About the game Streets of Rogue

In 2017 tinyBuild released Streets of Rogue, a unique visual successor to the hit game Punch Club. Streets of Rogue is remarkable for the variety of its game features and genre elements. The developers combined an intense top-down roguelike, a retro pixel art style, an atmosphere of irrepressible excitement, classic character levelling, and questing. The game revolves around playing through a series of randomly generated cities. This can be accomplished via brute force, stealth, or hacking — it’s up to you!

How and why the game needed to be localized

Streets of Rogue quickly garnered a warm reception from gamers and the press alike, so tinyBuild naturally decided to bring the game to a wider international audience.

Recently we at Alconost were producing several videos for games and, in the process of working with clients, we heard questions again that we had heard before: what should we show, should the video have a voiceover or not, how expensive is it to translate into multiple languages, what source materials do we need, how can we capture video of the screen of a mobile device… To answer these burning questions once and for all, we would like to share with you and give specific examples of how we make videos for games.

We think our experience will be useful both to anyone who is trying to produce video independently and to developers who are outsourcing creation of video for their games.

Written by Alconost

Launching a new business is always stressful and hard. Building everything from scratch can take years, with no guarantee your chosen business or marketing model is good enough. This is why franchising is so widespread – you can use an already established brand with polished marketing.

However, in the IT sphere, the number of franchise offerings is quite limited. So, I've come up with a list of promising tech franchises of 2019. Enjoy!

5 options to choose from

I used to work as a translator. As I speak several foreign languages, friends, colleagues and “friend-of-a-friends” — heck, even total strangers — would often approach me asking to translate “just a few sentences”.

I have translated for clients, for friends and for my own needs. And I can tell you: there are several ways to get your text translated.

How do you choose the best one? Well, it boils down to the famous “time — cost — quality” triangle. And normally we get only two of these three at a time…

Let’s weigh up the pros and cons of each method. I hope to save you a headache next time you’re translating something into another language :)

Written by Alconost

Localizing your product can involve many pitfalls, and there are two of them that developers face AFTER the content has been localized: translating the product updates, and offering support for international users of the localized versions.

In this article, we will demonstrate how these issues can be solved with just a few clicks.

Written by Alconost

In the previous article, we discussed the most important languages for app localization. Soon afterward we received several requests to share our perspective on the key languages for game localization. That’s why we came up with this new post.

We’ve analyzed localization languages from the perspective of return on investment.

There are numerous case studies, research projects, and forecasts regarding the most promising countries and languages for game localization. In this article, we’re going to examine the game language issue from the perspective of the most efficient allocation of your localization budget.

What are the highest- and lowest-priority objectives when it comes to game localization?

We suggest raising this question first before selecting localization languages. Why? Because, depending on the type of game you’re localizing, your business objectives, and your audience’s expectations, there are several levels of localization.

You can do the minimum required and stop at the first level, or you can go further with a step-by-step localization and maximize outreach.

The first thing to start with is the localization of keywords and game description for app stores. This alone might work perfectly well if your game has little to no text or voice and its interface design is fully compatible with the standards of the country you are targeting.

Next, if your game contains text-based instructions, you have no choice but to translate them. In addition, other design choices will also need adjustments in terms of colors, numbers, and other local standards.

Finally, voice-over, if present in the game, must be translated as well, or at least subtitled. Or you can fully complete the localization process by rerecording voice-over in your target languages, thereby providing the perfect user experience.

Written by Alconost

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. The media industry exemplifies this mission. We live in an age where more content is being created and consumed in more ways and on more devices than ever. At IBC 2019, we were delighted to share the latest innovations we’ve been working on and how they can help transform your media workflows. Read on to learn more.

Our support chats and some other indirect signs showed that there are many students among our free users. Here's the reason: PVS-Studio is now more often used by professors in courses related to software development. We are very pleased with this, and we decided to write this small article to fall under notice of other teachers. We are pleased that students become acquainted with the methodology of static code analysis in general and the PVS-Studio tool in particular. Our team will try to contribute to this trend.

According to predictions of the analytical platform App Annie, interest in mobile apps will enjoy stable growth over the next four years. So, if you’re considering bringing your app to new markets, this is the time to do it.

During my two years as the localization manager, I came to understand that localization has its own rules, and knowing them can help you adapt any product for a new market quickly and competently. These principles will be useful for anyone who wants to localize an app but doesn’t know where to start.

1. Evaluate the potential

Start with the most important thing: figuring out which languages you need to localize your app into and determining whether or not localization is justified at all.

Here’s an example from my experience: Israel isn't a high-priority market for Badoo, but the app is localized into modern Hebrew. Moreover, only 6% of Israeli Badoo users actually run the app in Hebrew (as a comparison, 62.5% of Israeli users speak English). In this particular case, localization is justified even with these statistics, but a similar situation could represent a losing proposition for your app. So, study your market.

Probably the largest hurdle when learning any new programming language is simply knowing where to get started. What’s important? What do I need to know to be proficient? It’s hard to follow docs when you’re not even sure what you’re reading.

You might be taking a look at Python. Maybe you’re drawn because of its popularity. Maybe you’re drawn to its flexibility. With Python you can create solutions of all shapes and sizes. You can dig into web development. Simplify your life through automation. Or maybe begin building the future with machine learning.

Picking up a new language is a common situation for modern-day developers. The days of going your entire career focused on one language are long since gone.

