Research Story News

[h3][✨Update v0.4 is in development and will go live sometime in August!][/h3]

[h3]Greetings researchers![/h3]

Festivals and in-game events break up the pace in farming/life sims, show more NPC interactions, and build a sense of community between the townsfolk and the player. We're planning to add at least 1 festival per season, and some smaller events in Research Story. This will be done in parts as there's quite a bit of content to work through!

[h2]Spring and Summer Festivals 🌸☀️[/h2]
The first two festivals to be added to Research Story are the Cherry Blossom Festival in Spring and Ice Cream Fair in Summer. Townsfolk have special dialogues as part of the festival. Festivals will also be unique in terms of minigames, festival shops, and other activities.

Note for players
If you're in season and don't wish to miss the festival, please save at least 1 day before the festival date! The festival will only be triggered when you sleep the day before it.
🌸Cherry Blossom Festival is on 11 Spring -> Save before/on 10 Spring.
☀️Ice Cream Fair is on 19 Summer -> Save before/on 18 Summer.
Of course, even if you missed the festival this year, you can still experience it in the following years!

[h2]🌸Cherry Blossom Festival🌸[/h2]
Townsfolk gather to admire the transience of nature and the passing of time.

There's an activity called 'Spring Poems', where the player can participate in poem-writing and vote for their favourite poem (written by townsfolk)!
Spring Poems Board

[h2]☀️Ice Cream Fair☀️[/h2]
Townsfolk enjoy the various ice cream made for the fair.

There's an ice cream-making activity for this festival! 🍦🍨 Players can gift their hand-made ice cream to the townsfolk and find out what their favourite desserts are. This is one part of the ice cream-making process:
Milk Pot Minigame

This v0.4 update should be ready a little later this month! If there's anything else you'd like to see in particular, we're always happy to hear from you!

[h2]Upcoming Soundtrack release on August 9 [/h2]
Meanwhile, we'll be releasing the Research Story Soundtrack on August 9, 6pm (PDT)! There are currently 31 tracks in the album ✨ More to come as we continue development!

These are all original soundtracks made for the game, from various artists: bosu, Shevone Seow, Tyd, Tomás Palazzi, and I have all made tracks for Research Story! If you'd like to support our amazing composers, do keep a lookout for it! 💚
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2483750/Research_Story_Soundtrack/

Stay tuned and thanks to everyone for all your support so far! Miki

Fixed:
- Unable to use Origin Tracker after finding fish part and talking to Sesame.
- Stuck in fishing position after falling asleep at 3AM while fishing.
- Stuck in fishing position after sliding away from a water source while fishing.

Changed:
- Added a page counter to Research Shelf UI.

Thank you for your reports and feedback as usual!
Miki

Hello researchers! Pushing out another hotfix due to a crashing bug which I wanted to fix asap. There're also some minor QOL changes, as noted below. I'll be sharing about the progress for the next content update soon!

Fixes
- Fixed crash when walking into 'final room' in cave while animals are following.
- Blue Claw can now be used for the Magic Forge, just like other Fish Parts.

Changes based on player feedback
- In-progress and completed Research Samples now have differentiating icons in the inventory description.
- Composter ingredient additions:

• Added Jellyshroom and Slimeshroom as Quality Fertiliser ingredients
  
• Added Lavacress as Kelp Fertiliser ingredient
  

- Magic Forge ingredient additions:

• Added Watercress, Lavacress, as well as various Fish Net drops as organic materials for the Magic Forge
  

- Some placed items now need to be hit twice in succession to be removed. This is to address the issue where some of these items often get accidentally removed while doing other things on the farm. These items are:

• Well
  
• Crafting Stations: Stone Forge, Magic Forge, Loom, Spinning Wheel, Mixer, Seed Sieve, Campfire, Dehydrator
  
• Crafting Benches: Feed Crafter, Bait Press
  

Thank you for all your feedback and reports!
- Miki

A few more bugfixes!
- [Controller] Attempt to fix possible crash when interacting with the Auto-feeder.
- [Controller] Fixed being able to select two item slots when pressing Up and Left buttons simultaneously in the Auto-feeder Inventory.
- Fixed overlapping tooltip when cursor points to the trough and Auto-feeder at the same time.
- Fixed Journal UI's Information scrollbar.
- Fixed a missing collision bug when removing a bed while there is more than 1 bed in the room.

Thanks,
Miki

[h3]Hello Researchers![/h3]

This Devlog is about adding localisation to Research Story - it's a little more technical than our usual posts!

At this time, we can only confirm that we'll be localising the game to Simplified Chinese - we'll look into other languages in the future! Thank you to our Chinese fans who have been interested in the game and waiting for CN, it's on the way!~ ❤️

[h3]Localising the game - properly! 📝✨[/h3]
Together with Electronic Sheep Games, who have been working on the localisation of the texts itself, I have been working on the implementation of the localised texts into the game. While our Demo has localisation, I wanted to do things in a better way for our Early Access version. This is so that when we plan to have more languages in the future, it wouldn't take as long to do so.

With over 5000 rows of texts in Excel and over 45,000 words (and counting), it's no simple task! This is a snippet of how Kipp's Dialogue data looks like:

It has a unique ID (state), English texts for normal dialogue and options, and the translated columns.

All other texts, from a single word in a UI such as "Research" to Item Names and Descriptions all require similar treatment.

I had to make sure that each line was read from the Excel Sheets instead of being written directly into the game engine itself. If there were any in the engine, I had to move it to the Excel Sheet and give it a unique ID to reference in the code. Even though a large part of the game was already written in the Excel, I still spent maybe 4-5 full days (8 hr+) replacing the remaining written texts with the unique IDs. I did so much Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and other Ctrl Shortcuts that my left pinkie started hurting even after a night's sleep 😰😰 Glad to say it's all good now, and most of the intense copy-pasting due to my prior lack of foresight have been completed 🎉🎉

Being a Chinese Singaporean, I feel particularly excited when seeing CN in the game! Since I can read a bit of Chinese, it feels like I'm playing RS for the first time again - the texts are so refreshing. And yes, I was influenced by my Chinese roots when creating the General Store and its characters! ❤️

[h3]Other Visuals 🔍[/h3]
Other than the game title, there aren't many texts in-game that was drawn as an image (thankfully!). The Darts Minigame is one part of the game that has drawn texts, which would require appropriate localisation too:


[h3]Keeping optimisation in mind 💭[/h3]
In our Demo, there were some optimisation issues where adding CN led to longer loading times when changing the language and when returning to the main menu. This was mainly due to the loading of fonts, and I've prevented those issues from happening in our Early Access build!

[h3]What's Next 📝[/h3]
We'll be doing QA for the localised build before offering it in one of the future updates. Again, shoutout to Electronic Sheep who has been doing great work!! We're excited to share the update with you when it's ready.

I'll be going back to bugfixes + ramping up the next part of content updates, which I need some time to think about!

Hope everyone's been enjoying the v0.3 update so far!

Miki