Author: sick skills

As much as I’m enjoying Star Trek: Discovery I have often wondered what a new Star Trek television series, set after the events of Voyager and Deep Space Nine, would look like. For a decade and a half it’s seemed like Thar Be Dragons in those deep waters of the series’ chronology. 

Somehow I’d forgotten about Star Trek Online, however–at least until an io9 article that described the game in exactly these terms came across my feed. I have to say it really is the unofficial heir to the television series’ mantle of canon, and in the weeks I’ve played the game I’ve truly come to appreciate its storytelling and unique take on its source material.

The quality of its narrative is uneven, but mostly good and mostly very Trek-y. The best parts of the game are those that manage to go beyond mere combat to tell an interesting story about Trek’s weird, wonderful galaxy. Helping a species new to warp drive take their first steps out beyond their homeworld, for instance, or traveling back in time to stop a comet from attracting transphasic ghosts. 

There’s also no small joy to be had in how the game takes minor plot points from the old TV shows and spins them out into grand stories in their own right, often bringing back the original actors to provide voice work for the continuation of their stories. An obscure species that featured in a single episode of Voyager becomes the big bad for an entire satisfying arc about the Delta Quadrant; the fate of Tasha Yar spools out into an entire series of quests, and her half-Romulan daughter became a world historical figure. In the meantime, an epic and moving mission sees you help Captain Harry Kim make peace with a clone of himself created by a temporal rift. Yes, it’s all really weird–and that’s as Star Trek should be.

“Star Trek Online really is the unofficial heir to the television series’ mantle of canon, and in the weeks I’ve played the game I’ve truly come to appreciate its storytelling and unique take on its source material.”

But it’s worth paying tribute to what makes this possible in STO. It’s the way each mission is structured as an “episode” of a television show. If you look, most missions in the game follow the narrative beats of an hour-long network TV show, which makes the game’s switching between its space and ground phases feel natural and even necessary. It’s, of course, a lot more combat heavy than The Next Generation, but that doesn’t stop the story from being told. 

Many missions start with a certain goal that is quickly superseded by rapidly evolving events. A quiet series of lunar scans turns into a search and rescue operation which turns into a race against time to stop a planetary superweapon from going off; it’s an old narrative trick but it’s used to stunningly great effect here in a way that has the added benefit of thoughtfully expressing Trek-y themes. Having these wild, sometimes improbable narrative jump-cuts makes STO feel like the show.

Like most of these games, of course, combat can become a tedious and pointless grind–which feels especially prevalent in the away team missions. These third person combat sections, which most resemble traditional MMO combat, are the weakest part of the game in nearly every measure; gooey controls, ugly graphics, repetitive and uncreative combat. But the game shines in both its space battles (where there’s a surprising amount of replayability due to the fully 3D nature of it, permitting a kind of strategic thinking I’ve not toyed around with this much since Homeworld) and in its non-combat bits. 

Making a successful videogame that ties into a popular, non gaming IP relies on capturing the feel of the original work to some degree. STO manages this quite neatly in a number of simple, cost-effective non-combat puzzles in many of its missions. I am always pleasantly surprised when a game forces me to sit up and actually pay close attention to what I’m reading, where I’m asked to remember key facts and details, or names, or a certain order of operations for a later task. It’s almost always all multiple choice menus; STO gets a surprising amount of mileage out of its dialogue box, which does duty as everything from a frequency tuner to a warp core to an alien artifact. One gets the sense that this was a cost cutting measure. It forces a single, simple UI to do so much; that it’s done with such finesse is a testament to the skill of Cryptic’s developers.

“These wild, sometimes improbable narrative jump-cuts makes STO feel like the show.”

In another mission, you have to question a prisoner. Your officers advise the most culturally-sensitive path to building a rapport with the prisoner–a medic who participated in an assault on a defenseless ship. You need him to tell you how to safely remove a horribly invasive neural device he’d implanted in one of the survivors. Your dialogue choices, which are not always wildly different from one another, determine whether he opens up to you or walls himself off. It’s a relatively rare moment in this game, but it’s the sort of thing that really pays off. There’s a frisson that comes from these sorts of non-combat/dialogue puzzles where reading comprehension, empathy, and emotional reasoning are the primary skills you bring to bear. It’s also highly appropriate for a Star Trek game.

