Hi,
Just wondering, if I have people translate my game into multiple languages, but each of them being an independent build, what's the best way to go about this? Uploading all of them to one itch page seems too cramped to me (since I have to provide one for each OS); but making multiple itch pages seems too repetitive and inappropriate as well. Does anyone have any good suggestions?
There is the “App Manifest” route you can explore, which could allow you to set custom actions when players run your game from the app. You could add buttons like “Play in english” which would execute your game like “mygame.exe –lang=english” or something like that.
I haven’t used the app manifest before, but I believe this wouldn’t work for users browsing your game from the web. I also don’t think the manifest was designed for this, but I could be wrong on that.
The other path is to ask the user to change language when the game opens, optionally saving their preference for future use. This would ensure your downloads section does not look too busy showing all languages.
The downside being that all language-specific assets will also be included, even if a user is only interested in one of them. This is not a problem if your game only has localised strings and not any other assets, as strings are pretty minimal in size.
Thanks a lot for your reply. Of course, I understand that the best solution would be to incorporate all languages into a single build, and ask for the player's preference in the beginning. But in this case, I was actually approached by a few translators, and one of them replaced all English text with Korean, so I can make a separate Korean build. I assume, in that case, I have no choice but to upload all of them to the page for now? I would love to come back and integrate them into one single build, but I just really don't have time for now.
That makes sense. If I’m not wrong, Itch doesn’t allow (automated) translation of pages, so if you can only do separate builds, your only choices seem to be either put all language builds on the same page in the downloads section, or make separate pages (which can also be translated) with their own downloads section.
Either option seems cumbersome to me, at least if you plan to make updates semi-often. Maybe someone else might know if Itch supports a more automated way.
Actually now that I think about it, you can use the Butler tool from Itch, to automate builds of different languages. Although you might need some familiarity with the command line to do this comfortably.
