Energy Hook, a grappling and parkour game developed by the creator of the Spiderman 2 game, Jamie Fristrom, is near the end of its development. The gameplay is based on a surprisingly good swinging mechanic that Fristrom developed. With Early Access to the game already available, the last bits of work are being completed for the game to come together.
It was announced that the content for the game had been completed back in late December. Still there was more work to be done. The latest milestone is that the game has been translated. The way that this was done was unusual, but apparently effective. In a March update, Jamie Fristrom asked backers for assistance in translating phrases in a language they knew. Backers responded by filling in the linguistic blanks, and there are now translations for Russian, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, and Polish.
The translation, however, was primarily for the interface. No dialogue appears in the spreadsheet provided to translate phrases such as “main menu,” “paused,” “resume,” and various other actions related to gameplay. I wonder then, whether a full localization will be done in the future. If crowdsourcing the translation of the interface was successful, will subtitles for dialogue be completed in a similar way? Depending on how many words are outside the interface it could be entirely possible. Still, the variety of languages it’s been translated to are impressive.
With translating the game out of the way, and all content completed, Energy Hook is on track for its release later this summer.