STO succeeds in large measure because it manages to nail Star Trek’s tone so well, using its limited suite of mechanics and UI tools in creative ways to capture that spirit. By fitting this into a narrative structure that mimics a 60 minute episode of a TV series, Cryptic manages to do this while also creating a satisfying series of missions that make this one of the best story-rich MMOs out there. The “page turner” effect I look for in in-game stories was definitely there. I wanted to do the next mission just to see what happened. I was, dare I say, engaged.

In any event, the game offers some surprising lessons on doing a lot with a little, especially where text is concerned. It’s almost like a visual novel was grafted onto this graphically intensive, explodey game–and I mean that as nothing but the highest of praise.

Now if we could just get working holodecks on our ships…

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.

Games industry veterans across the UK are calling on the British government to champion the sector by officially recognizing and funding a British Games Institute (BGI). 

The BGI campaign was launched earlier this year, and is now looking to gather more momentum through petitioning website Change.org. 

Games Workshop co-founder and former Eidos CEO Ian Livingstone is leading the charge, and says it’s time the government showed its support for an industry that contributes over £1.2 billion ($1.58 billion) to the UK economy each year. 

The proposed BGI would be modeled on the British Film Institute, and would look to “support future growth by driving innovation and opportunities in the sector.”

“Some of the most creative and competitive games studios in the world are based in the UK, yet almost all UK games companies struggle to raise finance and access skills, and have to fight against low public recognition of our amazing art form,” said Livingstone.

“The BGI’s programmes will help address these challenges. I’m convinced that the BGI can increase the level of investment, widen games’ cultural impact and source the skills our studios need to stay world-class.”

The BGI has been backed by trade bodies UKIE and TIGA, along with over 500 senior games, investment, arts, and education figures. 

You can find out more about the campaign, including how to show your support, over on the BGI website.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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This post was originally published on rasmusrasmussen.com

In this second part of the translation guide, we look closer at how to separate content from code, and set up strings to become translated text assets. The first part, in case you missed it, gives you a higher level overview of the entire translation/localization process, and the next part will include an example project, and show how to implement it all using Gamemaker Studio 2’s GML scripting language and ini-files.

Torgar’s Quest was built in Gamemaker Studio, but the approach I took for separating the content of the game out from the code is not engine specific. In fact, I first saw this done on a game I worked on, which was built in Unreal. Regardless of your engine, you can use this technique or a variation of it, such as replacing ini-files with XML.

Optimize the Source Material

An often overlooked part of translation begins with fine tuning the original source material, so it becomes primed for good translation. This includes running a terminology consistency check on the content, making sure you refer to important things the same way throughout the game. You should also revisit any flavor text or descriptions which may include either pop-cultural references (trivia), political content (check against local law in your target markets), mature themes or puns. For different reasons, these can all pose challenging for translators.

Some of the worst mistranslations I have seen, have come from the translator not understanding a pun or cultural reference in the source material, and thus translated it word-for-word in their own language, losing all cleverness and sometimes meaning in the process. For better results, be critical of your source material before you hand it to translators.

This does not mean your content has be bereft of pop-culture references or the like. Just make sure you leave it open enough, that a translator can localize it and substitute references with similar ones of their own. If editing your writing to make translation easier sounds like a bad compromise to you, consider that the end goal is to have the best possible result across all supported languages, otherwise why support them in the first place.

Split In-Game Content into Areas

If you have not done so already, now is a good time to categorize your in-game content. This is useful for referencing specific areas later, or for directing focus onto a specific part of your game. A typical way to split up written in-game content might be: Menus, Tutorial, In-game UI, Enemy info, Item descriptions, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc.

How it best makes sense to split up your content, depends on the game you are making. You can define these areas even if your in-game content is incomplete, as long as you know your game well enough to know what parts are still missing.

