Looking for game testers!

Aye wordplay is a big thing with the English language because there are often loads of words you can use that more or less mean the same thing, which gives you some great options for adding a bit of character to your characters!

Ah, it's not against you. This "bullshit" is this spoken American slang street cool thinking-in-pictures-English I can't understand. If I want to write something in English I use a dictionary and often it's not the same in meaning. I translate from German to English in my brain. I can't understand all of the contest games, so I played them without reading all the dialogues...
That means: I'm not the right to test your game for this. But I'm the best to crash every game. I mean: every! (and mostly every program), so I'm good as a beta-tester to find out mistakes and ways you haven't ever think about....

I struggle in the same way with the Spanish language & I've lived in Spain for about 12+ years now. I really struggle to translate in my mind fast enough to converse with people & the Spanish people speak really fast, though text is a lot easier as I can take my time translating it or at least to the best of my ability with or without the aid of a translator.

I think, Germans has special ways to say something and English native speakers also. Sometimes they come together, but often not. So if you have a native English speaker he often doesn't know the German way to say the same.

If the adventure lives through language jokes (the sentence is an example for my German thinking, I don't know how to say it in English, it's a german text structure...), it will be difficult to translate it. And an adventure lives through funny words mostly, doesn't it? You need professionals who knows both languages good enough. You must create NEW jokes to translate it from one thinking to the other... (I played "The Last of Us". Elly has this "jokebook" - yeah, very flat jokes - to read out sometimes. In German there are other jokes than in English..!)

It's the same like "Simpsons": I watched them in English (better: I tried it...), but I understood only 5% of the jokes! The whole time it wasn't funny. I can't laugh. The movies were... stupid. But in German - after translating the "Wortwitz" - it was really fun! That's the same in "Doctor Who" and all other movies. So I went back to watch all movies and PLAY ALL GAMES in German.

@AFRLme: I read your postings for months (years, I think..??), but often it was impossible to / for? me to check out what you really mean! It is this "other" thinking in strange words. I know all words, but I can't put them together... They often haven't any sense to me...

Writing this text takes one hour and 15 minutes... In German: less than 17 minutes.

I guess the biggest problem for (german) people who are not very good at english is the grammar. They don't get the order of words correct, stick to the german construct of words in a sentence and get confused by the tenses (simple past, past perfect, present perfect progressive, etc); when to use what and have problems deciding if a verb is one of the "special ones" to take care of for the past tenses (if they waste their time by this at all).
Best example here for me is the verb "found" : Is it the past form of "find" or the present form of the german word "gründen"? without context and knowledge about the sentence at all it's difficult to say...

Often they also forget to use the "s" for he/she/it verbs.
By that they mix everything up and it ends up very strange when reading their masterpiece.

The best way to train this for me or as a suggestion to other "out-of-schoolers" is to watch/play games with subtitles whenever possible to get the connection for wordplay and meaning of verbs overall.

Regarding the english slang: yeah, thats difficult for everyone who doesn't know of them before (some goes for native german slang, too) When hearing/reading english and the sentence doesn't make sense at all its mostly some kind of joke/pun/saying/swearword stuff...

... since I managed to know why every person in a movie said "balls" everytime something bad happened, many years elapsed without knowing it right...

I'm not perfect in english but have to write a lot of it because if my job in IT. Got used to it even if I have some problems with special phrases, too...

Grammar is just a bitch in general, regardless of what your native language is or which country you come from. I struggle with English grammar too, as do most other people, so for me grammar in another language is pretty much impossible.

As for my English, it should be fairly easy to translate as I'm not prone to using slang words very often (except from a few of the old English / Scottish variations, such as wee meaning little/small, the day, the aft, the morn, the night, the morrow etc meaning today, tomorrow, tonight, this afternoon, etc). Other than that I tend to type out proper English, though I do tend to mix in what most people would refer to as big words. Most native English speakers; especially Britons are terrible spellers & tend to type in mobile shorthand, or spastic speak / slang.

