Twelve settlers, three languages
The whole game now speaks English, Dutch and Greek, with its own help, its own names and its own jokes in each.
Twelve settlers come to a town the mine left behind, with an old wagon full of planks, bread and water. That is how the help starts, and until this week that sentence, and every other one in the game, lived in the code in English. I speak Dutch at home, so the first thing I wanted was to read my own game in my own language.
Now every line the player reads comes from a table, one file per language. Each line is a whole sentence, never glued together from pieces, because “4 people are without work” does not come apart the same way in every language. Where a number changes the words, the table knows: one person is hungry, four people are hungry. You pick the language in the settings, and the first time the game starts it takes your computer’s language if it has it.
Switching does not need a restart. I switched in the middle of day 5 with the help open, and the alerts, the build bar, the clock and the page I was reading all turned Dutch at once. The wagon became de wagen, the haulers became sjouwers, and the alert about the field became “Akker wacht op hout”.
The people change too. Their names were never saved, they come from the world’s seed and each person’s number, so a switch gives everyone a name from the other language’s lists. In Dutch you meet people like Feike de Hoog and Hilletje de Kok, and a married woman is written the Dutch way of the time, her husband’s name first and her own after it, like Janna Smeets-van Loon. One family in twelve is still a joke, as in English, only now the jokes work in Dutch: somewhere in the town lives a Klaas Vaak, and with some luck an Anna Nas.
Then I added Greek. I do not speak it, so it waits for someone who does to read it before the game ships. The fonts I use only have Latin letters, so Greek falls back to Noto Sans, which you can see in the screenshot: it is plainer than the rounded letters around it. Greek surnames change for women, so Παπαδόπουλος has a wife called Παπαδοπούλου, and a married woman carries her own family’s name after “το γένος”.
Before all this I spent a day cleaning up. I wrote down the rules every change has to follow, from keeping the help pages true to leaving room for longer words, and checked the whole project against them. The old promo reels went, since their videos are all uploaded. The perf overlay got a dark panel and moved under the clock, where you can actually read it.