We're proud to announce that Soda Dungeon 2 is now available for Steam (WIN+OSX) and mobile! We want to give a heartfelt thanks to all the users that have helped us during our testing phases, as well as those of you that have just been patiently waiting for news. We have a ton of updates planned for the game and will be looking to start on new content as soon as possible. Please leave us a review or comment with your thoughts on the game, we'd love to hear it!
We're also excited that we're able to launch the game in six different languages: English, French, German, Russian, Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese. Localization is no small task but luckily we learned some lessons from Soda Dungeon 1 that made this process easier. The big one was to make sure we avoided placing any text into images, because then you need to export unique translated copies of each image for as many languages as you support. This was a pretty big headache in Soda Dungeon 1 when we decided to retrofit the game with additional language support.
That being said, localization always carries challenges with it no matter how much prep work you do. We ended up needing just under 3000 lines of text localized. Text adds up quick when you need to translate the same words in different contexts. We work with an outside team to handle this, and part of the process is being able to preserve the meaning of names, expressions, and unique language constructs. Sometimes a joke in English just doesn't make any sense in another language, so the translator must find a way to convey it as best as they can. Sometimes it's as simple as a word in English functioning as both a verb and an adjective. In the game we have a quests menu that has two tabs: Active and Complete. Here the word "complete" means "quests that have been completed" but when viewed as a word by itself in a text file, it's easy to assume the verb form was intended, such as "you need to complete this task." The localization team sends us back a list of notes so we can clarify issues like this. My favorite exchange was probably a line of dialogue in which a character refers to progress in the game as "big juicy numbers." The translator was a little puzzled by this and just asked "...what does this mean?"
Anyway, If you'd like to join the conversation or just say hello, please stop by our Discord server or Reddit!
https://discord.gg/sodadungeon
https://www.reddit.com/r/sodadungeon/
https://twitter.com/SodaDungeon