When I was developing Laser Droplets, I did ask myself whether should the game support multiple languages just like every other games out there. The answer to myself back then was “Just complete the game first and think about that later.” Well, the game is completed and it’s on Steam for a week already, so should I add another language?
From the sales data of this 1 week, about 17 copies are sold as of writing this post (Well I guess it’s not bad, I was expecting 0 haha. A big Thank You to all these people out there who are willing to try out my game. Thanks again.) Of these, most are from US, but I also noticed a handful of buyers are from China. So I guess it’s time to add another language, the only other language that I know, Mandarin (Simplified Chinese). The best part is that I can have the translation done for free, by myself :P
So I went back to look at my game again, but I realised it was never coded or designed in a way that it could scale to support multiple languages. Luckily, this is such a simple game, that in terms of “language support”, all I need to translate are the UI related stuffs, there is no storyline, no voice over, etc. So with some code restructuring, I managed to make it such that it is reasonably easy to add multiple language support with minimal hardcoding.
虽然我会听说读写中文，但我在生活中是很少写中文字的。回想起来，这还是我第一次尝试翻译一样东西。第一次翻译就选择了一整个游戏，看来野心是有点太大了哈哈。尽管这是个非常小的游戏，但还是有点挑战性的。尤其是对我这个初学者来说。因为不只是从英文翻译成中文，还得考虑到如何修改 Unity Editor 与 C# Scripts 的部分。在翻译的过程中，有好多个词汇是我完全不知到如何翻译，尤其是那些有关游戏的词汇。我上网查了查，但也没查出什么好结果，只好靠“感觉”来翻译了。所以如果有些翻译错误还请原谅。我对中文字的 Font 不太了解，而因时间关系就选用了系统里基本的 Font。所以翻译后有点不好看。以后会抽出点时间，看能找些比较好看的吗。
For those interested, the above paragraph translates to:
Although I know Chinese language, but I seldom write in Chinese. Come to think of it, this is the first time I tried translating something. It is perhaps too ambitious to have chosen to translate an entire game as my first attempt to translate something. Although this is a very small game, it’s still quite challenging, especially for a beginner like me. Because not only I have to translate, I have to modify parts in the Unity Editor and C# Scripts. While translating, there are quite a number of words that I have totally no idea how to translate, especially words related to the game. I did try searching online, but didn’t really found anything, so I ended up using my “feeling” to translate those words. Please forgive me if there are any translation errors. I am not familiar with how fonts work for the Chinese language and due to time constraints, I went with the default system font. The result doesn’t look nice. I will spend some time in the future to research on Chinese fonts and see if I can find something better.
Latest version that includes the Simplified Chinese Language Support is uploaded. Version 1.1.1