Paper Lily - Chapter 1
Translations and version 1.1
Hi everyone!
It's been 3 weeks since we released version 1.1 on itch.io and Steam, and the reception has been amazing! We're really thankful for everyone's comments, videos, emails, bug reports, and especially reviews! Not to mention everyone who purchased the supporter pack or the soundtrack - we're eternally grateful!
It took a long time to get this version of the game out. It's hard to be satisfied when there's always an opportunity to improve things and add more fun features, but we finally have a version of the game that we're proud of, and that also takes in consideration everyone's feedback.
As several of you have noticed, due to all the changes we made, if you had already played Paper Lily before v1.1.0, your old save files no longer worked. We tried to avoid this as best as we could, so we apologize for the inconvenience. Had we allowed old saves, a ton of strange bugs would've happened (such as reaching the end of the game without the return doorknob or having two lighters in Miss Knives' house), so ultimately it was best to mark them as obsolete. On the bright side, there are now 30 save slots so you can try and retry things to your heart's content!
What's different in version 1.1?
- 13 endings
- Some new areas
- A new character
- The conclusion to Miss Knives' story (The 6th blessing)
- New puzzle solutions and fixes
- Some minor story alterations
- More spook
If you're a completionist, this adds a few extra hours of playtime and some more secrets and lore to discover.
What's next on the development on Paper Lily?
The roadmap right now is looking something like this:
- Take care of translations
- Port the game to Godot 4
- Improve our internal tooling
- Meanwhile, continue the development of Chapters 2 and onward
Porting the game to Godot 4 will allow for future-proofing as well as some important performance gains and new features that are simply not available in Godot 3. Sadly, Godot 4 is incompatible with the way we drew the maps in Godot 3, so this will take a lot of work (there are hundreds of maps)!
Improving our tooling will speed up development, as well as allowing the possibility to have someone help us with the development if the opportunity arises.
In a previous devlog we mentioned that we would release the rest of the game chapter by chapter. We don't love the idea, so it's still subject to change: if we notice that the Supporter Pack sales made us enough money to hire a few people to help with the development (no volunteers, sorry!) then we might be able to get the whole game done in decent time. For now, we're still just 2 idiots and we can only develop at the speed of 2 idiots (part-time idiots, at that). We'll make sure to let everyone know when anything changes.
Some of you might have noticed the absence of the Kickstarter we made a big fuss about about a year ago. We'll give this topic some more thought before getting back to everyone. We're also editing old posts and devlogs to reflect these decision changes, so that there isn't too much conflicting information floating around.
How long will it take to make Chapter 2?
We don't know. We're in the process of making some adjustments so that we can make it faster (we'd rather not spend 50 years making this). The story and many of the characters are already designed, it's just about figuring out how to best make this game without losing our sanity in the process. We had to learn the hard way that the scope of our game is too large, so we have to improve it for the remaining chapters. Luckily, this is a pretty fun task!
How can I support the game?
The best way is by leaving a review on itch.io or on Steam. Reviews are everything!
If you prefer to support us in a different way, you can buy the Supporter Packs or Soundtrack here on itch.io or on Steam.
- Chapter 1 Supporter Pack on itch.io if you pay $8 USD or more
- Chapter 1 Original Soundtrack on itch.io
- Chapter 1 Supporter Pack on Steam
- Chapter 1 Original Soundtrack on Steam
- Project Kat Supporter Pack on itch.io if you pay $8 USD or more
- Project Kat Supporter Pack on Steam
Fan translations!!!
Alright! So now that most of the bugs and typos are gone, it's time to talk translations. Despite being two idiots who don't currently have the funds to afford official translations for our games, Project Kat has over 10 fan translations from some amazing people who loved it enough to want to help share it with more players. Over the past year, we've received many requests from people who would like to volunteer their time to translate Paper Lily Chapter 1 as well. We're very surprised, considering this chapter is so much bigger than Project Kat, so we've given this a lot of thought to try to make the translators' efforts worthwhile and reach as many players as possible.
The system for fan translations will work similarly to the way we did it for Project Kat, so that we can once again include them on Steam where everyone can find them easily. This time however, with lessons learnt from last time and because the translations will end up on Steam, we needed to add some requirements.
You can contact us to translate Paper Lily Chapter 1 if:
1) You already translated Project Kat (i.e. your translation is on Steam) or you worked with us on Paper Lily.
~or~
2) You've translated 2 or more games before.
