Game companies have to be relevant and continuously captivate an audience worldwide to remain profitable. Many localization challenges are faced by game developers as they adapt their games to diverse cultures, languages, and player preferences. Game localization is not just about translations into local languages or making some tweaks to designs, it’s about transforming the entire player experience to cater to the demands of a specific market.
Companies can partner with game localization service providers or hire in-house teams to manage the game localization operations. In this article, we’ll look into some technical aspects of game UI localization and practical ways to manage them effectively.
Best Practices to Localize Your Video Game for Global Players
Flexible UI Design Frameworks
To accommodate the diverse linguistic and cultural requirements of your foreign player base, you need to come up with more flexible UI design frameworks for your game. Here are some techniques that you can use to smoothly adapt your design elements to different languages, screen sizes, and cultures.
Responsive Layouts
Building your game with responsive layouts makes it easily adaptable to different devices and localization changes in the future. Developers must use responsive design principles from the very beginning so that their visual design remains functional and appealing to the player using different resolutions and devices to play their game.
Modular UI Components
Developers can break down the user interface elements into reusable modules to make the localization process simpler. It will also make it much more convenient to go about regular game updates. Moreover, you can significantly enhance the efficiency and scalability of your game using this approach, as it facilitates easy maintenance and content updates.
Localization Strings Management
The management of your localization string is critical to effectively organizing the translated content and seamlessly updating it. When you centralize your text resources and implement a robust localization string management system, it makes the localization job much easier for your
game and software translation agency and translators. This way, you can also maintain your language consistency across different versions of the game.
Dynamic Text Rendering Techniques
To optimize your textual content display on the game, you can use the dynamic text rendering method to better merge the updated design and text. Using these techniques, you can ensure accurate and legible text adjustments in the game.
Text Wrapping
If you are using text wrapping and line break algorithms in your game, it will implement new updates more seamlessly. So, the translated text will automatically be adjusted to different character sets and languages with proper readability and line breaking.
Font Substitution and Size Adjustments
You must use font substitution and fallback mechanisms to choose suitable fonts for language and character set variations. You can dynamically scale your text size for specific language requirements by implementing font size adjustments. You can also ask your game translation service provider to make text-style adjustments to the game.
Simplified Updates and Maintenance
To manage different versions of your game effectively, updating and maintenance of your game gets easier. Here are some useful techniques that can be used to make the ongoing localization process seamless.
Modular Asset Management
It is an effective technique to properly organize all components of your games by breaking them into reusable modules, as discussed earlier. You can update or change one module at a time and keep your game maintenance hassle-free.
Version Control System
Using a version control system, you can track all the changes implemented throughout the game localization process. It will facilitate seamless collaboration with developers and translators working from remote locations and ensure the accountability of all team members.
Cloud-Based Localization Platform
A professional localization platform with centralized storage, and resource management with collaborative workflows makes localization operations smoother and less complicated. Moreover, advanced cloud localization platforms have integration options that reduce manual efforts and streamline the localization process.
User-Driven Customization Options
Integrating customization into your game will allow the players to tailor their game experience to their specific needs. Plays can make adjustments to the designs, themes, and language as they want.
Language Selection
Instead of automatically changing the language from English to local translations, you can allow the user to choose their preferred language if they are not proficient in English. So, foreign players who can understand English can go with the default language mode.
Subtitles & Audio Preferences
Players can customize their subtitle settings, including their color, font size, and position in the game. It enhances the game’s accessibility and overall text readability for the players. Similarly, players can also choose their preferred language for game audio. Audios are mostly used in games for providing instructions to the user, or they can be the voices of different game characters.
Cultural Localization Settings
Such settings allow the players to change the user-facing elements in the game, like date and time, measurement units, currency symbols, etc. You can ask your game localization service provider to adjust the cultural elements in your game to players’ preferences. This way, players can tailor their game components and have a great player experience.
Summary
It has become crucial for gaming companies to employ the best localization practices to streamline their localization operations and make the jobs of developers and translators less complicated. In this article, we’ve talked about various techniques that can be used to make your game localization more seamless, less time-consuming, and budget-friendly in the long run.
