A big mistake no one talks about in certain WG games

There are some games with such bad English on this forum that they are nearly unplayable, I sorta cringed when I played Weight Date. Aren’t most wg games acknowledged for their writing? Most people ignore the spelling and grammar mistakes. I remember a different wg game on this forum that had such bad English that I couldn’t even understand it. I think a lot of more people should start noticing this.

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something you have to think of though. not every game was made by English speakers. A piece of cake is naturally french. it just has a translation. Feeder Fantasy it is I think Japaneses and its still having its translation worked on

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also. some time the games are just their for a quick bit of fetish enjoyment and thats it. no one is going to care all that much about grammar in a game built for a 5 mine session or something

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I tend to get hung up on grammar and spelling, too, but I think you have to overlook it here. It’s true: not everyone speaks English, not to mention fluently, so take it easy on people who aren’t native speakers-or maybe reach out to someone and see about lending them a hand with translating?!

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I don’t know about anyone else, but while I’m fairly capable at writing English, it can easily go out the window if I’m also coding at the same time. I actually find it more accurate to write separately and then do the coding afterwards. Many coding environments, unlike a word processor, don’t have spell checking support either. The one I use does, but it can silently fail if it isn’t able to work out what is code and what is text that needs checking.

If you (in general, not just the OP) find spelling or grammar errors, it’s worth reporting them back to the dev (while staying positive about things) - but in most cases I’d personally do it via message rather than a public post.

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Yep, a lot of games are written by non-English speakers, and even if English is your first language, it’s really hard to proof read your own work. I do a fair bit of proof reading in my daytime job, so I’m relatively good at it, but even so, I’m still picking up typos and poor grammar from the early stages of my game that I’ve simply missed.

As @dingotush says, most devs will welcome you pointing out mistakes. None of us are perfect :slight_smile:

*edited for typos… I rest my case :stuck_out_tongue:

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Bear in mind some of the games were made for jams too, it is possible the author simply didnt have time to correct mistakes in the rush to hit the deadline :smiley:

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oh yeah having/ writing stories I can not tell you how many times I missed a spelling or grammar mistake until like a day or two after I finished the story. most of the time its a case of the brain tricking the eyes. I see what I ment to write not what I did write.

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Grammar/spelling consistency is something we really shouldn’t put too much of a stint on, also, Is “A lot more of” proper English, or did you just do the same thing you’re complaining about?

Not everyone is a native English speaker, and not everyone is able to full grasp English, even the people who speak it natively can have trouble with it with it’s many obscure rules of how you’re supposed to do things.

English is five languages in a trench coat, pretending to be one language.

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It’s just a matter of the community needing to grow. It is normal for many games to be low quality in a community like this, but I think it’s because people just want to release something and get it over with. If only 10% of things are of decent quality or valid to a person’s taste, then we should feel lucky if there are any games we enjoy a lot out of like 30. It’s understandable to get frustrated with games though since they often feel that they should be immersive and you want to get invested in them, but then a lot of these indie projects are just really incomplete or have big flaws and that may or may not be fixed in development.

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Even putting non-native english users aside, there’s more than one game that’s already deep in development, in-progress and popular, but with absolutely HORRIBLE spelling, grammar, and punctuation. To me, reading things like that is like nails on a chalkboard, except the nails are carpentry nails and the chalkboard is my eyes and brain. It just makes it look like they don’t actually CARE about the game or the people playing it. I just can’t stand it.

Just give your text a once-over with a spellchecker, devs, please.

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I wonder which game you’re talking about, I’ve already talked about Weight Date…

I don’t want to start anything or get any flak since it’s a curated project, so I didn’t want to name any names. They had a spelling and bugs channel in their Discord, and I thought I’d help out, but after finding over a hundred major and minor spelling/grammar/punctuation areas before even leaving the first area of the game, and it had at least 10x as much content past that, I kind of realized it would be a Sisyphean effort to clean up after them.

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@Korota it really isn’t as simple as ‘just give your text a once-over with a spellchecker’.

Unless you’re creating all the text for your game in a word processor and then copying and pasting it into your game (and a game like mine has thousands of lines of text, so you can imagine how boring and time consuming that would be), spell checking is a waste of time.

To give you an idea, I’ve just dropped about 400 lines of code from my game into Openoffice and run a spell check. It found almost 700 ‘errors’. That’s nearly two per line. Over 99% of which aren’t errors at all. I use Ren’py as my game engine and almost every ‘error’ is simply a variable name or Ren’py code. Using a spell checker to spot typos in something like that is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

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@tiggertoo - there are a couple of options for RenPy:

First, you can ask it to build translation files, and then spell check those - it filters out most of the code leaving less for a word processor to fret over. Then you have to go and find the mistake in the source script, but at least you know what to look for.

Second, the code I wrote for patching A Piece of Cake also pulls out just strings, and outputs them to a text file ready for translation, which can be spell checked. It wasn’t really built with this in mind, and the code will need to be tweaked (in PocEn.java) to know the names of your script files, which is a pain. Again, you have to go and find the mistake in the source script, but at least you know what to look for.

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Haha, I never knew you could do that! Shows how little I know :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s still a bit more complex than ‘just run a spell check though’

Just let them sort it out, or don’t look into their content, I suppose. If you’re not a fan, no need to torture yourself. And if you try to help in a manner that’s not perceived as especially polite…they might just think you’re being rude for the sake of being rude. I’ve had that mindset about real people, and it’s burned them and me. Not a great thing to hold on to.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m always happy to hear about typos/grammatical mistakes etc. It’s very very easy to miss errors in your own work as your eye tends to skip things when proofreading.

I’m with you on that; I just prefer it when, as you’re doing, it’s worded politely. When @Korota sent his posts, they felt like there was some ire to them. It’s best to approach with a gentle, steady hand, rather than come off as if your intentions are impure. I apologize for how severely I’m reacting myself, but it just eats at me. (No vore pun intended. Unless you’re cool with that, and the circumstances are to your liking)

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I do think that the main idea of the thread is seeming more valid after reading these responses. When you are making a text based project, you should ensure the text is polished enough to at least leave a good first impression and at least the first area should read well. It is fine to have a sloppy rough draft when writing things, but making people read it is not good. Unless you feel that your writing is usually free of a severe amount of errors when carelessly writing, you should always do what it takes to review your work or spellcheck or have someone go over the text with you.

Spellchecking might not help that much with how something is written but it can be a good incentive to notice any flaws in writing you could recognize but overlooked or maybe unconscious mistakes you made. I have an unconscious mistake where I think something over or have a strong sense of what I want to say and I can end up saying the opposite of what I meant by leaving in or out a negative word or I could leave a broken sentence which was supposed to be cut out by the text that comes before or after it.

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