Double Check the Scope

Besides the strings in your game, there may be other content to consider for translation. If you have Voice Over in your game, will that be localized and recorded for different languages too? Will it be subtitled? How about your store description text and sales copy? What about achievement text, help documents, marketing material and your entire associated website? Point being: be aware of all the content surrounding the project, not just what is in the menus and on screen during gameplay. You must draw the line somewhere, and this phase is your last good chance to double check that line before committing to it.

For Torgar’s Quest, I decided to leave the voice over in English only, as it is purely there for flavor and is non-essential for the game. Compare that to the major hassle and expense of getting it done by voice actors in several countries, and it just was not worth it. I did choose to translate the Lore books you can find, which are also purely flavor, but since they are text based and appear in-game, it would seem weird if they were left in English. Likewise, I chose to translate the store description and achievements, but not the associated website or the trailer.

When preparing content for translation, always look beyond your game itself. Don’t be surprised by these things and end up piling on extra translation work right before launch. Map it out and make strategic decisions now!

Separate Out Hardcoded Strings

If you are like me, every string was first hardcoded straight into the code, and will now have to be found and replaced. I cover how to load the strings in part 3. For now, all you need to know is that every string must be replaced by a string-ID reference. When a string is displayed, the ID is matched with the correct text asset, which is then shown.

Using the areas you defined before, go through each one, looking for strings to replace with IDs. Add the area names as part of your string-ID naming standard. Like with variables in code, it is highly recommended that you name your string-IDs in a way that helps identify where they belong, and what their context is.

Compare these two string-IDs both referring to the label for a save button. Which one is easier to understand:

• MENU_BUTTON_SAVE
• MB30221

I have seen both styles used, even in AAA projects, and I know which one I prefer. You will notice in the top example, the first word refers to the overall area where this string appears, the menus. This helps to locate it on screen, but also, in cases where there are similar strings in different parts of the game that may have different meanings, like saving game progress vs. saving a hostage. Small nuances like these can be important in translation. The second part specifies where the string appears (on a button), and finally, there is contextual keyword to help identify what the string is about. Not rocket science, but you can save yourself a lot of headaches later, if you start out with solid naming.

File Formats and Handling of Assets

Depending on your project and the tools you are already using, setting up the cadence and tools for handing strings back and forth can be surprisingly challenging. For larger projects with multiple translators, you need a system where two people can’t work on the same strings simultaneously (thus overwriting each other and wasting time). Many team-based tools allow checking out of files and locking assets, but it is still something to take into consideration. I have worked with Perforce and Team Foundation Server for this purpose, and they both do a great job. On the low end of the scale, I have used Dropbox, and worked on shared Google spreadsheets, where you had to pay attention to other users’ names, to make sure you weren’t working on the same areas. Not a recommended way to work.

For small games with just 1 person per language, you can take a simpler approach. I used spreadsheets with the source string in one column, the translation in another, and columns for notes and IDs. I would hand over the spreadsheet to each translator, filled out except the translation part. Once completed, they sent it back. I would then compile (also known as copy and paste) each translation into a master spreadsheet. Here is where it gets technical.

In my game, I store the text assets in ini-files, 1 file for each language, and each section within the file matching a previously defined area. These are very easy to work with in the code, but not so much for keeping track of translations.

Ini-files have to be maintained with every translation update, every added, changed or removed string, and that is a mess to do manually. Errors will happen without a doubt! For that reason, I made a macro in the master spreadsheet, which allows me to export a pre-formatted ini-file straight from Excel. It also adds a version number to each file, in case I end up with multiple copies and not sure which one was newer. This took a little time to make, but saved so much more time and frustration down the road.

I am including the master spreadsheet here to hopefully help make your life easier.

DOWNLOAD: Game Translation Master Spreadsheet

You are free to use it or modify it for your own project without paying or crediting me (though I do appreciate a shout out or game key). It has a single record in it, just to show how one would enter records. We will also be using this in the example project, in part 3. As a disclaimer, you are using this at your own risk. I am not able to provide support for using or modifying the tool.

In part 3 I take you through the implementation of this into a Gamemaker Studio 2 project. Do you have questions? Did I leave something out? Let me know, and I will address it.