Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Aquatic Adventure, Uncanny Valley and Omega Strike now available on Switch!

We helped port these titles for Digerati, and as of Christmas they're now available on the eShop, check it out!

Image result for omega strike game

Omega Strike is a contra-esque platformer with metroidvania elements.  It's got nice sharp pixel art and tight controls, and well worth checking out if you're a fan of the genre.

Image result for uncanny valley game

Uncanny Valley is a sort of story-based survival horror title.  It's unique in that there's really no game-over, more a series of branches that lead to different events and ultimately to different endings.

Image result for aquatic adventure of the last human

The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human is hard to describe, it's almost an underwater Shadow of the Colossus style experience, with a series of well-designed boss fights connected by an open world.  We really grew to dig this title, in particular, while working on it.



Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Desert Child now available on all platforms!


We helped Akupara bring their pixel-based racing title to all three consoles and all three PC platforms, on a variety of storefronts.  Check it out on whatever platform you prefer!

Official Desert Child page here!

Thursday, August 30, 2018

What About Localizing My Game?

This started as a Reddit post in reply to a question about how to handle localization, but it got quite long so I figured I'd post it here.  Hopefully this is useful to someone.  For the record, what we're talking about here is making your game available in multiple languages.

There's not a ton of work required, on a technical level, to build yourself a functioning localization solution.  Someone experienced can probably build what's necessary in an afternoon, and none of the work is exotic.  Unity doesn't have one in place by default however, and so I think a lot of folks who are just learning tend to gloss over the infrastructure or not realize how much difficulty they could have down the line trying to retrofit support.  Luckily it's pretty easy and I encourage preparing any serious project for it from the beginning.  Here's roughly what we use.

Firstly, we have a TextManager that is a mostly-static singleton class.  This gets initialized on first use if needed, but also manually initialized in the game's startup scene, and that mostly consists of setting the desired language, then reading in the actual strings and sticking them in a dictionary.  We only read in a single language at a time, and the languages exist in a set of parallel files that use the Android XML format.  If you set TextManager to german, it loads the german.xml file, if you set it to english it loads the english.xml file, etc.  You can then use a static method like TextManager.GetString("level_readout") to retrieve an entry.  It searches for the "level_readout" key and returns the actual text for your loaded language.

We've got a lengthy history of Android dev, which is really the only reason we use that file format.  A CSV or set of CSVs is probably the best in my opinion, since when you get to the point of actual localization you'll very commonly end up sending spreadsheets to people.  A format that makes that simple is useful.  Alternatively iOS or Android style files are useful since a lot of services can work with them directly.  Remember you will very likely have to merge things eventually, so whatever you do don't use a binary file for this.  UTF-8 text is ideal.


CSV file with key in first column, languages in following columns

Requirements for the entries are quite simple, whatever your format.  You have a dictionary-style key, which is what you'll use to refer to the strings in code, and then the actual text entries which are what will ultimately end up on-screen.  No matter how good the idea sounds at the time, do not use your english string as the key.  Strings change, your first draft is often temp, and you don't want to have to edit your code in order to fix grammar or spelling or whatever.  In fact, I encourage forcing your keys to lowercase, and disallowing things like spaces as well.  Treat your string keys like variable names.

Now here's the important part: make sure you use it.  Whenever you put text on the screen, call TextManager.GetString() and use the result.  That real-text string is what you put on screen.  Directly putting user-visible strings in your code is now verboten, and you should feel dirty for doing it.  This means that in addition to lengthy strings like dialogue or item descriptions, you'll end up with short strings that are simply labels, or that have replacement fields in them like "Level: {0} of {1}".  Replacements like that are better than assembling a few tiny strings because some languages may prefer a formatting with a different order.

This sounds like a hassle, but it quickly becomes not a big deal -- you're probably only making a couple entries at a time, and you'll mostly only end up dealing with english (or whatever your native language is) during development.  I assure you, doing it as you go is far, far less painful than tracking down hundreds of strings scattered across your codebase later down the road.

You'll probably end up with some convenience functions for common types of usage.  If you're using Unity, a component that automatically fills in a text component on the same GameObject is an obvious addition, as well.  Whether you want to try to deal with switching language on the fly is something to consider, and that's getting more complicated since it means menus and stuff will need to be notified and update all their text fields.

If you really want to help your translators, add a section to your CSV (or whatever) that lets you fill in context for the string.  You don't need to read this in yourself, but remember your translator will often only have the list of strings to refer to and won't have the time to find that text in the actual game.  A note that says "Refers to the player's current experience level" can be hugely helpful, since what if that string is talking about unlockable areas or something?  Things like that often come back as questions if the context isn't obvious.

If a key is not found upon attempting to retrieve a string, make it very obvious.  We literally return something like "MISSING: level_readout" so it screams incorrect to the viewer.  During development I could see having your non-native languages fall back to the native string that (almost certainly) exists, but once you get into a QA finishing-things stage you should remove that so nothing gets missed.

There's a whole pile of features you could add to a system like this, but for my money they pretty quickly start seeming not worth the trouble.  We have some python scripts to convert our XML files into a couple of other formats like CSV, but have never had much call to do something like upload them dynamically to Google Drive or whatever.  You could invent your own super-easy-to-parse format if you wanted to, too.  So long as what you have is consistent and you use it, that's the big thing.


Thursday, August 23, 2018

HackyZack now available on Switch!



It's a tricky platformer, where you're also playing hacky sack to reach your destination!  We worked to bring this to Switch, and added support for two player cooperative play at the same time.  Have a friend join in and work together to get your Hacky to the goal!

Take a look!
HackyZack!

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Chicken Assassin Reloaded available on Switch!



We helped bring Chicken Assassin Reloaded to the Switch, working with Akupara Games!  This is a crazy role-playing-clicker with a super insane art style.  Well worth checking out!

Image result for chicken assassin

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

INK now available on Switch!

We handled porting this fun and challenging platform game, where you splat invisible walls with ink to discover the level!  Plus we added cooperative play in the process, for pretty sweet couch multiplayer.  Check it out!




Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Unity3D Default Script Properties

I get the impression a lot of people aren't aware that Unity lets you set the default properties for any script file with serialized fields.  This means when you add that script as a component to a GameObject, those defaults will be applied upon creation.

This is something that doesn't matter that often, but in the right situation can be very useful.  For example, I just completed a task in which I needed to apply a component that plays appropriate selection/activation sounds for a button.  This component requires that I set an audio mixer channel, and fill in lists of which sounds to play.  Since the menu has dozens of button objects, many of which do not have a prefab, these assignments would need to be manually done dozens of times.

This is obviously a chore, and beyond that there's a lot of room to accidentally miss a couple of fields as I went through and did them all.  Using default properties, however, I could avoid those problems. I can simply select the script file, fill in the defaults for those fields, then whenever I added the component the standard sounds and channel were filled in automatically.

For reference, when selecting a script file look for a section at the top of the inspector panel, like so:


Friday, January 12, 2018

A Useful Feature of Unity's Debug.Log

This really isn't hidden, but somehow we've been using Unity for years without ever realizing.  Debug.Log (and related methods) actually have a second argument you can fill in.   Pass it an Object as a second argument, like so:

Debug.Log( "Some sort of problem!", myGameObject );

This will print to the Unity console as normal, but filling in the object means clicking on the log entry will take you to that object in the hierarchy.