Fortunately, concepts typically don’t change as you move from one programming language to the next. Sure, the syntax might be different, but an if statement is still an if statement even when it’s written using { } or End If. So, we don’t need to learn how to program, but rather how to program in a new language.

This is why Susan and I created this series of videos! You might know how to write code, for example in JavaScript, Java or C# (or COBOL, or Bash, or… it doesn’t matter, really). Maybe you learned in a college course, online, or reading a book. So, you don’t need to be taught what an if statement is, but rather what an if statement looks like in Python.

We decided to take the «no-fixed-office» route from the very beginning of our company. For a boutique translation agency focused on the IT industry and working remotely with clients, this seemed like a natural fit. 15 years later, Alconost has over 700 employees spread across the globe, including translators, marketing professionals, PPC advertising experts, sales staff, editors, localization managers, and video production whizzes. And, still, we think an office isn’t the most effective way to operate. As one of the company’s co-founders, I can share just how we managed this.

Not having an office makes the most positive impact on business growth

Our clients are located throughout the world, and our managers often have to send emails outside of normal business hours. When you’re dealing with major time differences, problems could easily take days to resolve. But not for us. Our employees aren’t bound by the limits of the standard 8-hour workday, and we can count on them to respond to emails and queries promptly whenever possible. Getting a quick response is key — even if it’s just to hear “I’ll look into this and get back to you tomorrow.” It’s a win-win: the client feels better and we’re happy.

We like the officeless life not because it allows us to take our time. In fact, it’s the opposite, and we can clock our turnaround times in minutes, not hours. Half of the orders made via our online translation platform — Nitro — are delivered in less than 2 hours. And anyone who emails us with questions or inquiries about Nitro can count on a reply within an hour. This kind of response time simply isn’t possible with fixed office hours.

Written by Alconost

In previous article we told a lot about security of ERP systems. Now we want to talk about ways to protect them.

App localization statistics, case studies and analytics

The goal of every app developer, product manager, and marketing manager is to drive their app’s visibility and broaden its coverage. At the same time, this is also a way to approach the ultimate business goal of increasing monthly active users and revenue.

This brings us to the idea of app localization, which allows a product to reach new geographical regions and satisfy specific needs and user expectations. As such, localization must address multiple linguistic, cultural, regional, and religious considerations.

Written by Alconost

Every day we hear about new budding software programs. With the rapid advances in the software development industry, new players entering the market and have captured a large segment of the market. So, when you need to track business projects, handle the allocation of assets, and solve other IT challenges, you need help from the top software development companies. However, it doesn’t mean that you should select a software development company on the basis of how appealing it was once. Today, people prefer to check the full profile of a company first and then decide to get their service.

To ease your pressure down, listing here some of the internationally acclaimed software development companies from the development niche. This list has been curated on the basis of a variety of reliable resources like Clutch, GoodFirms, Google SERPs, user's feedback & reviews, different independent review firms including medium.com, themanifest.com, etc. Based on the collected data, I’ve assigned the total score for each of the 10 leaders, and here I represent a list of the top software development companies that are doing best in their domain.

List of the Top Software Development Companies

I hope that you will find Node version 12 new capabilities compelling and soon you will upgrade your app to it.

In turn, you will get advanced debugging, intelligent coding with the powerful IntelliSense engine, interactive window, quick tracking of performance issues, unit testing, typescript integration, source control, cloud integration, and npm integration.

To get started in this walkthrough, this post captures the steps on how to update Node.js in Visual Studio, Windows/macOS, and NPM.

Talking to people at conferences and in comments to articles, we face the following objection: static analysis reduces the time to detect errors, but takes up programmers' time, which negates the benefits of using it and even slows down the development process. Let's get this objection straightened out and try to show that it's groundless.

The PVS-Studio 7.04 release coincided with the release of the Warnings Next Generation 6.0.0 plugin for Jenkins. Right in this release Warnings NG Plugin added support of the PVS-Studio static code analyzer. This plugin visualizes data related to compiler warnings or other analysis tools in Jenkins. This article will cover in detail how to install and configure this plugin to use it with PVS-Studio, and will describe most of its features.

Introduction

Trends in technology have turned around how things work in the world of business. In the past, the salespeople were in charge of driving the demand for their products. Today, sales are more customer-centered than before and most customers get informed about the products without the assistance of salespeople.

The creation of design models as well as visualization of solutions is for some reason always a subject of great interest among all members of a productive team, be it a manager eager to master Sketch, or a developer who wants to make cool interfaces without the need to go to a designer. But we all know what happens when it comes to actually doing stuff.

My way

Hi, everybody!

My name is Anna and I work for an American company Scentbird NY as a product designer. Prior to that I was involved in developing flagship products in Alfa-Bank design team.

I was probably born under a lucky star but all my life I've been working with the developers who suggest the best product solutions, better than a lot of product managers and product owners. But anyway, my observation is that the earlier you involve developers into working on a particular task, the better off you are.

What you are about to read is actually a blueprint on how to conduct brainstorm sessions and generate not-so-obvious yet effective solutions, which are apparently really easy to reach and not that time-consuming.

Scrum allows Agile teams working on complex projects and delivering winning products by solving problems adaptively. This popular straightforward method is widely used to handle projects and get things done. Scrum projects more accurately fulfill customers' needs because they encourage continuous feedback.

There is no need for detailed analytics to understand that Scrum continues to grow in popularity just because of its many benefits and general effectiveness. And the important merit in this belongs to a Scrum Master. In this post, we extol and praise the role of a Scrum Master, without which no Scrum project succeeds.