on writing games

the unavoidable cost of interactive fiction

Interactive fiction is less costly to develop than practically any game that requires a lot of graphics, especially with real-time motion and 3D graphics.

Except in one area of development: translations.

The cost of translation is usually per word, and this makes it prohibitive to translate the game into many languages. There are games that have a small menu, and maybe some text here and there.

If I remember correctly, Nubarrón had a total of 2000 words.

Dance of the Spirits is not finished and already has 20,000 words.

Being in the era of LLMs, this might not be a problem anymore.

I have the ability to evaluate the quality of translation of an LLM in English, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish; and the truth is that I believe they do a good job.

At least they comply with the Pareto principle, which is already better than many translators, especially those that I could afford as an independent developer.

I am not going to spend time discussing the ethical issue, because I already gave my opinion on it.

In the next emails, I want to share with you some ideas I have on the subject. I was going to include everything in this email, but it turned out to be very long, so I decided to break it down into three more emails to elaborate a little more on each of the three ideas I considered.