LudoKit Release Notes

Added a new Markdown Tools page, which currently just provides a Markdown to HTML converter. WHY!? Because I needed to be able to get simple, complete HTML documents from Markdown while building Localization Kits, and Markdown-to-HTML converters don't give you full documents.

Added a copy of the "New Team" button to the bottom of the page (after existing teams) since people may look for it there.

Added a time converter page so that we can create shareable links for a specific time that a user can follow to see that time in their time zone. It lets you select from LudoKit's supported time zones and languages so you can also use it to get a time in a particular format for marketing and other purposes.

You can now send a "notice" to credited contributors, asking them to ensure their credit is correct with a due date. This is useful for giving creditees a final opportunity to make requests prior to building a game for release.

Added a notice at the top of a game's Credits page if there are any issues, so you don't have to scroll through the list to determine if there are any pending requests.

Added a "Bug Notice" footer to outgoing emails so recipients will be less surprised if something weird happens.

Credits invite links now have more useful behavior for existing contributors. Now when you open a Credits invite link you'll be given different options based on whether or not your are already credited, and whether or not your credits include the roles granted by the link. This update also includes more improvements to the credit roles editor, which hopefully make it more understandable.

You can now force-override the positioning of layers in a non-default language even when that layer doesn't have a variant in that language. Previously assets with variants in the selected language would auto-decouple its position from the default language when you started editing it, while editing a layer without an asset in the current language made those edits globally. That's still true by default, but now you can unlink the layer from the default language even when it has no asset in that language! This lets you override positioning of any element on a per-language basis, while providing good default behavior.

Added a template for Steam Soundtrack "Album Cover Art", and a link to where to upload it.

You can now save a Steam Event/Announcement ID to a Marketing Campaign. For now this just gives you quick links to Steam to view/edit/create the Steam Announcement, but we'll probably get some more interesting features in there later!

The Gallery sections now remember their open/closed state, making it a lost easier to keep track of where you were while navigating around.

The Gallery now remembers what Campaign you were working on, making it easier to navigate around without having to re-select that campaign when you get back to the Gallery.

Game exports now take an optimistic approach to missing store IDs: if the store-specific achievement ID isn't explicitly set in LudoKit, but that store allows custom IDs, then LudoKit assumes you'll use the LudoKit ID on that store eventually and falls back to that value. Previously it would exclude that ID from the export. This new behavior prevents you from needing to update your in-game achievement data if you haven't set your achievements up on stores yet (so long as you do use matching IDs!). The downsides are limited, so long as your achievement-updating game code is designed to fail gracefully.

When syncing Steam Achievement identifiers in LudoKit, the UI now reports on additional warning categories: (1) Mismatched Goals, (2) Mismatched "Hidden" state, and (3) LudoKit achievements with Steam Stat IDs that do not have a linked Stat on Steam.

The LudoKit Bookmarklet now also extracts achievement "max" values from Steam. (You'll need to re-bookmark it.)

The Steam Store Kit now includes the "VDF" file you can upload directly to Steam to batch-update all text and translations for your achievements.

Steam Achievement identifiers can now be batch-added to LudoKit, via a bookmarklet that extracts Achievement data from Steam. In addition, the "Store update mode" in the Achievement editor now includes detailed instructions for how to efficiently update Steam achievement data, and has been generally improved to make manually syncing data between LudoKit and stores easier.

Updated the Achievement status summaries to include the 4(!) different steam identifiers each Achievement should have.

Achievements now also list their Steam "Localization Tokens" as editable IDs. These are needed to enable LudoKit to provide batch-text/translation uploads for Steam Achievements, since Steam doesn't have an inferrable ID system for its Achievement strings.

The Achievements page now explicitly tells you when all Achievements are fully configured (rather than just telling you when there are issues). It's more celebratory, but also just more explicit which is helpful right after you upload something so you can see that it did what you expected.

The Achievements page now summarizes counts of achievements with issues making them "incomplete" (missing translations, missing icons, missing Google Play IDs), and individual achievements on the page are now highlighted as having issues for all of those same cases (previously they were just highlighted for translation issues).

You can now batch-sync your Google Play Achievement IDs to LudoKit by uploading your CSV "Resource" from Google Play. The Achievements page now has a dedicated button for this, and the Google Play "Store Package" download now includes this process before and after the package-generation workflow. This allows you to completely avoid manual mapping of Google Play IDs to LudoKit achievements, except for cases where LudoKit can't unambiguously map the two.

Removed the "Workflows" concept entirely from Achievements. It was only very partially drafted, and the work required to fully implement it is simply too much! Removing in favor of the simpler "Store Update Mode" views in the Achievement Editors.

