Hi all!

I’ve been extremely busy working on the next Zoomies update, and this one is BIG :) Today we’ll be diving into two major changes to the game, as well as some smaller (but just as important) stuff!

Enough faffing about. Let’s see the diary:

Japanese Localization

Eagle-eyed readers will know all about this as I’ve talked about it in earlier dev diaries, but I wanted to go back through it to explain the how and why.

The why is easy; Japanese players currently hold the title of second most popular audience for Zoomies. I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with some awesome Zoomies fans hailing from Japan and one of the main bugbears was not being able to understand a lot of the English text in the game.

The how is a bit more complex; I wanted to make an easily-maintainable localization system so that I would be able to add more languages later on, but I really underestimated how much work that would be. Most of the work comes from setting up the first language (in this case, Japanese) as this would require setting up all of the initial string values in my excel sheet as well as preparing every string object in the game to be localized. After that is done, all I would need to do is update the excel sheet with new values (perhaps for other languages) and the game will automatically update those strings.

I am using Simple Localization to achieve this. Huge shoutout to this tool. If you want to implement localization for your own game, I recommend this. It’s free!

However, I made a crucial mistake. I intended on setting up the localization feature BEFORE revamping the UI and adding an entirely new settings menu, which has essentially ruined any roadmap plan I had. It’s my own fault and is something I did not think about. After setting up the localization, I had to add support for the new settings menu (which I will talk about below) which contains so many new string values and I also had to add support for real-time switching of the language for when the player changes languages mid-game.

Since then I have decided to merge the two updates (localization + UI revamp), which is why this next update is so big :)

UI Revamp

The UI revamp includes a few new things:

New Main Menu

The main menu UI hasn’t changed much, per say. But the background scene is completely new. Instead of the usual tuxedo cat sitting inside a house, the new main menu scene represents a race between all of the cats in slow motion. I thought it was a bit more exciting than the old scene, but I’ll include a setting to restore the old menu, if I have time.

The new main menu still needs a bit of work, as the camera (and background cats) can be a little buggy, but I might leave this in the next update to see what everyone thinks. If it’s too messy then I’ll improve it.

New Settings Menu

The settings menu has been completely ripped out and re-created. Instead of haphazardly-placed settings on a single screen, I have included multiple pages worth of settings. I don’t want to reveal every new setting here, but a few of the honourable mentions will be Language selection, visual/performance settings and more. Unfortunately I don’t have time to include accessibility and extra (misc.) settings, but they will be something I’ll be wanting to add to the next update after this one.

Also, longtime zoomies fans will be glad to know that the next update will also include some more granular audio settings, now being able to control not just the Master volume, but also music and SFX volume!

New Camera Views

The next update will also bring two new ‘near’ and ‘far’ in-game chase cameras for those players who dislike the rigidness of the current chase camera.

DEFAULT (CURRENT CAM)

NEAR

FAR

Honourable Mentions

There are a lot more notable additions to the next update, but here are some of my favourites:

• AI cats now stay spread apart for a few seconds at the start of a race
• A new ‘Final Lap’ animation
• Fixed janky rotation while a cat is in midair
• The game now uses the player’s native resolution on start up if the user has never played the game before.

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That’s it for now. Sorry it’s taking so long, but I promise it will be worth it! :) <3