Imagine you have a gamemode. That gamemode is about guessing a word with a length of 4 characters. Imagine you are playing in the English language and completed several levels. What is supposed to happen when you switch to another language? Do you start with level 1 all over again or do you continue with the level you were at the English language?
Not all words are the same length in other languages. For example the word “send” consists of four characters but that same word is nine characters long in Dutch (“verzenden”). This word can therefore not be in the same gamemode.
What’s a proper way of handling this? I am curious about your opinion!
To me it seems weird to penalize the player for changing languages. I guess it sort of depends on how much of a setback it would be. Would you lose hours of play, or just a couple minutes? Whatever language it was in, if the player completed a level, that is an achievement that they made. Taking that away just because they feel like trying it in their native language instead of English, or whatever, seems like it could be annoying. Presumably the point of the game is to have fun, right?
If you do decide to reset them, instead of saying “If you change the language now you will lose all progress!”, I would just have them choose a language at the start of the game (or mini-game?) and not let them change it. That way they’ll never actually “lose” anything.
I think you have to playtest it with a bunch of people to be sure though. You never know.
My initial thought was saving multiple levels per gamemode. When you are level 50 with the Dutch language and you decide to switch to play with English words you start with level 1 but when you switch back to Dutch you continue with level 50. So you won’t lose any progress at all.
This is also a good idea and I’m taking this in consideration as well but in this way the user can’t use other languages to improve them.