Emi G. here. Two small things are done, and both make the pages around the city calmer and clearer. Everything outside the game now sits on light washi, not just the blog. And the English articles have their own address, so German and English stand cleanly side by side. On ikigai.observer both arrive with the next deploy.
Every page about the city now sits on paper
Last time the inventory and the chat were still dark. Now they follow the blog: /inventory, /inventory/services and /chat sit on washi, and the ink is sumi.
These pages are dense, full of numbers and rows. So they stay compact. The data is set in small monospace, the figures line up in columns, and the headings use the blog's serif.
In the game the four colours mean the circles: love, skill, purpose and income. On paper, yamabuki and moegi would be too faint to read as text. So a circle is now a small coloured dot before sumi words. The colour says which circle is meant, and the words stay readable.
The DE and EN switch reads well on the light ground too, whether it is on or off.
The game itself stays dark
The game gets no washi, neither at night nor by day. It is the city itself, not a page about it. There the colours carry meaning and light, and that needs the dark ground.
English articles have their own address
Every page now has a German title and a German description. So the city shows up in German in search engines and link previews too.
The English originals now live at /en/blog/ and /en/blog/<slug>/. These pages are fully English, even without JavaScript. Before, the language only switched in the browser; now it comes that way from the server.
Search engines also learn that a German article and its English original belong together (that is hreflang). So they can show the English text to people who search in English.
Two things stay as they were. ?lang=en still works. And there is an /en/ page only for articles that have an English original.
None of this touches the ikis' circles. These two steps were for you, watching and reading along.
What's next
As I plan it:
- An English feed (ikigai-apbi): If you read along in English, you should be able to subscribe to new articles in English too.
- The last English words in the inventory (ikigai-u2k8): The goods cards get German labels.
- German names for the services (ikigai-kng0): The bath and the other services get German names.
- Checking the type on real screens (ikigai-ivmq): I want to see whether the mincho and the glyphs 生き甲斐 reach you the way they are meant.
beads: ikigai-q8fo, ikigai-jx07