The Google Play export (for batch-creation) no longer includes a README.md file, nor puts icons in a subfolder, because as of today doing either of these cause uploads to Google Play to fail. They've apparently updated their requirements to be more strict since just last week 🙄

The Achievements page now provides a count of Achievements that have localization errors, and highlights every Achievement that has such an error so its easy to spot. Note this will make the page a big noisy when you haven't done any localization yet, so it may need to be toned down for that scenario.

When achievement icons are exported, they are now prefixed with their position number so that they sort the same way as your achievements. Since they usually have to be manually uploaded to store pages, this makes them much easier to find.

When your release date is configured, it's shown in all of your target locales. Now it's also shown in ISO so you can easily use the date in software.

Each Steam section in the Promo Art gallery can now be downloaded on its own.

In the Promo Art Gallery, compositions now include eye-dropper buttons to copy their data and paint-bucket buttons to paste that copied data. You can use this to replace one composition's content with a copy of a different composition. It works the same way that drag-dropping one composition onto another does, but is easier to use when you don't want to scroll around while dragging something.

Steam Announcement and YouTube Post promo art can now be created per marketing campaign.

Achievement translations are now uploadable! It currently does minimal checking and reporting, so make sure you back things up and double-check everything. Translations are also available in the Google Play export, which means that you can fully create your Google Play achievements with a single import provided by LudoKit!

You can now export Achievements for Google Play, which includes the files you need to batch-create new Achievements. (Note that Google Play only allows manual updates for Achievements, but you can use this LudoKit feature for batch creation).

Added an Atom feed for the release notes so that people can subscribe in their feed readers.

Updated the XLIFF files in the Achievement Localization Kit to separate notes out by category, and added info to the Kit README file about those categories.

You can now create Promo Art Overrides linked to Marketing Campaigns. Once you have at least one Marketing Campaign, you'll get a dropdown list in the Promo Art Gallery to optionally pick one of those campaigns. Once you've done that, new sections will be added for any overridable templates. (This is a work in progress!)

The sections in the Promo Art Gallery are now collapsible to make it easier to see the things you want to see. Sections where you have no compositions, and sections for stuff that isn't the main game (demos, soundtracks) start closed.

The Promo Art Gallery now supports Steam Soundtracks! As with your demo, if you add a Steam Soundtrack to your game's store settings, a new section will appear in the Promo Art Gallery with the subset of Steam templates used by "Music" entities on Steam, including a preview of the overlay banner that Steam renders on those images.

The Promo Art Gallery now supports Steam Demos! If you have add a Steam demo to your game's store settings, a new section will appear in the Promo Art Gallery. This section includes all of the Steam Promo Art that is required by Steam for Demos, and adds the demo banner overlay to those images that have it so you can see what your assets will look like with that overlay.

Re-organized the Promo Art Gallery in general so that templates are partially sorted by squareness, to make the layout less distracting -- previously the vertical and horizontal sizes changed a lot from template to template, making things hard to look at (templates were previously sorted by rough "importance", but you kinda need them all anyway so visual clarity is probably better).

Re-organized the Steam promo art for better grouping to reduce cognitive load.

Added a new "Translator" role. Org members assigned to this role for a game will generally be able to update translations of LudoKit-managed text for that game.

The XLIFF files generated for translators (currently just for Achievements) now include basic validation while being built, so that any strings that need retranslation due to certain kinds of errors are flagged and annotated as such.

The PSD downloads of Promo Art have some improvements: (1) any language that has at least one image variant now gets its own folder of layers, so you can toggle visibility of per-language folders rather than having to manual toggle visibility for individual variant images; and (2) images that go outside the template bounds are no longer cropped in the exported source layers (each image is always present in its entirety).

There is now an "Achievement Tasks" page, which is in a largely non-functional, draft state. The purpose of this page is to (eventually) give you a dynamically updated task list regarding your Achievements, so that it can help you ensure your Achievement data is properly synced everywhere as you add or change achievements, translations, etc.

The Achievement Editor now indicates when a target language has issues, and shows those issues next to the corresponding input field.

Steam recently changed the dimensions of the "Steam Broadcast" images. Those templates are now updated in LudoKit!

Added an "Achievements" link to each supported store, to take you right to the Achievement configuration pages.

There is now an "Achievements Manager" role that can be used to give specific people update/create access to Achievements.

Added simple variable support to achievement names/descriptions: you can include the substring {goal} in either of those (e.g. "Catch {goal} worms") and LudoKit will interpolate the goal value upon exporting for your game or stores, and will add instructions for translators. This feature allows you to change an Achievement's goal value without having to remember to update the text, and without necessarily having to re-translate (though translations can depend on the exact number, so while the number will remain correct in translations you may end up with something ungrammatical unless you do re-translate).

