Language Support / Campain Length

[iob]

Hi,

I just want to add two questions before I ask more friends to back.

First: Will the game ge an official german translation (I would also recomend spanish, french etc)?
Second: Will the campaign length be lower (e.g. 3-5 hours instead of 8-12).

If both questions are answered with yes, I see a LOT of potential for our lan-parties. If not, the interest will be zero.

[kasnavada]

AFAIK from another thread were this was discussed... to both question "it could be done via modding, but will probably not be in the base game".

German translation will be possible via modding. I know not of official translations.

Campaign length is not currently planned to be lower than in AI war I, but there are possibilities of scenarios via modding, which could / could not be shorter and tailored to smaller sessions. So there are possibilities there. I personally plan, if the KS is successful, to work on a overhaul mod that aims to reduce the game time to single sessions.

[Tridus]

I thought the campaign length was meant to be shorter?

[Misery]

I thought the campaign length was meant to be shorter?

Aye, I could have sworn Chris mentioned this somewhere.  Possibly in the document.  I mean, it's a known issue that campaigns with the base galaxy size are a bit too long in the first game.

[kasnavada]

Shorter, yes, I think I saw that too. But shorter is what, 12 hours ? 16 ? The OP asked for "Shorter enough to be in the 3-5 hours range", and I haven't seen that. I stand corrected if I missed a post stated the opposite though. I kind of wish for a 4 hour AI War too, but I understand if / that a lot of people would like to keep the pace of the first game, so more in 10-30 hours long range.

[x4000]

Campaign length: overall I'm hoping that campaigns will be about 30% shorter than what they were before, just because of cutting out some of the "netflix time" things from the first game.  Making it quicker to actually get to the strategic and tactical parts, and not waiting around on things to build while timers tick down, etc.  The actual "meat" wouldn't be cut down any... unless you wanted to, via the extra configurability that is now around.

Doing a smaller map with an extra aggressive AI and with only one AI home command station would potentially get you into that 3-5 hour range, maybe with a few other tweaks.  There were already some folks that played the original in 4-6 hour campaigns, but they tended to both be more experienced and playing on very specific settings.  That didn't stop other people from having 50+ hour campaigns, with different settings.  The goal is to still have a huge spread like that for the sequel.

Official translations: those are unfortunately expensive to initially create, and then to maintain (and quickly become outdated), so I doubt we will have those.  It's certainly a possibility that we'll have something fan-created, or even that eventually we do have something official, but I would count the likelihood as very, very low.  We've not had good experiences with this in the past.

[iob]

Official translations: those are unfortunately expensive to initially create, and then to maintain (and quickly become outdated), so I doubt we will have those.  It's certainly a possibility that we'll have something fan-created, or even that eventually we do have something official, but I would count the likelihood as very, very low.  We've not had good experiences with this in the past.

If you want to stay small and niche, then do that. The German market is probably one of the biggest for strategy games. Tons of lan-parties are held here monthly and the games you can play with lan support are old and dwinling. I am talking about classic cs, starcraft, quake 3, company of heroesw and unreal tournament here.

There is a potential to be tapped.

If the translation stay "outdated" you are doing it wrong. I mean a lot of other small indie devs can do it. You just have to send your text to some fans or a translator. If it's wrong, someone will correct it.

It's a no brainer compared to the sales you can get imho, especially if you are lacking interest in the game now already. I can tell you that I have tons of friends who I regularly play strategy on lan, but noone would touch AI: War because they can't understand it. And I really tried because I wanted to beat it in lan.

I can't say much about the italian, spanish or french market, but I can tell you one thing: Most people there don't bother if it's not in their native tongue. Would you buy a game thats only in german? See.

I would also advise you to take a different route, much less units, much less options, more focus on gameplay. I mean you had like 10.000 armor and damage types in the last game. Seriously? .

