Post by LocJAM in Game displays black screen

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Now that we have over 30 builds of the game working online, it's safe to say that game-breaking issues must be local.

If your game fails to run, try using a different machine, possibly a Windows installation with the default apps, since that's inevitably the most tested solution.

Then check your own edits

Furst of all, copy the content of your text_translated.lua, file and paste it on the https://sellaroli.com/apps/nem-translation-tool/ website. It will show you where the first lua synthax error is. Fix them one by one, then copy the text back to your file.

Then download a fresh new copy of the localization kit, extract it and overwrite text_translated.lua with your own version (to make sure no other file was changed)

Similarly, if you changed the graphics, overwrite poster_translated.png and title_translated.png inside the game.zip file. Make sure they are located exactly in the assets/single_sprites/ folder

In general, the more you can carefully transfer your edits into a freshly downloaded, stock localization kit, the more you can trust it to run like the others

Finally, zip and upload the project folder to Itch.io as explained in the step by step guide. This time, it does not need to be password-protected.

Sara Todaro175 days ago(+1)

Thank you for posting this troubleshooting guide!

I'm from another team who's having problems uploading their project.

I updated the first release 1.0 with only text_credits.lua changed to test the credits and it worked correctly.

From version 1.1 I tried to upload the ip with edited text_translated.lua but got a black screen: https://saratodaro.itch.io/locjam-6-submission

I wasn't able to find any code issue in MemoQ nor in the Sellaroli translation tool.

Then, I tried to download version 1.2, but I apparently I can't extract it. I get an unknown type error for several elements, included game.js.

Any idea where my problem could lie?

Gnou175 days ago(+1)

your game is not visible to the public right now!

one thing off top of my head: did you make sure to escape quotation marks? there needs to be a \ before any " symbol within your text

Sara Todaro175 days ago(+1)

Apologies, I made the page public now! -_-'

Yes, we were careful to use the escaped quotes for text within the localizable portion.

We also used heavily the breakline \n to improve readability. The preview tool gave no sign it was forbidden, but I wonder if that's the root of the problem? We didn't do any other "crazy" changes, after all.

Gnou175 days ago(+1)

linebreaks are not a problem of themselves, but it's possible that you made a bad one somewhere; the Sellaroli tool does say that linebreaks confuse it so it may be your error happens after a linebreak!

Smaxx175 days ago(+1)

Don’t forget you’ll have to escape line breaks, too! Don’t use actual line breaks in your translation. Use \n instead. (Unless you added a filter doing that replacement for you.)

Sara Todaro174 days ago

Thank you both for your replies!

I confirm we used \n.

In the end, we managed to upload a working version containing an updated translation.

Probably, there was some minor error in the code that got ironed out...