Added prior/next buttons to the top of the Achievement Editor to make it easy to work through all achievements (rather than having to go back to the index page all the time).

Achievements now have multiple "Export For..." options. The "Game" option includes the JSON of all data for use in-game, along with full-scale PNGs of each icon for in-game display. The "Translators" option includes everything a translation team would need to translate your achievements (or update existing translations). Finally, each store you've configured for a game now has its own export button; these include upload-ready icons that will work on that store, and over time may include other store-ready data for stores that support batch operations (most don't...).

Translations of Credits role names have been updated (by From the Void) to fix a small number of errors.

Added "Images" as sidebar entry to get to your Image Library, and changed the URL for the library to be at /images rather than /promo-library, since the Image Library is now meant for more general use.

When you open the Image Library via an editor (e.g. the Promo Art or Achievement Icon editors), the images are now pre-filtered on corresponding tags. These tags won't yet exist on any existing library images, but you can add them at any time (and you can always remove the filter to see all images).

Image Library assets now have a "tags" concept, for future use in better default filtering and organization.

You can no drag one Achievement Icon onto another to replace the latter with a copy of the former. This allows for quickly setting up your icons: start with one that has the proper background layers you want, drag-drop it to those that should use the same background stuff, and then just edit the top layers that need to change per icon!

On the main Achievements page, clicking an Achievement's ID, name, description, or goal will copy it to your clipboard to make it less tedious to copy that info to stores etc.

Achievements can now be drag-drop sorted. The UX isn't very clear about that right now, but it does work!

Updated the Release Notes page to group entries by category, include release dates, and otherwise be more readable.

In your Font Library, you can now add an optional note to each font. This is useful for indicating what a font is for when that is otherwise not discoverable in LudoKit.

Subsetted fonts are now using a different library. The prior subsetter resulted in fonts that had all of their metadata stripped, making them incompatible with game engines. The new one should resolve this!

Credits roles and headings are now pre-localized into all languages supported by LudoKit, thanks to From the Void!

Achievement name and description translations can now be added/edited/viewed in the Achievement Editor. This is meant for surgical translation fixes; professional translators will prefer to edit translations in their own tools!

Achievement names and descriptions are now paired with optional "Context Info" fields, which can be used to add notes for translators and colleagues.

Achievement icons are now exported along with their definitions. The exported zip includes a folder of icons for each of your game's supported stores, with correct dimensions for that store, and includes the grayscale versions where needed.

In the Achievement Icon editor, you'll now see a preview of what it'll look like as a circle. That'll make it a lot easier to ensure it'll look good on any platform while you're editing it.

The Achievements page now generates and displays the grayscaled "locked" version of each icon, and a preview of what each icon will look like when circularized.

Achievement icons are now displayed on the main Achievements page for each game.

You can now edit Achievement Icons using the same system as the Promo Art editor. The Promo Art Components library can now be used for your Promo Art and for your Achievement Icons.

Achievements are now exportable in a general JSON format that can be directly ingested by a game or preprocessed for any use case.

You can now manage data for a game's Achievements in LudoKit! It's bare-bones at the moment: only the text data is supported, there are no exports, and localization data is not yet being managed.

Added a template for "Google Player Partner Images", which may be requested by the Google Play team when they want to feature your game.

When set, your planned release date is now shown on the game's dashboard.

Moved the target-store configuration from a popup to its own page, since there's a lot there. Also fixed some issues with setting the release date on that page.

You can now record a game's release date in its Supported Stores settings. This includes draft support for localized versions of that release date for your target languages, in timezones that make sense for that language.

Added YouTube links to the main site footer and the sidebar.

Added a field to exported credits called "kind", which indicates the type of thing you're currently looking at. Helpful for orienting yourself in larger exports. This was just an addition to the export and does not change any existing formatting!

When exporting credits, you can now opt into having that export include "subsetted fonts", which are fonts that only include the glyphs they'd have to render in your Credits. This is useful for allowing a smaller memory footprint when you need to support lots of fonts at the same time while rendering credits.

Added a JSON Schema for exported Credits, and a reference to its URL in exported Credits JSON files. This allows code editor to automatically enable hover descriptions, error checking, and autocompletes in your exported Credits files. While the format is subject to rapid change the schema and any particular download might be out of sync, but schemas will be versioned once things settle so you can count on them always working for a particular download.

Credits are now exportable! They're provided as zip of per-game-language JSON files. This draft format is likely to change with user feedback, so keep your head on a swivel!

