In my country, people claim for localized games, because we haven't got a good English level, neither listened  nor written (I think my posts are a good example, hehe). So, I'm sure people will be grateful with you if you provide them a localized version of your game. I supose our case is not unique in the world, so my question is: are you facing the localization problem? How? For example, where do you find other languages speaking people? Are you taking into account the differences among same speaking language countries (for example, Spanish of Spain is not the same as Spanish of America)? Are you designing your interfaces to be text size independent? There are many questions related to localization. These are only some of them.

No it's not, but i think it is a damn good idea so i'll look in to it. 

I'm also going to try and build it as 'disability' friendly as possible so we are talking about re-mappable controls, alternative input methods, visual as well as audio cues, colourblindness (think thats a made up word) issues and a hundred other issues - i figure it's a good way to make a game stand out and something the xbox is woefully inadequate at (ao i'm told)


hmm, I may be taking on a litle too much here...

It's difficult enough for indies to even get a game completed, let alone worry about things like localization. I'd be willing to bet most don't even think about it, let alone attempt to design their games with such things in mind.

JuxtaDeus:

i figure it's a good way to make a game stand out and something the xbox is woefully inadequate at

Sorry, I don't understand you. Are you saying the 360 hasn't got translated games enough? If it is, I don't agree with you.

Machaira:

It's difficult enough for indies to even get a game completed, let alone worry about things like localization. I'd be willing to bet most don't even think about it, let alone attempt to design their games with such things in mind.

I don't agree. If an indie can face to things such as graphics design or AI, he can prepare his game to be localized. I think localizing a game is one of the most easiest things he can do in game development. It has some problems, but nothing to do with other game-related tasks.

Abel García Plaza:

I don't agree. If an indie can face to things such as graphics design or AI, he can prepare his game to be localized. I think localizing a game is one of the most easiest things he can do in game development. It has some problems, but nothing to do with other game-related tasks.

You forget the ignorance of native English speakers towards other languages there :)

Björn Graf:

You forget the ignorance of native English speakers towards other languages there :)

But English speakers can look for volunteers to translate their texts. I don't understand German, but I can look for a German guy who can translate my game ;-) There are many contributors all arround the world who want a software to be located to their language and they do that dirty work.

Being able to do something and having the time and want/need to do it are two different things. I'm sure many people here can develop huge, high-end games if you give them enough time. But who wants to spend weeks adding localization support when only a handful of people will even be using it? