Ecchi Sensei multilingual releases

Heyho!

Latecomer here, making a small announcement/post for you guys.

If you don't know who I am, I'm basically BlueCat's second in command.

We're currently working on Days 8+9 and work is going really smoothly so far for Blue and me. Absolute butter as far as I'm concerned.

This week I expect to be done with the proofreading for the German version so I can start with my translation very very soon.

Which brings me to something I'm quite excited about.

See, our plan for Week 1 was to have a multilingual release in both Blue and I's native German as well as an English translation provided by yours truly.

That was our first time working with the Ren'Py translation framework and while there were many things about it that I personally really liked, some things caused some problems (if you remember some German text appearing while the game was set to English in Week 1 Alpha and if you remember the Week 1 Beta being quite borked, that was the cause).

My thought behind the multilingual releases was that it would be a lot easier for Blue to write and playtest in German (in fact, Blue has been writing in German since I joined the team around Day 3 and I have then been translating everything to English, resulting in a massively improved text quality). The Ren'Py translation framework, however, as we were using it, ended up causing so many issues and so much extra workload that we decided to abandon it to not cause any further delays for the Week 1 releases.

However, I have been adamant about making future releases of the game, starting with Day 8+9, multilingual from the get-go.

After brainstorming with our programmers, we came up with a hybrid system that allows us to reap the best benefits of the translation framework and not cause too much extra workload while also minimizing the risk of everything breaking down.

Blue and I are confident that this new method is going to work and provide great results!

However, if this optimistic idea turns out to be a big disappointment or a huge train wreck, we see no choice but to scrap the idea of multilingual Ecchi Sensei releases and we'd be going back to just releasing in English.

Anyway, that's all from me so far.

If you've got any questions, don't hesitate to ping me on our Ecchi Sensei Discord.

Toodles~

Latecomer