Post by Bo Carlsson in Hive Time comments

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Hi. Sorry for my extremely late answer.

I'm not sure exactly. It's a bit hard to explain. I would say that an option to just slow down the speed a bit. I think my problem is that during the mid game your population and resources get full a bit too quick so it feels like you have to build nurseries and storage faster to keep up with the supply. I think this feelings are due to the history of resource managing games. As you wrote below; people aren't primed for a more relaxed gameplay. In traditional games the mentality is that if you can't store resources you are losing resources instead of thinking about is as a positive when you have full storage. It's kind of a glass half full (Hivetime) vs half empty (others). So a part of the problem is the genre in itself.

P.S. Have you considered localizing the game. Way back in the days I was part of the subtitle translation community where I both created new Swedish/English subtitles and translated English and Swedish ones. So if y'all are interested I would love to localize the game. There's not a lot of text so it wouldn't be that much of a hassle for me.

Thank you again for the great game.

Cheeseness2 years ago

Hi hi! No need to apologise. There's plenty going on in the world that's more important than Hive Time comments!

From my perspective as a designer, I see the genre conventions that I intentionally buck as a way of expressing commentary on those conventions. Giving players an opportunity to brush against post-scarcity and discover that a solely growth-oriented mindset doesn't offer limitless enjoyment is something I wanted to do, in the hopes that players with those mindsets would start giving more attention to other aspects of the game. I can understand that that's a friction point, though!

I should note that the way that "birth debt" is handled was changed in v1.2-95, and my previous description is no longer current. The changes are outlined in this post celebrating Hive Time's second beethday.

Localisation is something I would like to do, but there are a couple of hurdles. The first is that it is a little bit bigger than it might at first appear - I haven't done a count in a while, but I think it's around 8,000 words, which is large for a small game that isn't text-focused. Humour in general and puns in particular are notoriously difficult to localise since that kind of content is steeped in cultural and linguistic nuances that frequently don't exist or have different connotations in other languages - it's doable, but requires a lot of extra effort and rewrites. Last, but certainly not least is that since Hive Time started as a jam game that I didn't have intentions of growing into something bigger, it isn't structured in a way that is friendly toward localisation - there'd be a lot of work involved in externalising strings and getting the project ready for localisation.

I would like to localise the game into other languages, but I don't want to do it unless I can do it right, and that requires a lot more in the way of resources and time than I can justify giving Hive Time right now.

Bo Carlsson2 years ago

I totally agree with you about the friction in Gameplay. It's always a problem when trying to take a genre in a new direction. But it's still wort it and hopefully players will find the good things.

When it comes to localization. I find that word count often isn't a great measurement of how much work is required. I usually check how many instances of text there are. Are the text stored in the folder with json files? I can take a look and estimate how much time it would take. When it comes to puns etc I have a lot of experience. In addition to films I have adapted lyrics and other texts (fiction and non fiction) as a part of my linguistics education. And localizing things like idioms are half the fun.

But the most important question is how much effort it takes to adapt the code. And if you say the code isn't really made for multiple languages at the backend. Because if it's to much of a hassle for you guys it's not worth the effort. I have a limited knowledge when it comes to programming so that is not something I can determine.

/Bo

Cheeseness2 years ago (1 edit)

I have a pretty clear picture of the ins and outs (both from a programming perspective and a localisation perspective), and as I say, it's just not something I have the resources for.

Some of the game's strings are within its json files, but there are plenty that are not. Even if I ignore the cost of other people's time localising strings, the work of externalising those strings and implementing a system for tracking and substituting per locale is beyond what I can allocate to Hive Time - it's been a stretch to put together even the superficial patch that shipped today (which definitely wouldn't have been possible if I had the extra overhead of maintaining additional languages).

Edit: I also forgot to mention that since Hive Time's UI doesn't scale and isn't flexible, that represents another non-trivial amount of work that would be needed before I could consider localisation (in other games I've worked on, German and Russian localisations have required changes to layout handling).

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