@ Machtnix: The ALLD game I've been helping with in my spare time has required us to rewrite jokes & general text independently for both English & German as we took into consideration that what an English person might find funny, a German person might not find funny & vice versa, so Marian comes up with the initial stuff in both German & English, then I go over the English texts & I rewrite them as I see fit. In other words it's not necessariliy a good thing to simply translate texts 100% word for word as not everyone will understand what is being said or find the same things funny.

Over here in Spain the humour & jokes tend to be mostly dirty or noise based where the Spanish express themselves with gestures or resort to simulating noises with their mouths. UK humour on the other hand tends to be quite dry, dark & morbid, though in recent years it's been moving closer to the American pun variety or playing dumb/ignorant (both of which I absolutely hate).

Hallo.

ich möchte mich für meine Polemik eintschuldigen. Ich habe alles noch mal Revue passieren lassen. Bei diesem Thema werde ich einfach fuchsteufelswild. Es ist nämlich ein Politikum, es geht gar nicht um die Sprache, sondern um die Nötigung. Ich muss hier auf Englisch radebrechen, obwohl es auch auf Deutsch geht.

Das haben die Beitragsersteller nicht verdient, weil sie nichts dafür können. Englisch wird einfach verlangt - fertig. Wer das von vornherein akzeptiert, denkt nicht über Gängelung nach.
Ich allerdings werde nie ein Spiel installieren, das keine deutsche Sprach- oder Textausgabe hat - folglich würde ich das zu testende Spiel auch nie spielen, wenn es nur auf Englisch ist...

Ich habe den Beitrag geöffnet, weil ich dachte: "naja, vielleicht kann ich helfen." Jetzt klinke ich mich aus, weil es zu nichts führt.

Ich gehöre nämlich zu den Spieletestern, die jedes Spiel öffnen, als wäre es das erste Spiel ihres Lebens. Dadurch finde ich sehr viel mehr versteckte Fehler, die sogenannte Vielspieler gar nicht erkennen würden, da sie auf denselben Gleisen und mit denselben Erwartungen spielen wie die Macher es vorgesehen hatten. Sie spielen "Mainstream".

Ich hingegen erwarte von dem Spiel, dass es sich selbst erklärt. Ich weiß nicht, wo man "üblicherweise" klickt, wen man anspricht und wie man bei einem Adventure zu denken hat, deshalb bringe ich jedes Spiel an seine Grenze (und zum Absturz...).

Beides hat Vor- und Nachteile. Deshalb braucht jedes Spiel genaugenommen zwei Testertypen.

Leider ist das aber auch der Grund, weshalb ich schlecht eigene Spiele entwickeln kann... Meine Lösungen sind unkonventionell und irritierten bis jetzt alle Testspieler. "Das ist bei einem Adventure aber nicht so" höre ich immer wieder. Naja, aber bei meinem Spiel ist das so...

Ich wünsche den Machern viel Erfolg ("Die Macht sei mit Euch").

Machtnix

@Machtnix
Negalla ist sowohl auf Englisch als auch auf Deutsch verfügbar. Vielleicht hätten wir das erwähnen sollen. Naja.
Falls du noch Interesse hast, einfach schreiben.
Es wäre eine große Hilfe, da wir bis jetzt noch sehr wenige Tester haben.

Freundlicher Gruß
David und Dario

@ OP: sorry for hijacking your thread - we tend to do that on here. Besides, it makes for a more interesting read anyway!

Do you have a website or any screenshots / artwork you can share with the rest of us on here?

No we don't have a website :/ we are just developing our game because it's fun we are not professional at all, we could send you some screenshots though our backgrounds are not that detailed yet the "hijacking" thing is not a big deal

@machtnix, macht nix

Not really sure any of us are professionals on here. There's only the odd few developers / studios that you could argue are professional, but even then that would primarily be Daedalic Entertainment, even though there are a couple others, but they are lone wolves or tiny indie teams.