Layer8Problem · published
The game is now available in English. In full, not in parts: every event, the inbox, the phone chat, the intranet, the noticeboard, the knowledge, the company chronicle, the achievements, the morning moods, the excuses, the news ticker, the diary and every label around them. Around 11,600 texts, a good 650 standard pages.
It was translated scene by scene, not word by word. Where a punchline does not carry in English, it has been rebuilt - Kevin's nickname for Miller, for instance. What draws its effect from the German stays German: the Mettigel, the TÜV, the Döner, the colleagues' names. Müller is called Miller, which is the literal translation and the same joke: the most common surname in the country, and therefore nobody in particular.
There are two places to switch: at the bottom of the start screen with a plain DE | EN, and in the settings. The one on the start screen is deliberate - anyone who ends up with the wrong language cannot go looking for a settings menu whose label is in the wrong language too. On the first start the browser decides, in the Steam version the language set there; anyone who has played before stays with German.
The switch happens on the spot, without reloading and without losing anything: in the middle of the day, in the middle of an event, in the middle of a phone chat. Everything on screen comes along, the log and the open conversation included - a week you began in German can be finished in English. Save files are language-independent.
In the Steam version, everyone now reads the friends list in their own language. Until now it showed the player's - play in German and you were off fetching coffee for your English friends as well.
The break now has a memory too. Run ten kilometres with the running group and you feel it on the stairs the next day; let the sales rep take you out for sushi and you find a summary in your inbox in the morning saying "as discussed", although nothing was discussed.
The seat at the board's table stays free for a day and waits. At the old table, Kevin and Chantal have made room as well.
Eight new incidents, making thirty-eight: an expired certificate in the customer shop, both ends of a network cable in the same socket, a manufacturer recall affecting your devices of all things, the annual test of the emergency power supply, an air conditioning unit set a little too well, a delivery in the fire escape, an update that redistributes itself, and a call in which everything is right except the department.
Two of the new ones have a continuation. The call from head office becomes a story over three days that can be read up in the knowledge - if you follow it to the end.
An emergency now has a tomorrow. Eight incidents get an aftershock the next day: the smell after the capacitor and the inspection report, the koi in the water butt in the meeting room, the invoice for the emergency router, Kevin's four handwritten pages after the near-deletion.
The titles are no longer named after their type of disaster but after what actually happens - the display already writes NOTFALL in red anyway. Four incidents previously had practically the same name.
The texts have been reworked: fewer capitals, fewer exclamation marks, and more precision instead. An emergency becomes tense through what you see, not through punctuation.
Twelve chains instead of six - so Friday repeats itself after twelve weeks at the earliest. New among them: the evaluation of the staff survey, a video link to the Southern branch with no sound, an appointment nobody attends, the preparation for the external audit, a pilot project with an assistant that has learned from your own ticket replies, and a workshop about too many meetings.
All the meetings have got longer: three decisions instead of two and twice as many exits. The new middle section is what really makes meetings drag - the slide afterwards, the follow-up question, the colleague who would like to add something.
No tickets come in while the meeting runs - everybody is sitting in the same room, after all. It lasts three quarters of an hour and there is no leaving it, so until now Friday could end in a dismissal there was no way to prevent, in the closing scene of a week you had otherwise survived. The time it costs stays, so the afternoon is as tight as it was.
The book now also covers the summer party, the weekly meeting, the consultancies, two persistent senders from the inbox and Jürgen from sales.
Entries with unread notes highlight their number in the register. Open the book and you land directly on the new entry; after that the number sits there quietly again.
Each of the seven colleagues has gained a note from the personal encounters - it records what you only find out about somebody once you have dealt with them for a while.
The six stations in the foyer now carry images of their own instead of emoji - beer mug, salad bowl, disco ball, armchair, cigarette and toilet. Emoji are drawn by the operating system and looked different under Windows, under Linux and in the Steam overlay; the foyer is by far the most-seen screen of the evening and now looks the same everywhere.
Nine result texts told the player what the display underneath shows anyway - "Das Radar sinkt massiv" stood directly above "Chef -10". They now describe what actually happens instead of reading the number out. Nobody in this building knows they have a radar.
Very long words with no break point - the coffee machine's error code, for instance - pushed the event text off the screen on a phone. Such words now wrap, and ordinary tapeworms are hyphenated rather than stretched. Affects events, results, the phone chat and the knowledge.
A phone errand could briefly show a bar above 100 % before it snapped back. The value was never really higher; the display was a blink ahead of the cap.
Continue a day that was saved before an update and the log named the version from back then, while the terminal header next to it named the new one. Both now agree.
Kevin is the apprentice, not an intern - he had been promoted in five places, from his own call heading to a morning mood. Bernd is in sales, not logistics. The thick manual is Windows-95-Handbuch in all twelve places. And the boss's office is below the server room, not above it, which is why everything drips into it.
Where two places named different figures, the smaller one was right: a full descaling takes seventy-five minutes and not ninety, and the ten minutes in the tea kitchen stay ten minutes - they are still the most relaxing of the day.
Six spelling mistakes that had been standing since 5.0, among them a "Taffe" travelling across the table and a bellowed "STEKCER ZIEHEN, SIE IDIOT!". Plus three small corrections in the knowledge and the errands: Herr Aluhut has exactly one alias and not several, Frau Elster now accepts the donut that was actually put in front of her, and the error message stammered at Sarah from HR is complete.