Game Maker Studio Localizing Text Tutorial Video Lecture - Game Maker Tutorial

Oh
game developers designers and cool kids
in general welcome back I have a very
exciting announcement to make that I'm
not going to make this is me announcing
the announcement I'm gonna do another
video where I make the announcement but
this video isn't but it's gonna be
really cool so I'm telling you about it
so you can look forward to the
announcement where I announce the cool
thing basically I'm gonna do like a
livestream thing over a couple of weeks
I'm gonna make a cool game and give you
all the source code and you're gonna
watch a little blood it all to YouTube
and it's gonna be really really cool but
I'll talk about it in detail a mom of
what's going on with that and how
awesome and cool and exciting it's gonna
be in the video I do I just day or
tomorrow I talk about how cool and
exciting and awesome that's gonna be but
in the meanwhile this video today what
we're gonna be looking at is how to
localize a game or rather how I
specifically localized my game another
perspective that's this game you're
probably looking at right now I was
going through like my patreon tutorial
special ease up not not had a lot of
time this week unfortunately but I saw
this topic and I didn't have a lot of
votes but I was like oh I could I can do
that's pretty straightforward and also I
think it'll just help a lot of people
sign get this one out the way pretty
quickly and it's a cool one to talk to
Mike I also get to plug my game at the
same time so that's pretty cool too so
this is another perspective you might
not have seen it like this it's in debug
mode and it's got like the little
debugger thing going on in the top
corner there where I see all the FPS and
I have all my key commands to send
myself throughout the game a thing I did
in another perspective cuz a few people
we're asking them offering to do things
like fan translations and stuff is I
added a few languages so you can see all
the tanks in English and you can see it
in Italian and you can see it in Spanish
and you can also now see it in French so
there's a few extra languages added into
the game now basically I'm just gonna
talk a little bit today about how I did
that technically speaking and some of
the problems you might run into when
wanting to localize your game and just
general things for you to think about in
terms of the method you might use to go
about solving that particular problem if
you want people to
be able to read your game in their
language so with another perspective
like the text is also shown to the
screen via things like if I come out of
the game and go to say oh just some
random room like some room with some
actual text and it would help like this
this little object here called obj
underscore well okay no that's called
text on because I have a bunch of
different text objects and there was
text objects basically they have the
text that they want to display that like
comes up in the I just add during in the
creation code of the specific instance
that I drop into the room so I plunked
the object in the room then I edit the
creation code or I add in the actual
string of text that I want to show to
the screen and then the object does a
bunch of fancy things because sometimes
I want to only show the text when I only
want to show the text when the player is
gone all the keys or touched a certain
point in the room or something like that
in order to control pacing and all those
other kinds of little things so that's
how it works when I came to came around
to wanting to localize it basically what
I did is I use in any file and I've
talked about this before I have a video
on that you can check that out on using
any files to save and load different
kinds of data by Van any file called
language dot any where basically I have
every single string in the game under a
section called English and they will
have numbers about and all the sunlight
it's not very long game that's like 300
or something lines of text or something
like that in the game and they're all in
this any file and the English and then
when I want to do a translation I add a
new section with a different language
name so because we can see down here I
have Italian and I have those exact same
numbers that match up to each specific
line equaling their new lines of text
okay then yeah that's more or less how
that works so what I then do is I have a
script called where as a ser and score
string where basically I pass the number
of the string that I want to get for a
specific block of text and I go into the
any file and I
the string under that number in the
section based on whatever language I
have set on a global variable of just
global dot language which I can change
in the options by just cycling global
lot language the variable goes between
Orton three and then nor is English one
is Italian two is Spanish it's French
right so it just finds the appropriate
section and then just finds the
appropriate strain from that section
okay
so then instead of writing in the
creation code text equals and then a
long English string of text which is
what I did when I the game was only in
English I just replaced that with text
equals SCR and it's got string and then
the ID of the string that it needs to be
I leave those blocks of text in there
and I've left them all in from around
the game just so the just that I can see
when I'm looking through the game what
each string was kind of thing I can
remember in English rather than just
