Friday Rambles and Gamedev Update 2024-03-15

It's the Friday Friday Rambles, and whew boy am I tired.

Made it to the new place, still unpacking boxes. I set up the computers asap because I needed to finish remaining work for the Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese localizations, and of course, build them for all platforms. But the coolest thing about it was spending like 4 hours on the phone with my ISP trying to get my internet to work (and eventually failing), and using a wifi hotspot on my phone instead, which kinda sucked but at least it worked. Albeit super slowly. Waiting on the upload to Apple servers for app notarization was really fun.

After pulling an all-nighter everything was ready to launch the evening before the Spring Sale (in typical Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines fashion), so we launched the CHS and PTBR localizations with much fanfare. Hooray! 

Above: CHS announcement pic

Above: PTBR announcement pic

Thank you to the CHS translator Kakihara MasO and PTBR translator snowkoil for all your hard work and dealing with me for the past few months.

And of course, now we see the fruits of our labor, as many people rush to buy the game in their language with the cool Steam Spring Sale discount. (or so the hope goes.)

Above: The Spring Sale Pic

With all that done, I'm finally going to focus my energy on the next story update, which I've been promising for months at this point, but got sidetracked doing all this localization stuff. I'm only one tortured voice, dammit. 

Above: Chinese localized title is: 永不结束的星期一：梦想与死线. Yeah I redrew all the sprites myself

I learned a lot from this experience. I think for launch next time around I'm going to focus on CJK for the non-English localizations, if at all. Localization is a lot of hard work, and with as many words as my game has (and future games will have), I have to really think about whether it's worth it to spend all that time and money and effort on it. After all, I need to break even at least for it to be worth it, speaking from a purely financial standpoint. Not counting the opportunity cost due to time spent. Then again, it's early on in the Spring Sale - maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised (and at least one language from this batch is doing pretty good). But more and more, I'm thinking the return on investment (financially, temporally, mentally) would be far greater if I just spent my time making the next game. 

Yeah. It's time to move on.

So in about a week and a half I'll be flying overseas for a long-planned trip to the ol' family homestead. I'll be taking my fancy new laptop for writing scripts and doing gamedev, but I'll probably be more busy doing family stuff. This means I won't be able to do anything cool for the 1 year anniversary of the game, but why do I need to do something for the 1 year anniversary of the game? No! I'm not going to feel guilty for not being able to extra work for the 1 year anniversary of the game. But hopefully I'll make some significant progress on the story update and have it out before it's too far past the 1 year anniversary of the game, after I'm back at my home sweet moving-box-filled home.

Okay, I'm going to spend this week sleeping and posting about how everyone should buy my game, and unpacking boxes, and sleeping. I think things might be more interesting soon, because I'll finally be working on something new.

Anyway, thanks for your support, as always. See you next week!