With a little help from my friend (the most difficult proofreading ever)
If I were endowed with logic and calculations, I probably wouldn't be working with languages. However, I do work with languages, and I am absolutely unable to deal with anything related to numbers and codes.
That's why I hold on tight to my trusty companion who solves all my non-linguistic problems (so about 95% of my life).
After a few times testing the game, it became clear that to release a version free of some minor issues, I would have to tweak the code. Or my trusted programmer would have to do it.
Make no mistake, these weren't insurmountable problems, but for a 100% polished version, I had to get rid of unnecessary spaces, redundant punctuation, letters displayed without accents, and other subtleties that only annoy us translators, proofreaders, and language OCD enthusiasts.
Unfortunately, many of these details were hardcoded and embedded in the code, so there was little I could do. That's how poor Davide had to lose long hours - taking them away from his colossal project- to solve my problems. Here's a few of them ๐
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Here we have the list of the carried items. I just wanted to get rid of those full stops after each line. Davide helped to find the right string to edit, and the annoying dot was removed.
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In this case, whenever we tried to use prepositions to access places, the game wouldn't recognize them. The "unknown word" would be repeated, followed by a space and three question marks. I needed to remove the space and to make sure the game would recognize the prepositions as it was already supposed to do.
Here's the code that was changed. With a Regex we redirected the preposition to the related string๐
From:
To:
Then, to remove the extra space, this was also changed:
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This pesky redundant comma took one hour to be found and solved.
The two strings were treated as two elements of an array list, therefore listed consecutively but separated by a comma. Merging the two strings in a single one was enough.
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Here we can see that whenever we're spelling "yes" as it should be spelled, (with an accent, "sรฌ"), the game wasn't able to recognize it, and would offer two choices, still omitting the accent.
For this one, Davide had to add a single string in the localization file, adding the new spelling, and then implement the rest of the script on the IFEngline.js file:
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Last but not least, even though it was not localization-related, Davide created a little script to increase the speed at which the text gets displayed, and therefore to speed up the whole testing phase.
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There's one last thing that still bothers me, and it's the impossibility of using the same verb in different situations. At the beginning of the adventure, to insert the bone into the hole, one of the most immediate verbs in Italian would be "Metti". Unfortunately, the same verb is used in the string related to wearing the parachute, so it can't be used elsewhere. A player trying to write "metti l'osso nel foro" (put the bone in the hole) would only get an "Eh?" We tried to think of Regex to address the issue, but so far, we haven't found anything satisfying. We'll revisit it at the end of the publication, if we have any time left, and in that case, we'll update this post.
Files
Avventura nel castello
Inclusive version of the original 1982 Italian game
Status | Released |
Authors | Locjam Before Christmas, ildede, Chiara@LoQAce |
Genre | Adventure |
Tags | Game Jam, locjam, Multiple Endings, Retro, Short, Singleplayer, Text based |
More posts
- Adventure in the Italian gender-neutralityDec 31, 2023
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