Grid Town v1.1 Release Notes

v1.0 finished the game. v1.1 opens it up to more players. A lot of the people who play Grid Town, and a lot of the people who run real grids, don’t read English first, so this release translates every word of it: the menus, the tutorial, all 100 Daily scenarios, the Gazette, the share cards, every Grid Upgrade. The rest of the release is a set of fixes found along the way, including places where the game’s own English said something slightly different from what the game actually does.

Play in Dutch, French, or Spanish

• The whole game, not just the menus. Around 1,800 lines of text per language: the tutorial, the HUD and build tray, every alert, the Daily bulletin and all 100 of its scenarios, the day report and the Gazette’s headlines and quotes, the Ledger, the post-mortem, the share cards, and the full Grid Upgrades deck.
• Pick it, or let the game pick for you. A language switch sits next to the seal on the main menu and in Settings. If your browser is set to Dutch, French, or Spanish, the game starts in that language on its own, and your choice is remembered.
• Links that land in the right language. Share gridtowngame.com/nl, /fr, or /es and the game opens in that language, with a link preview written in it too.
• Euros, written locally. Prices and budgets show in euros in each language’s own style (€ 1.200 in Dutch, 1 200 € in French, 1200 € in Spanish). English keeps dollars.

Translated the way games talk

The first Dutch draft was correct but stiff. A native Dutch speaker who reviewed it called it a very literal translation that doesn’t always work in the gaming world, and caught a few places where the meaning had slipped, like the graph’s colored area being called a “mountain”. So the approach changed.

• Meaning first. Every line was translated from what it does on screen, not from the English words alone, so a label for households that left town doesn’t come out as “remaining”.
• The words players already use. Daily, Sandbox, Stats, and streak stay as players know them where that’s what games in that language say. Instructions follow how software in each language phrases them, and the jokes and headlines were rewritten as local jokes and headlines rather than translated word for word.
• Reviewed. The Dutch is signed off by that native reviewer. French and Spanish were written the same way, then checked line by line by an adversarial review that fixed several hundred lines. They’re live now and still going through native review, so if something reads oddly, the feedback button is the fastest way to fix it.

Daily fixes

• A way back to the menu. The Daily and archive score cards now have a Menu button.
• “Play again” really plays again. On a live Daily, the practice-replay button used to drop you back at the menu. It now starts a fresh practice run of the day’s grid.
• No more wrong goal mid-run. Reaching a clean city on a Daily no longer pops a “Sustainable City!” message, which wrongly suggested that was the Daily’s goal. The Daily is scored on carbon-free hours, and the badge is still recorded quietly on your results.
• The AI Boom keeps its promise. The second pair of data centers that the AI Boom scenario announces for day two now actually switches on.

The game says what it means

Translating every line meant reading every line closely, and some of the English turned out to be slightly off. These are fixed in every language.

• Coalfields to Batteries no longer claims there is “no fossil to lean on”. The coal is gone, but gas is still there, and burning it costs you clean hours.
• Gazette headlines that match the numbers. The evening-shortfall headline now reports the share of demand that went unserved, which is what it measures, rather than a share of homes. The growth headline no longer says “this week” for homes built in a single day.
• Plainer report wording. The share card says “1 home”, not “1 homes”. The day report names a grid battery and a data center instead of internal names like “GRIDBATTERY”. Estimates carry one hedge, not two.

Smaller fixes & polish

• Rotate freely. The installable app no longer forces landscape on phones and tablets.
• Credits. The open-source components the game is built on now have their full license notices published alongside it.

Play at gridtowngame.com, or read what changed in v1.0.

These release notes are written by Claude, based on direction from Trevor Hinkle.