Wasteland 2 - Post-Funding Update # 49

Writing & Localizing

It is May and things are good. Another big beta update went out, patch notes here. We are nearing the end of the three-month plan we outlined earlier, and hit all our internal end-of-April milestones, which is a rarity. We're getting closer every day, and we intend to announce the official release date sometime this month.

At this stage of the project some portions of the game require less manpower than they did a few months ago, which is all part of our plan for moving people to Torment: Tides of Numenera when their work on Wasteland 2 is simply done. One of those things we're slowly wrapping up is writing, which at this stage is really just tweaks or minor NPCs and encounters added. You may have heard us mention Nathan Long before, a talented and veteran writer who we were very lucky to have join us on this project.

Crowdfunding Localization

As the in-game texts are starting to hit their finalized stages, it's time to ramp up our localization effort in earnest. As you may recall, we've promised localized versions in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish and Russian, all of them are still planned for the released version of the game. Deep Silver is helping us with the Polish and Russian localization so we're all set there.

For the other languages, we've received many requests since even before we ran our Kickstarter from fans looking to contribute, wanting to help us localize the game. And we always planned to involve our fans, so we've launched our Wasteland 2 localization crowdsourcing effort. We are counting on our fans to join our Get Localization project for French, Italian, German and Spanish and together do the bulk of the work on translating to those languages. When that step is complete we will hand the results to professional editors who will do editing and consistency passes. This is an important step to ensure that the localized version will meet the high, professional standards we are looking for.

The more fans we get involved and the more they translate, the faster and better our localized versions will be. We sincerely hope this'll be a fun and productive process. At the end of it, we'll be looking at ways to help compensate via upgrades or cash for the backers that helped generate the most translations.

Dialog Screen

Speaking of writing, we recently gathered a bunch of feedback on the dialog screen on our official forums. The feedback clearly pointed us to preferences for making the dialog UI more tangible and solid, to emphasize the portraits more, and to put it all in a nicely skeuomorphic UI. Here is the first pass we posted on our forums:



One of our fans by the name of Alex 'Olovski' Drożyner saw this UI and responded by offering some mock-ups of his own, improving and tweaking our work. We liked what we saw there so much we've contracted him to do a pass on the UI for us to use moving forward. It's a unique process to involve fans so directly, but the results speak for themselves!