Don't be surprised if noone wants this crap anymore in 2016. Look at how succesful games like stellaris or cities: Skylines were. Less is more. Maybe play some rounds of hearthstone. Yes, it's far fetched, but more often than not, I wonder why turrets like sniper turret were even in AI:War as they do almost nothing. You chould just remove them if they are so powerless.


Yeah, if your aim is to create a game for the 100 hardcore ai1 vets, stay as you are. If you want to get big, make it fun for more people. And I tell you, the market is RIPE for a challenging multiplayer coop title that get's it right. My friend and I just dumped 100 bucks each for the gears of war 4 campaign and thats only 8 hours!

[jenya]

I wonder why turrets like sniper turret were even in AI:War as they do almost nothing. You chould just remove them if they are so powerless.

you underestimate the power of logistics. One use case: the sniper turrets allow to skip the long process of visiting each guard post when capturing another minor planet (place several of them arnound entry wormhole, plus a few defences, and you can be busy elsewhere, these puppies will slowly clear the planet). Snipers were a part of my strategy, they save a lot of time on moving things around.

[WolfWhiteFire]

Quote from: x4000 on Yesterday at 01:01:48 PM

Official translations: those are unfortunately expensive to initially create, and then to maintain (and quickly become outdated), so I doubt we will have those.  It's certainly a possibility that we'll have something fan-created, or even that eventually we do have something official, but I would count the likelihood as very, very low.  We've not had good experiences with this in the past.

If you want to stay small and niche, then do that. The German market is probably one of the biggest for strategy games. Tons of lan-parties are held here monthly and the games you can play with lan support are old and dwinling. I am talking about classic cs, starcraft, quake 3, company of heroesw and unreal tournament here.

There is a potential to be tapped.

If the translation stay "outdated" you are doing it wrong. I mean a lot of other small indie devs can do it. You just have to send your text to some fans or a translator. If it's wrong, someone will correct it.

It's a no brainer compared to the sales you can get imho, especially if you are lacking interest in the game now already. I can tell you that I have tons of friends who I regularly play strategy on lan, but noone would touch AI: War because they can't understand it. And I really tried because I wanted to beat it in lan.

I can't say much about the italian, spanish or french market, but I can tell you one thing: Most people there don't bother if it's not in their native tongue. Would you buy a game thats only in german? See.

I would also advise you to take a different route, much less units, much less options, more focus on gameplay. I mean you had like 10.000 armor and damage types in the last game. Seriously? .

Don't be surprised if noone wants this crap anymore in 2016. Look at how succesful games like stellaris or cities: Skylines were. Less is more. Maybe play some rounds of hearthstone. Yes, it's far fetched, but more often than not, I wonder why turrets like sniper turret were even in AI:War as they do almost nothing. You chould just remove them if they are so powerless.


Yeah, if your aim is to create a game for the 100 hardcore ai1 vets, stay as you are. If you want to get big, make it fun for more people. And I tell you, the market is RIPE for a challenging multiplayer coop title that get's it right. My friend and I just dumped 100 bucks each for the gears of war 4 campaign and thats only 8 hours!

You asked a question, he answered it, that response seems a little excessive. Also to my knowledge they are trying to reduce the number of units by allowing the player to upgrade them to suit their playstyle, and are trying to improve gameplay, for example by removing "netflix time", but a lot less options just seems like it would make the game more shallow. Also a lot of that stuff you said would fit better in the gameplay ideas or multiplayer & variants sections of the forums and what makes you think he is lacking interest in the game?

[x4000]

In general, yes, we're going for fewer units, etc.

As to the whole translations issue and things getting out of date:

1. I'm sorry that offends you, and that's not meant to be an insult or anything.

2. Huge numbers of indie games can afford a translation to a lot of languages since they have a few thousand words in them at most.  The original AI War, circa 3.0, had about 35 thousand words.  The German and Russian translators were kind of agog at it, and the publishers we were working with in those markets were really going "oh no," sort of thing.

