Hello everyone, I decided to write a monthly blog (update, report, whatever the name) to inform you about the progress, struggles and plans of LyaaaaaGames!
So here is the first edition. Good reading :).
The Steam Release
During the end of August and a good part of September, I had been working on the Steam version. Some of you received a Steam key because you bought the game on Itch before the Steam release. If you didn’t claim your Steam key yet, email me at lyaaaaa@lyaaaaagames.com
The sales on Steam had been surprisingly good (everything is relative). But in 20 days on Steam, I did the equivalent of 4 months of sales on Itch. So, it’s very positive :)
Release of the 1.4.0
The 1.4.0 had been the result of a good amount of work, but it’s now properly ready. It has been the source of a few “discoveries” about the support of languages. With the 1.4.0 the Steam and Itch versions are now at the same version (1.4.0) and will stay the same. I notice some of my games on GOG are updated way after (in months) the Steam version. I believe it’s an unacceptable behavior and won’t happen with AIdventure. Itch’s users won’t be left behind with the update cycle.
Here is the full changelog of the 1.4.0: https://www.lyaaaaagames.com/blog/release_1.4.0/
The lore book!
The lore book is now fully available. It might be a bit hard to understand it for some people.
So, how does it work?
When you click on the Generate button, the game will analyze your input with what we call a regular expression (or Regex). And if it finds the equivalent of a lore book’s entry in your input, it will fetch that entry’s description.
For example: if you have the entry Orc in your lore book and write “Orcs”, the game will send the Orc description to the AI.
Here you have a picture of how the Regex works. You can see the Orc entry is triggered even when orcs is written. It is because the regex allows the entry’s name to have an ending S. It is to avoid having to duplicate entries in the lore book.
It is clearly limited because adding an S doesn’t work in every case in English (e.g. Elf-Elves) and not in every language, but it’s a nice thing nonetheless.
In the future, I want to allow users to add commas “,” in the entry’s title to specify multiple trigger for a single description. That way, you could have the following:
"Elf,Elves": "An elf is a creature that appears to be human in nature, but has magical powers and does not age."
Where the word Elf or Elves would both trigger the same description.
The new languages
The game now fully support Spanish and Catalan! The AIs were already available in these languages, but the interface wasn’t translated. Now it’s done!
The Portuguese problem
The interface had been translated in Portuguese too (thanks to Zariten) but for now I didn’t implement the Portuguese AI.
Why? Because I’m using Transformers from Huggingface to run the AIs and the Helniski-NLP Opus MT AIs to translate. There are many languages available yet but not any AI (Helniski-NLP’s) doing Portuguese only. It means I have to do researches and tests, while other languages like Spanish required no work to be implemented.
This is why some languages (not only Portuguese) aren’t available in the Automatic translation options yet!
The non-Latin languages
Support non-Latin languages is something I want to do soon. It has been delayed by the Steam release and the Lore book.
What is required? Not much except one big thing, a new default font. A new font will probably have many impacts on the interface, so it’s something to correctly prepare.
The future content
- I’m planning to make a small video explaining the basics of the game. It would make it easier for people new to AI to understand how to play.
- I want to integrate the Steam workshop in the game.
- Support non-Latin languages (If it impacts too much the interface, I might do the much-needed interface rework at the same time)
And that’s all for this month! See you next month for the next report!
Don’t forget you can easily get in touch with me on https://discord.gg/mJGSkJ3mgT, join my server ;)