people could potentially play these games.
- I'm worried that adding it will open up a can of worms in my code (long story short, I'm worried translated text will have issues in the menu/UI, overflow, look bad, etc.).
So for the non-native English speakers especially, how important is this to you? Do you expect smaller indie games to play in English or in your native language?
-
I'm working on a small project that I hope to be able to share soon.
I created a game engine for point-and-click adventure games and I'm working on three different games for it. Two are near completion, the final one is just getting started.
I plan on sharing this (on Lemmy and elsewhere) once the last game is ready.Now, I am an English speaker and have little insight from the outside world.
The game engine does not support translation/localization at all.- I'm somewhat interested in adding this as it means more people could potentially play these games.
- I'm worried that adding it will open up a can of worms in my code (long story short, I'm worried translated text will have issues in the menu/UI, overflow, look bad, etc.).
So for the non-native English speakers especially, how important is this to you? Do you expect smaller indie games to play in English or in your native language?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Disclaimer: I'm a native English speaker, so grain of salt.
It depends a lot on the kind of game. Some games are pretty easy to play only on visuals and small bits of text. For something text heavy, like an adventure game usually might be, I'd think most people would not try it unless it's in a language they understand well or want to learn.
For an individual game, I'm not usually that upset if it's not in my language - Lotta games out there, I can just move on. But if you're making an engine and hope to keep using it and maybe expand the scope of your games - I'd say start trying to implement i18n support sooner than later. Even if you don't have time/resources to translate the games yet, it'd be good to make the code ready for it.