3. For some of the companies that are larger and working with Paradox or similar, I believe they have in-house translators, so it's no biggie.  If a unit is added or repurposed, or a tutorial needs tuning, or whatever else, then just call up Jan and get him to make the adjustments for German, and then someone else for Russian, Italian, Spanish, and maybe that's it.  For us the quotes we have had from translation companies (and we literally have been approached by multiple dozen over the years) have been astronomical.  Worst part is, the last translation of AI War was so bad that our German fans actually had to work together and fix it; this was not a company we hired, but rather the one hired by the German publisher we were working with for local game stores.

4. I know that the German market is huge, and a huge number of our players are from Germany actually.  We always go out of our way to make our games translate-able, in that we have everything pulled out into separate xml files and so forth so that translations can be done with ease.  But actually having someone who is sufficiently bilingual and sufficiently versed in the game, and available on an ongoing basis, is hard.  The localization services really stink.  And while I do have a number of German friends (I was last over in your country in 2014 and can't wait to be back; it's my favorite place to visit), they are not exactly strategy gamers or translators, and it does make a difference.

Anyway, the point is that it's complex, it's overwhelmed us in the past, we've tried it before and it has failed to lead to anything substantially useful, and I wish that wasn't the case.  We may be able to overcome that in the future, but pointing to an indie with a game with 2k of unchanging text and comparing it to an ever-evolving game with tens of thousands of words of text is very much apples and oranges.

[PokerChen]

...our German fans actually had to work together and fix it...

Subcontracting translators is generally a bad idea - from the other side, one'd almost always end up with phrases out of context, which is impossible to translate correctly, let alone with decent quality.
 I'd reiterate here that you could open up discussion in the KS updates/main page about the possibility of community translations, and be frank about the challenge (since lots of people don't appreciate how difficult translation is). This will help you gauge whether a localised v1.0 version would be possible, and whether it's worthwhile canvassing for a volunteer team during alpha. I say team here because it'll help to compensate for mistakes of individual unskilled volunteers - like how Duolingo works.

Would you buy a game thats only in german? See.

If there's a strat/RPG/adventure game you'd recommend, do mention it - I'd like something to help me solidify German.

As a side note, there was an age in the past where there were sets of decent Japanese PC games that could easily have attained cult following abroad like their consoles analogues. The trouble was how Unicode wasn't, well, universal code, so that you had to have a Japanese Win95/98 to not see gibberish... ...so a lot of Nipponophiles probably ended up opting for consoles instead to save themselves the trouble.

[jenya]

If there's a strat/RPG/adventure game you'd recommend, do mention it - I'd like something to help me solidify German.

I would recommend Drakensang http://store.steampowered.com/app/12640/
and Legends of Eisenwald http://www.pcgamer.com/legends-of-eisenwald-review/

[x4000]

Actually, if there are any games that are only in German that you think would help me learn German, I'd be all over that.  If it requires advanced German I'm out (I'm not remotely up to that yet), but I've been wanting to learn more and more.

[iob]

I wanted to point out what is needed as a multiplayer game for the usual,lan,party i know.

I am nit sure how much lan play ai classic even got. From some major bugs i stumbled across, not so much i guess. I would say less than 1% gameplay.

For solo,play, a long campaign, civ atyle, ia very good thoguh. Also i dont care if its tranöated in a single player game.

But for lan play in germany with new players, it doesnt work.

I am also not offended in any way. I just think that its a no brainer to make a pc game with challenging coop for strategy fans.

Maybe the coop market is smaller than i thought but then even sc2 implemented a shitty coop and tons of friends play tower defense maps...

If thentarget isnt an international game or the guys who like,coop tower def its fine.

I would target those 2 though

If you want to learn german, probably the old lucasarts adventures are great. At least thats how i learned english.

Mckraken, maniac mansion, monkey island...

[iob]

Besides, why.does ai war classic even have so much text?

There was no story. Did it have 35k units with 100 words decription each? As I said the problem is seen here. If you have so much text in a game without a story something is wrong.

Maybe compress unitbdescription?