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The original was posted on /r/godot by /u/dtelad11 on 2024-10-15 15:06:47+00:00.
I'm about to release the demo for my game Flocking Hell, which will be available in 8 languages. Here's a look at my experience with the translation process.
About the Game
Flocking Hell is a turn-based strategy roguelite with deck-building elements. Your goal is to defend your pasture from demonic legions. You have 80 turns to explore the map, uncover and connect cities, and play cards for special abilities. Once the turns are up, the demons invade, and your defenses are put to the test in an auto-battler sequence. Win by defeating the demons with at least one city standing, or lose if all cities are razed. The game is designed to be quick to learn (~30 seconds) and fast to play (~5 minutes per level). For more details, visit the Steam page.
The demo includes 30 cards (with an average of 15 words each), 15 guides (about 12 words each), similar to relics in Slay the Spire, and 20 unique levels called islands (around 40 words each). In addition, there are menus, dialogs, the Steam page description, and streamer outreach emails. Altogether, I needed about 3,000 words translated.
The guide selection screen
Choice of Languages
I chose Simplified Chinese, English, French, German, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish. This decision was based on recommendations from Chris Zukowski (howtomarketyourgame.com) and insights from the HTMYG Discord channel. While I don’t have concrete data, I suggest looking at popular games in your genre and following their language trends.
What Went Right
Translation partner. Huge shoutout to Riotloc, the company handling the translation for Flocking Hell. They’ve been both affordable and prompt. Special thanks to Andrei, my main point of contact, and the teams working behind the scenes. If you're looking to translate your game, I highly recommend them.
String labels. I’m a newcomer to game design (I come from web development and data science). As I was learning Godot, I reviewed tutorials for localization, which emphasized using unique IDs for all text labels. I followed this practice from the game’s inception, including all menus and game mechanics. This made delivering the translation to Riotloc and incorporating the text back in the game super-easy.
Wiring locale changes. When the player first launches the game, they're greeted with a language selection dialog, and there’s a big “change language” button on the main menu (using iconography). Changing the language fires off a global “locale_changed” signal, which every scene with text connects to. This made it easy to catch and fix issues like text overflow and ensure all languages displayed properly. For development, I connected this signal to the Q key, letting me quickly switch languages in any scene with a single tap. It was also invaluable for generating screenshots for the Steam page, just press Q and print screen for each language. Then tidy them up and upload to Steam.
Creating this animated GIF took about two minutes
Font choice. This was a painful one. As I was developing the game, I experimented with a bunch of fonts. I don’t have any design background and therefore settled on Roboto, which is functional but admittedly rather plain. This choice ended up being a blessing in disguise, as Roboto supports Cyrillic (for Russian) as well as Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. I didn’t have to worry about finding additional fonts for these languages, which can be a common issue many developers encounter late in development.
What Went Wrong
Text Length. Some languages, like Russian and German, tend to be much longer than English. I’m sure there are native speakers who are reading this post and chuckling. In some cases, the translated text was almost twice as long as the original, causing issues with dialog boxes not having enough space. I had to scramble to either shrink the text size for certain languages or cut down the wording entirely, using Google Translate to figure out which words to trim without losing meaning.
Buttons. Initially, I used Godot’s default Button throughout the game, but I ran into issues when implementing the translated text. First, the button doesn’t support text wrapping, which was surprising. Second, in languages like Russian, the text became so long that I had to reduce the font size. To solve this, I created a custom SmartButton class that supports text wrapping and adjusts font sizes for each language. Reworking this and updating all the menus turned into a bigger task than I anticipated, especially so close to the demo release.
A bit of a vent: I found Godot's Button to be a bit too simple overall. For future games, I plan to implement a more generic button that is structured around PanelContainer. So you can dump whatever you want inside rather than being limited to text + icon.
Line Breaks for Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. These scripts don’t have spaces between words, so I wasn’t sure where to insert line breaks when the text got too long. This resulted in non-colloquial text with awkward line breaks. I later learned that providing the translator with a character limit for each line can fix this, but I discovered it too late in development. I’m embarrassed to admit that the demo still has these issues, but I plan to correct them for the full release.
Summary
On a personal note, I want as many people as possible to enjoy Flocking Hell. I’m a big believer in accessibility, so translating the game felt like a natural choice to me.
On the practical side, translating the game and Steam page is already paying off. Flocking Hell was featured on keylol, a Chinese aggregation site, and streamers and YouTubers have reached out because the game is available in their native languages. While the process was costly (several thousand dollars), it took only about 3 days out of a four-month dev cycle to complete. With the full game expected to include around 10,000 words, a significant portion of the budget is reserved for translation. With that said, while localization requires a large financial investment, I feel that it’s a key step in reaching a wider audience.
Thank you for reading! If you have a moment, I’d really appreciate it if you check out the Flocking Hell page on Steam and wishlist if it’s the game for you.
