Ars Technica
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2023
10:18 · 317K views · May 21, 2019
Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains in Ars Technica's War Stories how localizing the game's logbook nearly sank the project.
Recommended for its insight into game design and cited as a vivid example of how tricky localization can be.
3 comments from Hacker News
Pope nailed in with Obra Dinn in how he implemented the detective gameplay and story telling. The game had me with several wtf story moments. This is one of those games that I'm reluctant to start playing as I don't want it to end to soon but can't stop playing once I've started it. Also worth watching are these insights into the game design (and a chance to enjoy the soundtrack again) (spoiler warning): this video [LINK]
Arstechnica did a war stories with him on Return of the Obra Dinn, combining one of my fave video series with one of my fave gamedevs. this video
A particularly tricky case of this is with usernames and user defined content. Eg, a notification like "Alice is online" in some languages requires knowing Alice's gender. Which may be something that's not even stored anywhere in the system. There's probably some language out there that requires some other piece of personal info for a correct translation. To make things tricky, try having a multitude of items that you refer to: "You're holding a dagger". Now you need to have a serious discussion with your translators, because this is going to get all kinds of tricky, as the maker of Obra Dinn discovered: this video And to make things extra-tricky, allow users to create content. "Alice gave you a banana", where "banana" is a custom object Alice made herself. Most translation efforts seem to give up at this point and resort to something stilted like "Alice: online"