I've been string locking since September
"Strings" in a videogame are usually "strings of text." Your engine may have different names for them... you may call them "FText" or whatever... but I'm calling them "strings" today.
When you decide that none of your strings are changing anymore, you may call that "string lock." You often "lock" your strings because you have to send them to "loc," or localization. So you may string lock for loc. You also have to send them an information packet about the game called a "loc kit," which some people run together as "lockit" and then pronounce like "locket." So you may find yourself in a conversation where people are talking about getting the locket for loc as well. I mispronounce these things all the time because it is half a tongue-twister.
The thing about locking your strings is that you eventually get to a point where you have mistakes in the game that you are no longer allowed to fix. The chains binding you have big, political-cartoon-style labels on them, and the labels are "time" and "money."
- If you are doing localization, you have to factor in the time that it will take the translators to finish their work. You don't always have to lock everything down months in advance, but you do have to stop changing the text with complete freedom, because you can't roll back all the localizers' work every time you send them an updated version of the game text.
- You may also be sending your game through "loc QA," or a QA pass focused specially on loc. This also takes time.
- And, of course, it also costs money to localize things, and you may run out of that eventually!
If a game ships in many languages, basically, it becomes much harder to change a line of text. You can't just fix the way something is phrased. If you make a change, you have to change it everywhere, in every language.
I can still remember the first time I worked on a game that was being localized, and I realized: oh fuck, I actually cannot fix that mistake. It's in the game permanently now. Fixing the phrasing of that sentence would cost, like, thousands of dollars. You can rewrite it in a minute, but the professionals who rewrite it in every language, and the engineering and QA involved in creating the release candidate, and the release manager who sticks it online - they're all involved now too, so no, you can't fix it.
"Rewriting a single sentence" is one of the many things that get a lot harder to do once you have publisher money and a ship date. The funny thing about narrative games is that a lot of indie narrative games in English actually do not get localized - it is one of those things you usually only learn about if you have a bunch of money. This precludes a lot of pretty sick text-heavy games. I know a bunch of great writers who have not actually ever had to go through loc on their own material. If you are coming up through zero-budget or freeware indie narrative games, making your own things and releasing them online as you build a portfolio, then changing text is usually pretty effortless. There is some text document somewhere that you can go change in, like, five minutes... you just gotta release a new build. Even translating your own game is nothing like working with localization - working with other translators is the thing that changes the dynamic. Surrendering it to someone else is the scary thing!
I am working on many games at once right now, so I have been in a period of practically uninterrupted string lock, loc, and prep for string lock/prep for loc since last year. It will continue for me for a while now. I am always going to be locking them strings. It is now my fate.
On Skin Deep in particular, I think back to the years of time I had to lock my strings for loc - the months I wasted playing Wandrer.earth in the evenings instead of trying to lock all the Skin Deep strings as soon as possible - and I curse myself. Really, locking strings earlier would have been impossible - a lot of my text was blocked or forced to change by design, art, changes made during the VO process, or other unforeseen consequences of game development - but still! When you are locking those strings, you are suddenly in high stakes mode. It used to be free to fix a word. Now it costs one bazillion hours and dollars. You are fucked. You wrote that shit so now you gotta stand by it.