Games being released without meeting BGA's own standards

[cigma]

And while it's great that the Sky Team team has been so responsive, shouldn't at least most of those recently-fixed bugs have been caught at the alpha/beta stage?

Like some other posters here, I'm happy to trade a few glitches for newness sometimes (and am an alpha reviewer), but I think if BGA is going to bother to divide games into 3 levels of 'polishedness', those levels should mean something. When a game has made it to full release, players have a right to expect hassle-free interaction with the interface.

I agree

[Meeplelowda]

Having tooltips which can be translated is crucial. Without them non-english speakers will not have full access to the game.

I did not realize that translations were implemented through tooltips. I apologize for my snark.

[robinzig]

Having tooltips which can be translated is crucial. Without them non-english speakers will not have full access to the game.

I did not realize that translations were implemented through tooltips. I apologize for my snark.

They can be - it depends on what the developer chose to do for that game.

For Deus (the only game I've implemented on BGA so far), because the only card images I had available to me had text in English and French, I only gave players the option (via game preferences) of choosing between those two. If players cannot read either language then the only way to access the translation is indeed via hovering to get the tooltip, which will have the card text translated into their language. (This of course isn't ideal as it's not always easy to get tooltips to appear on a touch-screen interface.)

Because of these problems, some of the more "regular" devs, rather than simply using images of cards (or similar game pieces) which include the text, just provide the card background and apply the translated text over the top of it. When done well, this is without doubt a much better solution (players of all languages will see the translated text without needing to display a tooltip) - but it's not perfect, particularly because you don't know how much space the text will take up in different languages and there's always a risk it will overflow the provided space (or appear unreasonably small if you lessen this risk by reducing the font-size). You also have to find a freely-available font which looks at least a little similar to the font used on the actual card.

I'm not sure exactly how those other developers solve these issues, but some of them post on these forums regularly so maybe one of them will tell us here But as with everything else while developing, it's a balance.

[pjt33]

And while it's great that the Sky Team team has been so responsive, shouldn't at least most of those recently-fixed bugs have been caught at the alpha/beta stage?

Like some other posters here, I'm happy to trade a few glitches for newness sometimes (and am an alpha reviewer), but I think if BGA is going to bother to divide games into 3 levels of 'polishedness', those levels should mean something. When a game has made it to full release, players have a right to expect hassle-free interaction with the interface.

While this is certainly true in an ideal world, there is a bit of a catch-22 with some games: they're stuck in alpha because no-one plays them and marks them as ready to progress, but because they're stuck in alpha only a small number of people can see them. We're not supposed to publicise the games in alpha so I won't name names, but I played one alpha game this weekend which has been in alpha for over two years, and which I've been wanting to test for several months, but it was the first time I managed to get a large enough group together (we played with 6 players). On the one hand, it really needs to go to beta to start getting some plays; on the other hand, I reported what I consider to be a bug which really should be fixed before it goes to beta.

[ufm]

And while it's great that the Sky Team team has been so responsive, shouldn't at least most of those recently-fixed bugs have been caught at the alpha/beta stage?

Sadly, most BGA reviewers are not good testers, and the number of played games are too few to catch bugs in most games.

KoT handled this greatly. In contrast, there are some games on the verge of being unplayable.

[cigma]

Because of these problems, some of the more "regular" devs, rather than simply using images of cards (or similar game pieces) which include the text, just provide the card background and apply the translated text over the top of it. When done well, this is without doubt a much better solution (players of all languages will see the translated text without needing to display a tooltip) - but it's not perfect, particularly because you don't know how much space the text will take up in different languages and there's always a risk it will overflow the provided space (or appear unreasonably small if you lessen this risk by reducing the font-size).

This is often the problem when translating into German, because German texts need about 20%+ more space than English texts. In some cases you can shorten the translated texts by translating more freely, but in some cases you will loose crucial information. Thus I prefer the tooltips, but I agree that neither way is ideal.

[fruktansvärt]

… German texts need about 20%+ more space than English texts. …

this is often true for most languages. you could amend your statement to "Translated text need about 20%+ more space than the original language text."
try translating an original German text to English, and you may find it's longer too.