Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
I took a little detour this morning and finally tackled one last bit of localization prep that I’d been putting off for a long time: supporting translated names of keyboard keys. Ever since the first version of my input system, way way back in (oh no) 2008, I’ve hard-coded the names of keys. And that’s mostly fine for most of the keyboard, but things like “Left Ctrl” or “Caps Lock” should really be translated.
I had briefly attempted this last year when working on my new localization system, and I can’t remember exactly why I reverted it. I don’t think there were any real blocking issues, it probably just felt like too much tedious work for relatively little value. But it kept itching my brain, so I finally decided to do it. And it was a lot of tedious work, but now it’s done and I’m pretty sure that every single string displayed in the game is now localizable.
I don’t think I ever wrote about it, but about two years ago, I also did some work to decouple virtual keys and scancodes in my keyboard input system, so that non-QWERTY layouts would use the correct key placements, instead of using whatever key corresponds to the equivalently named key on a QWERTY layout. So now, if you’re playing in French with an AZERTY keyboard, the default WASD cluster will be ZQSD, and “Esc” could be rendered as “Échap”.
Of course, this ultimately depends on what languages I can afford to have the game translated into, and I’ve got a lot more game to make before I need to think about that. But it feels good to have this sort of thing figured out in advance.