Hi Tromboners,
We're excited to announce that a Trombone Champ update is coming soon, which will allow the game to be played in 10 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean!
This update is a lot larger than the usual ones, because adding support for multiple languages means adjusting every single piece of text in the game. This is also why it's been a while since we've posted an update here! It's time-consuming work that requires a lot of testing.
While we finish up this update, we'd like to take a moment to discuss it in (perhaps too much) detail!
Update Size
Unfortunately, since almost every single piece of GUI has been adjusted and all of the track assets have been restructured, this update will be around 500mb. This is a bummer, since people playing in English shouldn't see that many changes. Apologies for the inconvenience, but this is unavoidable!
Additionally, this is definitely one of those updates that will destroy most existing mods when it comes out. As usual, check for mod updates - and if you need to, you'll be able to opt-in to the previous, un-localized version of the game using Steam's "Betas" tab.
About the Localization Work
The vast majority of localization was done by Keywords Studios. They've done a tremendous amount of work... all of the GUI, all 50 cards, and the metadata for every base track has been localized! That's more content than you'd think, especially now that the game ships with almost 60 tracks!
Keywords Studio's work was mostly aimed at the Nintendo Switch™ version of the game, so there are a lot of very small text fields specific to PC that we had to add and adjust ourselves using online tools, such as graphical settings, some button language, etc. We took care to double-check these for accuracy, but it's difficult to ensure that every single piece of text is perfect in every single language. When the update comes out, we will make a thread in the Steam Discussion page dedicated to mistranslations - so if you see anything that's mistranslated or awkwardly translated, don't hesitate to mention in there! Luckily, it's very fast & easy for us to adjust / correct text problems.
Benefit: Restructured Track Assets
One of the most challenging parts of getting localization working was adjusting how track metadata is saved and loaded. In the previous version of the game, all of the track metadata (track titles, descriptions, artists, genres, etc.) were kept in one enormous file. Needless to say, adding ten languages to this already large and messy file wasn't a great idea.
Ultimately, rather than hack together a quick and ugly solution, we decided to significantly rework how the game loads track assets. The new system is much cleaner and actually makes sense! Each track simply has a folder, and this folder contains everything the track needs: metadata files in various languages, the track's level data, the sample audio clip, etc. Previously, these files were scattered all over the place.
Even though normal gamers shouldn't notice that the data has been restructured, this restructuring comes with a bunch of benefits:
- Half of the work we'd eventually need to do to get an official level editor working has been done, thanks to this updated structure.
- Likewise, half of the work needed to eventually get content loaded via Steam Workshop should also be done thanks to this restructuring.
- If you're the type of person who likes to tinker, it should be much easier to dig into the game's files and mess around (just don't complain to us if you break the game).
- As the game grows in size, it should be much easier to add songs to all versions of the game.
Visual Changes
If you're playing the game in English, the new version should look & feel almost identical to the previous version. However, since we needed to adjust basically every single piece of GUI, we've made some tiny improvements and polished up a number of items throughout the user interface. Some of these updates are things already present in the Nintendo Switch™ version of the game.
Notably, the "Tromboner Cards" look a little different - previously, each of these was a single PNG with the text baked into the image. In order to get these to display in ten languages, we had to break them up: the text is now rendered in-engine. One benefit of this is that we're able to make a much nicer "golden" effect!
PC & Nintendo Switch™
If you have the Nintendo Switch™ version of the game, you might have noticed that it already supports localization. So why did it take so long to come to PC?...
To make a long story short, we had to split the Nintendo Switch™ and PC versions into separate projects - and stupidly, we did this before beginning localization. So, we essentially had to do all of the localization work twice over.
Fortunately, since we've already done this work for Nintendo Switch™, we were able to do it much more quickly this time. Also, of course, we were able to re-use huge chunks of code to speed up the process even further.
Bonus Update: Score Changing
This update also changes how scoring works: short notes are worth a bit more and long notes are worth a bit less. Also, notes that consist of multiple "slides" are now treated as one note, rather than being broken up into a bunch of individual segments.
As a result of this, the maximum scores for every track are increasing! If you're competing with your friends on the Steam Leaderboards, you'll want to replay the tracks you really care about!
The Future of Trombone Champ
We plan to continue to update Trombone Champ for the foreseeable future! However, once this update goes live, we will finally be close to having a version to which we can say: "if we were to disappear from the face of the Earth, we would be ok with where this game left off."
As mentioned earlier, the next "large" update will likely be centered around an official level editor, which then will lead into Steam Workshop integration (unless we hit any unforeseen roadblocks).
Of course, in addition to "large" updates we have planned, we also plan to add more tracks and continue improving the game in incremental ways!
We hope to release this update very soon, and are already working on new content for the updates beyond that. Thank you for your patience as we finish up!!!
-Holy Wow Studios