This was a short week as I was gone for three days for the school enrollment of my oldest child 
For the remaining two days I had to take a bit of a detour from my planned work on the new inventory system implementation I touched on last week. Our other game Prosperous Universe recently opened the gates to community translators and we were quite overwhelmed (in a positive way) by the burst of activity that ensued. A handful of languages are already well beyond 80% done, so we’ll activate them in production very soon.
But since PU and AS share most of our backend systems (like account management and payment processing), this ended up having implications for AirlineSim as well. To give you two examples:
- So far, we store a singe “preferred language” in a user’s central account. But AS and PU support a different set of languages, so a language might be available for one game but not for another, and when a user plays both, they might run into weird behavior whenever they change the language to whatever they prefer.
- For AS, we never properly handled language variants. For example, we do support “Chinese”, but it’s actually “Chinese as spoken in Taiwan, using Traditional Chinese script”. This never was an issue, but now PU has an almost finished Chinese translation that’s “Chinese as spoken in China, using Simplified Chinese script”.
I tackled most of these issues last week, primarily in our backend systems. The changes in AirlineSim itself are about 50% finished and I’ll wrap those up early this week. Both backend and game will most likely receive the respective updates over the course of week 38. After that, I’ll return my attention to DS stuff.
On a technical side-note: This week would have been utterly frustrating if it hadn’t been for our near 100% test coverage of our central account management system. If you are in software development, I can only recommend to go with TDD whenever and wherever you can 