Logo and Localisation

Here's another quick update about Key, Shovel, Treasure, our pirate game side project. Progress has been slow, mainly due to other fun stuff like a festival and a LAN party eating away at my gamedev time, but there are a few things we can show. First off, the logo for the game clearly needed an update. I'm quite satisfied with the result:

Before

After

Doing graphics stuff is always a slow process for me, mainly because I don't do this often enough to really get it into my system :). However, I did learn a lot about using Paint.net. Mainly thanks to people who have been so nice as to write tutorials. I'll be adding the same sort of parchment-y look to the backgrounds for the menus as well.

I've also added localisation to Key, Shovel, Treasure. This turned out to be more work than I'd initially thought, just like most things in gamedev (or programming (or life for that matter)). But I've now made it so that adding an extra language only requires an extra column in the localisation.csv file, two text files to be translated (for explanation and credits) and a new version of the logo. There is no need to do anything in code, since the game now auto-detects the languages that are in the csv file and adds them to the languages dropdown menu under settings. The fun of automating things aside, this prevents headaches from trying to find out how I programmed this stuff if, a year from now, I'd like to add another language like French (Clef, Pelle, Trésor anyone?).
Of course, the language I've translated the game to is Dutch. There's something to be said to translating this game to a language that my mom and my kids can actually read ;). Here's the Dutch version of the menu:

A truonsletiun tu Svedeesh Cheff Speek is ilsu un ouptiun. Bork Bork Bork!

That's all the progress for now. There are a couple of things I want to do before I think this side project is done (enough). Having said that, I've certainly learned by now that there is no such thing as a quick side project for me. Not if the goal of the project is to build something I'd like to show to the world (by putting it on itch.io in this case). A valuable lesson I'd say. So valuable that I predict that this wasn't the last time I've had to learn it ;)

- Willem -