Roles are now rendered with their configured fonts on the Credits page, so managers can now see how well their font configurations are working for contributor names and roles while switching between languages.

All text related to Credits is now checked for font coverage, and any unsupported text is shown with with relevant font-configuration options next to it. This makes it easy to quickly resolve font issues.

When a user follows a self-service Credits Link to add themselves to a game's credits, they'll now get to specify their roles before creating that Credit. Previously they'd invisibly get whatever roles were attached to the invite and then have to go check their Credits list to see if they wanted to change anything, which was confusing and also led to people just not realizing they could update their roles.

When editing your own credits, roles with optional language-specificity (like localization) now provide a language picker. This was already present for Credits managers, because those users have access to data like "which languages the game supports". That data isn't available in the context of editing your own credits, so previously you were just given no options. Now it lists all languages (whether or not the game supports them), since that's an overall improvement.

Re-normalized LudoKit's standard language codes. The prior approach tried to ensure that each language code was specific to a particular language variant, but that's not really how game translation is done. The new approach tries to better match game-translation reality: it's very unlikely for one game to be translated into two mutually-intelligible languages, and most stores only support a single language code in such case. Existing data will be mutated with this update to ensure all language codes are part of LudoKit's defined set.

Reduced the list of available languages that Games can say they support to the top 19 most common targets on Steam. This is to enable pre-localization of certain content, like roles in Credits, while ensuring 100% coverage for LudoKit-supported languages.

For Credits Teams that are set to either not appear in post-credits affiliations, or are set to be shown in a different Team, their Team headings on the Credits Management page now shows that information so you can tell at a glance.

Credits Teams can now have configured minimum and maximum role counts for their members. Members with values outside this range will show an error. This also now allows for setting the min roles to 0, indicating that you're okay with credited members appearing in post-credits Team lists without them appearing in the actual credits; AND allows for setting max roles to 0 to indicate that Contributors on a Team should not show up in the main Credits at all (but can still show up in the post-credits Team listing).

Contributors can now add themselves to your Credits by following a "Contributor Invite Link". These can be created and managed for a game by anyone with sufficient permissions. These make it much easier to add people to your Credits, since you can just post a link somewhere rather than having to track down everyone's email addresses.

Credits Teams now include a "Post-Credits Affiliation" setting, used for determining which Credits Team (if any) the current Team's members should be listed under in post-credits affiliations sections. This allows you to create LudoKit Credits Teams for management convenience while still allowing you to list multiple Teams' members under a single Team, for example.

There is now an "Early Access Code" system. If a user has an Early Access Code, they can use it to create a new Organization (currently users can only access an Organization by being invited and cannot create one themselves at all). This will simplify onboarding of new Early Access testers!

You can now configure fonts for your Credits. A Game's Credits portal has a new section, "Credits Fonts", where you can specify which fonts to use by game language and text type (so you can specify different fonts for names versus roles). You can specify fallback fonts for graceful handling of variations of human-name locales. Finally, LudoKit checks your configured fonts against the names in your Credits and alerts you to cases where you are missing glyphs. (This only works for contributor/team names right now, but will be expanded to role names, disciplines, and headings.)

Credits Managers can now move a Credit to a different Credits Team, so long as they have permissions for both. Now you can fix it when you accidentally add Credits to the wrong Team, without having to delete and re-add them.

Added a role for "Internationalization", since that's a specialized technical role that doesn't really fall within any of the current roles.

Added the default "Credits Name" fields to the account management page. Previously you had to set it during registration but then had no way to see or update it afterwards!

Added email notifications for when someone's credit is updated by Credits Managers.

Added a warning to Games' Credits Management pages notifying that Credits don't yet have an export option, so data is trapped there until they do. (That's up next!)

Completed the first version of the Credits Manager feature! This feature provides a set of standardized roles, allows you to add credits by email, allows credited people to request changes to their credits, while ensuring that game managers have the final say. Credited contributors do not have to be part of your Org; they'll be able to log into LudoKit and see any of their credits independently of Org membership and game access.

Account registration now asks all new users for their "Credits Name". Since the only reason to use LudoKit is to collaborate on games, there's a very high chance that any given user will need to be Credited in a LudoKit-managed game, and ensuring users have already specified that makes it much easier to add existing LudoKit users to Credits without a lot of back-and-forth between a Credits Manager and a Contributor to get their name right. Existing users have had these values pre-populated with their LudoKit name, which may or may not be what they want...

Added links to the new Discord server in all outgoing email footers.

Improved the UX when logging in to make sense for new users arriving to manage their own game credits.

Drafted a "Features" page so people get get a sense of what LudoKit will do for them once it's available.

