Parlez vous Français?

Every single message, menu item, tooltip, and pop-up has to work in multiple languages. The idea is to get all this text into a table and look it up when you want to say something. Then, once you have all your text you send it off to get translated.

Well, that’s the theory. Like I said before, we had to support everything that could go wrong, like a memory unit becoming corrupt, so quite often we found we needed to add a new message. Luckily for us we had some great development partners, a multi national studio and one person’s girlfriend who was a translator, who were all happy to translate the odd string for us.

The hardest part, though, is ensuring that everything still lines up and fits properly on the screen, especially for languages like French and German which tend to have much longer words. This means thinking ahead when creating layouts of screens both in the front end and in the game itself and then adapting once you get the languages in place. Not hugely complicated but time consuming and requires a good level of patience.

Game over

During all these technical challenges it was important to remember one thing: that Chime, beyond anything else it had to be able to do, had to be a fun, challenging game with great music. Every decision made had to come back to this point and I think we succeeded.

Barry Northern – Lead Programmer