Don't Eat Soap (In Chinese!)

I have been working on a Chinese translation of my game "Don't Eat Soap"




I hope to have it working for the new chinese version of the OUYA console, coming soon as a result of their partnership with Xiaomi and Alibaba.

We don't have any real support for internationalization yet. We still cant have fonts with more than 255 characters, and we still can't have fonts with characters bigger than 8x8.

I am working around these limitations by replacing all the text in the game with sprite slices. I chose Don't Eat Soap for this task because it doesn't have all that much text, and it is already mostly scripted anyway.

I don't speak a word of Chinese, so I have been relying on http://translate.google.com/ and hoping that OUYA will be able to put me in contact with a good proofreader to help me fix mistakes.

That's awesome!

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
� C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

That's excellent! Great idea dude!

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Check out Red Triangle Games!

Fantastic! I'm interested to hear about your download counts once the Chinese OUYA launches.

"Please do not eat the bar"
"To press start"




"Avoid to eat the bar"
"Immediately! Press a button!"

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Nice :) I didn't know you spoke

Can you suggest better translations for those lines? I would prefer something that is soap specific rather than a bar of anything

And my "press any key" seems not to have translated well

Wow. I never would have suspected this!

Must be laborious to create all that text as sprites. I'm actually planning to allow importing TrueType fonts (rasterizing them and saving them as normal bitmap fonts... at import-time rather than in-game, I think).

This is pretty neat! Have there been any OHR games translated to other languages before? I vaguely remember there being a German(?) game that was translated to English, or was going to be translated to English, at some point in the past... but no English-to-another-language translations come to mind.

"Immediately! Press a button!" doesn't seem like too bad of a translation. Not an exact/literal translation, but the meaning is preserved pretty well.

But yeah, "avoid to eat the bar" probably needs to be re-translated, for both "doesn't specify soap" and "super awkward grammar" reasons. XD

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

I just made those up! But my parents are in China teaching English at the moment, and I can have them show your translations to a student if they're OK with it.

If the OUYA crew have a dedicated localization team, even better.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

If only Japanese and Mandarin were even remotely close to the same language I would probably be able to help. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This is super ambitious and cool!

Much less than expected. I just copy-paste from google translate into a text layer in The Gimp, and save as a BMP backdrop or large enemy sprite

Mogri: haha! You had me fooled :)

Fnnrf: I believe there are more than one German. I think there is at least one Portuguese, and there is one in Hungarian that even has an Android port on google play. Halapzachtrian, or something like that? I am sure I spelled that super wrong :P

I hadn't heard of any Portuguese or Hungarian games getting translated into English, and maybe only one in German.

However, there was this game, originally in Swedish, which the author translated into English:
Zander by Leo

Oh, I missed that part of the question. No, the Hungarian game was never translated to English.

I am sort of stuck on the name entry for high scores. I know I could make a small enemy sprite for every single character, but I am not even sure where to find a definitive list-- and are there special characters used for names? I don't know.

I wish I knew what arcade cabinet games in China use for high score name/initial entry... I guess I could go ROM hunting :P

Even if you did include a huge list of Chinese characters, how would people enter or select them? At a minimum that requires ordering them, but I don't think there is a natural way to order them. I think you should find some Chinese speakers and ask them; there's no other way. I know that there are a HUGE number of different IMEs for Chinese, which work in completely different ways. For example one way uses text spelt phonetically with Latin characters (pinyin), others use phonetic spelling with the sounds of Chinese characters, and others are based on strokes. But I have no idea what's done in contexts where you have no IME, like a high score table in an arcade game.

I updated this!

Android: http://hamsterrepublic.com/tmp/eatsoap_zh-release-signed.apk
Windows: http://hamsterrepublic.com/tmp/eatsoap_zh.zip

It is now fully translated! (still not proofread at all)

I scripted my own pinyin text entry screen, and it also includes the 160 most common hanzi characters.

This is used for both highscores and level-skip passwords

I work with these pinyin fake strings as a container slice with one child for each letter, with the letter index in the extra data 0 slot. For saves I write them into global variables.

It is mildly clumsy, but it works, and was much less trouble to implement than I feared.

I am still working with OUYA trying to figure out how to get the proofreading done so I can release on the Xiaomi console.