looking at a number because then the
line of code doesn't necessarily do
anything there I could just make that a
comment if I wanted to basically be the
same thing because it just gets
overwritten immediately anyway but I
just like added that line on top of them
I'm just left the other lines in as
essentially comments yeah now one of the
major problems that I ran into with this
method I mean this method works
perfectly well unlike say like text is
there and then I changed global variable
and then it shows the different types
okay I mean at the moment I'm in in
French mode and like if I just use my
debug commands and change the language
you can see how it's changing I have to
reset the room each time for it to kick
in but that's just through various other
methods of how my game is put together I
think I see that it works now one of the
biggest problems I run into just because
of the way my game specifically is
designed and I'm just about I'm not like
talking about this now just to sort of
highlight issues you may have trying to
do the same sort of thing with your game
is that uh because all my text is kind
of on the screen like this and it was
kind of important for me specifically
and for my game to have all the text in
like aesthetically nice-looking spaces
and to like not leak into the walls and
so on and I ran into a lot of problems
where I really
carefully crafted in English sand so
that it fitted into a specific space but
then obviously different languages have
different lengths of words and then that
ruined all of it and like the French
version or the Italian version would
like stretch into the walls or it would
just like the even sometimes be too
short and we just kind of look silly and
I would have to do a lot of playing
around with like like adding line breaks
and stuff I'm moving around and having
like the people who translated it for me
like reduce the lengths of certain lines
and things like that and it was a lot of
work and I think honestly there's not a
lot of ways of avoiding that work so
depending on how you show your text but
it's something to be aware of like if
you're building something with showing
text in a certain way thinking about how
you're gonna dynamically accommodate
text of different lengths you know
because you run into a lot of problems
when you have a situation like my game
where you have very specifics like small
spaces and just kind of walk through the
game you can kind of see these like
different sized space like this one as
well specifically these different sized
space it's like how do you make the text
fit one extra little solution I had to
make it dynamically a little bit easier
on me it was whenever you're using a
language that's not English because
everything was perfectly crafted for
English right
is that I just reduced the size the font
by a bit didn't solve all my problems
but actually sold a good 70% of them
like the text just managed to fit really
really nicely um just by reducing the
size the fun that's why I see when I
change language you see the font just
gets a bit smaller like that because
it's just like I think like 25% smaller
or something like that and yeah I just
kind of made text a bit smaller and that
helped out a lot but you can probably
tell I mean I think that one's even like
three lines as opposed to both the two
there and I had to do a lot of working
with the the different translators to
get everything to actually fit correctly
so that's just something you might want
to bear in mind as you go about
localizing your game but that's the
method that I used the any file itself
is an included file I don't think I've
ever really talked about these in gaming
before you have the section of the bomb
called included files you can create an
include file and you can pick a file
and it will bundle it along with your
game when like you create like the
Installer or if you create the exe it I
think it embeds the actual file into the
executable itself so that always has
access to and it's like always in the
memory so that's why I did for that
include fuzzies unless you'd like send
files along so you know that you're
always gonna like have access to them or
whatever and that's how you like include
files in like the the file structure of
a game when you like run the installer
and stuff like that anything you want to
install with the Installer that's built
into game maker alongside just the
executable and stuff like that
you got to include any included files
unless is something you're dynamically
creating a runtime like saved files and
stuff like that obviously but yeah I
just wanted to try to include files
because I don't think I've ever included
those before and yeah that's more or
less how I localized another perspective
I will actually pop up this script this
se arms go string to like a paste bin
awesome thing and I'll kind of comment
on it a little bit and pop that in the
description for you guys so you can kind
of just get the idea of how it works but
I think it's fairly straightforward and
you'd be like oh okay so this is how you
would read a mini file and get those
different things okay fair enough but uh
yeah I hope that was helpful for you
guys uh again cool exciting announcement
coming soon
various other stuff coming a lot of
stuff coming soon as seems to always be
the case but yeah exciting announcement
video will be either day or tomorrow
probably tomorrow not sure but it'll be
exciting so look out for that and I'll
catch you guys next time thanks for
watching guys see dudes
you