Two weeks to launch, Localisations

Hey everyone! It’s two weeks till we launch Dicey Dungeons, so I thought it was time for a quick update!

I’d expected to be feeling really nervous round about now, but actually I think we’ve all been too busy for that to sink in. It’s kind of a rush right now, seeing all the pieces of this weird game finally come together: sound effects and music and animations and writing and missing chunks of game design, all coming together and fitting into place. I can’t wait to share this with everyone!

One thing that’s changed quite a lot in the couple of months since the last public build is the story – not what the story is about, but just how much of it there is. I originally imagined that Dicey Dungeons would have an almost invisible story – just enough to hang the game together, a line or two here and there explaining why everyone is down here fighting monsters and walking around as giant dice. I never imagined the writing would be a substantial part of the game.

But once we started putting those little moments of story in, it worked so well! Lines for the monsters in the dungeon to say, just occasionally, when you beat them. Introductions to each new episode from Lady Luck. Tiny interviews explaining who the six main characters are and why they came to the Dungeons. Once the writing and the sounds and the animation of the characters all began to fit together, it really helped to make the game feel like one big whole world. So, I asked our writer, Holly to write us some more!

This is all great, but it’s caused a problem: We’re probably not going to have all of the localisations ready on launch day.

I originally got our translators to sign on for a much smaller job – about 4000 words or so – but as the game has been getting bigger and bigger over the past year, the word count got bigger too. Right now, I think it’s closer to 20,000 words, about five times more text than they were expecting.

None of the jokes or incidental lines or cutscenes in the game are actually very long – there’s nothing that runs more than 15 or 20 seconds, and a lot of the key moments are only one sentence long. But there’s a LOT of those – broken up into hundreds of different tiny moments. Also, since v0.17, I’ve more than doubled the amount of equipment in the game too (thanks to the new Parallel Universe episodes).

We’re still hoping to have a couple of languages other than English ready for launch (I should know more about which ones over the next two weeks), and then, after launch, I’ll be updating the game as soon as the remaining translations come in, which I expect will happen over the first couple of weeks. I’ll keep Steam updated with details of when languages are coming as I know more.

Thanks for playing <3 Into the final stretch, now…