If you fit either of the two points above, please send us an email and we'll send you the instructions! If you're on the second category, please include a link of the games you've translated and your translations. We'll send out the translation files in the following day(s) to those we already spoke to. If you've already emailed us and we didn't get back to you, feel free to send another one. We don't have a community manager so emails can be easily buried.
Lastly, these requirements also apply to Project Kat moving forward.
Why requirements?
We take absolutely no issue with people translating our game, of course. In fact, it brings us immense joy that people like our game enough to want to spend time translating it. But, realistically, it's a massive project and we have no resources to run quality control on those translations. These requirements establish a baseline of trust for a translation that will end up on a platform such as Steam. Remember that the quality of translations will affect the reviews left by players who use them.
What if I don't fit the requirements but still want to translate?
If you don't fit the requirements above or don't want your translation on Steam, you're free to translate the game through your own means and publish it on your website, as long as you don't charge money for it. Unfortunately though, we can't help you with this process, as translations are notorious for burning away months of work, and we want to avoid spending too much time on them from now on. We could be spending that time working on Chapter 2!
(Also, please don't spam us with language requests, we don't have any control over which languages people decide to translate!)
How will the full game be translated?
This is a complex topic because unlike Project Kat and Chapter 1, the full game will not be free. Allowing people to translate it and putting it up on Steam like we do now would be profiting off people's free work, and that doesn't sit well with us.
Depending on our finances after the full release, we may be purchasing and making available a few official translations, but that will still leave many languages not covered.
We considered making the translation files public, but that leaves another issue: Paper Lily is, (among many other things) a game about the joy of discovering secrets. Publishing all the dialogue in plain text for everyone to see spoils the fun of finding such secrets. This is also the reason the dialogue files were encrypted in version 1.1. We have to at least try to keep the mystery alive, especially with what we have planned for the story. Of course, players will find everything sooner or later, it's just better if it doesn't happen right away :)
Rest assured, we'll do our best so the full version of Paper Lily can reach everyone who wants to play it.
As always, thanks for listening to us ramble! If you got this far, then give yourself a pat on the back and treat yourself to something nice. This was a lot of reading.
A short reminder of the places you can find us:
For any other questions, bug reports, etc, you can email us at leef6010@gmail.com
Comments
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I switched to Godot 4 with my project and I’m pretty happy that I did. The new features totally made up for the things that I needed to fix. That said, my game has much less maps. So redoing them wasn’t really an issue…
Do you have the opportunity to provide a Turkish translation?
Hello, I wrote to you by email about localisation in Ukrainian. Please reply, thank you.
Porting tilemaps is time-consuming indeed if you don’t have a dedicated script. I don’t know if you’re switching from manual tiles to new auto-tile or old auto-tile to new auto-tile; I don’t see a conversion script for either just doing a quick search, and I don’t know how feasible that is.
If you really have too many maps it may be worth writing your own and distributing it to help other devs working on long-running projects; but if you’re switching from individual tiles to auto-tiles, that may be too hard, I myself have the same issue with PICO-8 native map vs a new 3rd party “PicoMap” that supports meta-tiles.
I have an older Godot 3 project but I didn’t have much to add so I decided to just keep it in Godot 3 (which requires a little mental gymnastic every time I switch from Godot 4), but for a bigger project like this it’s probably worth it. Good luck!
Hahaha just what I said: Paper Lily is a big question producer, both to players and developers!
Its strange that steam version doesn't have linux support while the one here on itch has it. And mac too, i guess.
Hi there! The Steam version runs on Linux through Proton! We tested it on the Steam Deck.
We also recently wrote a little Twitter thread explaining more:
I know what proton is, but you already have proper linux version here that you can simply upload there as well, which is why im surprised.
If you need more Linux testers using various distributions you can open a newsletter / form or something and start seeing if you gather enough people to consider it satisfying. I’ll be glad to subscribe.
In my experience Godot Linux export is quite reliable (second after Renpy in terms of “just build blindly on Windows, macOS and Linux and if one platform works, all 3 probably do”, certainly thanks to the use of export templates), but I’ve mostly been using Godot 4 lately so that’s probably something works checking after the Godot 4 port (but you can start the newsletter / subscribe form already to start gathering people).
Hablando de las traducciones, soy de esas personas que entra cada tanto a ver si hay disponibilidad en español. Lo seguiré haciendo! Espero que con el tiempo puedan acomodar todos los requisitos, ya que todo lo que mencionaron es entendible. Si supiera como hacerlo, aportaría con mucho gusto. ¡Mucho éxito!!!