WWWest-Online Development Blog

One of the great things about playing a multi-player online game is the fact that you’re playing with players from all over the world, so when thinking about a web-based game, it seems obvious that the game should support every language possible the only question is to what extent….

One of our goals with WWWest-Online is to create an environment for players to come together, play together and cooperate on different levels, and having the game interface in the players’ own languages seems like a good way to make the interface more appealing and easy to use for the players. On the technical side, creating a multi-language web-based game is pretty simple – all you need is to create a template system and… to know the language. Which can be a problem. So at this point we can say that we have already built the infrastructure for the multi-language support and can have every page and every string in all the languages we know (which are currently only English and Hebrew – translators for other will be welcomed).

Having dealt with the interface we are left with another aspect of multi-language support – The chat system. Should the chat be in a global language (e.g., English), so that most players will be able to understand it? This question immediately raised the suggestion of letting the player choose. Meaning, create global chat channels for each language and let the player choose which channels he wants to see. That way if a player doesn’t understand Spanish and doesn’t want to receive chats in Spanish he can choose not to see them, but if a player understands several languages he can choose to see some, or all of them. The current chat system already has support for user configurations and multiple channels, the chat system can also handle Right-to-Left languages combined with Left-to-Right in the same window. However since we are talking about a free game, and a small development team that can only handle 2 languages so far, we will most likely not open the different channels until we will have a team that can understand them well enough to moderate.

That’s it for now, we are about to wrap up the chat system for the game and thought that it might be a good opportunity to share the things we’ve done regarding this subject so far.

Scopti