Hey everyone, it's about time for a small news update.
Game awards
I'm really excited to share that Gentoo Rescue won two big awards last month!
The first was the "Best Challenging Game" award at The 3rd Annual Thinky Awards hosted by Thinky Games. Gentoo Rescue was also a runner-up for the "Best Puzzle Design" and "Game of the Year" awards at the same event. I'm really grateful to everyone that nominated Gentoo Rescue for these categories. It's crazy to see it among other winners, including giants like Blue Prince. Definitely be sure to check out all of the other games appearing in the awards. You'll certainly find some hidden gems!
Later in the month I was surprised to be contacted by Lizard Kun, a content creator for indie games on Bilibili. They have quite a large audience among the Chinese community, so it was great to see that Gentoo Rescue won the "Best Systemic Puzzle Game" (or "Best Logic Puzzle Game"). Other finalists were Öoo, Spooky Express, Glowkeeper, and Lab Rat. Here's a YouTube video of the awards (which much fewer views than the one on Bilibili), with the relevant category running from ~41mins to ~45mins into the video. It includes a video of me accepting the award and announcing...
Localization into Simplified Chinese
The next patch will include localization into Simplified Chinese! I never thought the game would be so popular to warrant this effort, and so I originally didn't lay any groundwork for localization support. Over the last few weeks I've been hunting down every piece of text in the game, whether it's a menu button, a setting description, an error message, or something else. There's actually way more than you would expect. All of this text will be fed dynamically based on the current language, instead of being hardcoded. There's also the puzzle data like puzzle names and hints, which will also have localization support (including for custom levels if the creator can get the translations, too)! There's still a ton of translation left to be done, so no word yet on when this patch will happen. But it's happening!
Other languages?
General localization support means that it's easy (from my side) to add other languages. The only issue is translation. Are there any languages that I should prioritize after Simplified Chinese?
200 reviews soon?!
We're currently at 198 reviews with 100% positive! It wasn't long ago that I was begging for a few extra reviews to pass the 100-review threshold, and here we are about to hit 200 reviews. Thank you so much for the support! It makes it really easy to stay motivated on post-release work.
Steam Spring Sale
Oh yeah, the game is 20% off for Steam's Spring Sale. Tell your friends!