Drafted a placeholder "Pricing" page since people will be looking for that. For now it's basically a shrug but, hey, knowing that we don't know is still something!

Anyone who wants to see what data LudoKit knows about them can now request that from a new Personal Data Request page.

Updated the Privacy Policy to reflect the new data that will come from the upcoming Credits Management features.

The "Send to YouTube" feature for submitting updated boxart to YouTube's auto-created game channels now allows you to pick which of your verified email addresses to use in the reply-to. Previously it just used your primary address.

"Credits Teams" are now implemented, along with the ability to delegate management of them to specific Org Members. (This is a prereq for the rest of the Credits feature, but not very useful on its own!)

Improved styling of the Pending Invites list (viewable by Org managers).

Now allowing languages besides English to be set as the "default" language for new Games.

Improved the role editor UI to make it much more understandable.

Org members can now only see other Org Members those others have Org-level roles or have roles in shared Games. Org Admins/Managers can still see everyone else. This adds some extra privacy, and will reduce overhead for large Orgs.

Added a confirmation message for any "Variable Fonts" you upload, since those typically have bad game engine support. Plus future LudoKit features may not have very good support for variable fonts either. LudoKit still lets you upload them, it just asks you to confirm you know what you're doing.

The Font Library can now be downloaded as a single zip file.

Game Fonts now have their language coverage computed (for languages your game says it supports). You can toggle language coverage display on and off in the Font Library.

Replaced the Org-level Font Library with a Game-level one. This works better for handling access permissions, and per-Game libraries will stay small and much easier to work with. Includes a ton of caching and performance tricks to minimize font re-downloads and ensure they're loaded quickly for previews. Also includes an overhaul of the upload process, making it very easy to upload multiple fonts at once.

Email notices about invites to Orgs now include hints in their links back to the site, so that following such a link will (if you are not logged in) automatically cause the login widget to pop up, pre-populated with your email address and choosing the correct "register" vs. "login" option. This should streamline the invite loop a bit and make it more understandable. Note that these "hint" links use the URL's hash for extra privacy -- the hash part of URLs is never sent to servers, so it keeps the hinted email address out of server logs and the like.

Improved the HTML formatting and organization of emails sent by LudoKit.

The sidebar can now be toggled open and closed, and when the window is narrow (like on mobile) the sidebar works as an overlay to save space. Probably not a great mobile experience still, but this at least makes it viewable on mobile!

Improved tab navigation for the user avatar picker. It previously used a fully hidden input for better styling, but this creates accessibility issues and can cause page jank when that "invisible" element gets focused. Now that input appears when tabbing through the page for better clarity.

Made it possible to drag-drop an image onto your Avatar preview in your account settings rather than having to use the file picker, and made the whole preview clickable to open the picker.

Added a button to an Org's settings to delete it. BUT. Disabling in production for now until it has some more safety mechanisms to keep it from happening on accident.

Promo Art Components can now be deleted, which removes any layers containing them from Compositions.

Added a simple undo/redo history to the editor.

Resolved an issue where sometimes the selection outline would be visible in the downloaded composition.

Resolved an issue where the editor would get stuck in a "Locked" state after downloading the composition.

When uploading a Promo Art Component, it now defaults to a max width of 3840px (instead of 1920) to support 4K images. You should keep your images smaller though to keep downloads and editing snappy!

Improved the options for copying the list of a game's supported languages so that it's easier to paste into an email, markdown file, text file, etc for sharing with others.

Added a language selector for previewing store pages in any language supported by a Game. Currently works for Steam and Google Play. (Apple's locale-specific links are difficult to predict due to each version of the store only supporting a subset of languages.)

Added a reset button to the date range picker, which sets it to the range default of the last two weeks.

Links that have date ranges impacted by the date-picker now show a calendar icon next to them for clarity.

Fonts can now be downloaded either individually, or as a zipped collection.

LudoKit now includes an Org-wide "Font Library", to which you can upload Fonts and their licenses. Fonts can be given nicknames, and you can specify which languages each font supports, which will enable future features in LudoKit. Each Game can "link" to any of the fonts, allow you to keep track of which fonts are used by which Game.

Added buttons for copying a game's supported language list with a few different delimiters.

Added a page for collecting Steam BBCode tools, starting with a simple formatter/prettifier.

The site now checks for updates when you navigate around (with a cooldown) and alerts you when one is available.

Added templates for Steam Announcements and YouTube Posts

Replaced the single Discord Promo Art with the 3 that are actually needed.

Added links to YouTube channels and YouTube Studio.

Added links for a demo's Steam player counts and SteamDB charts.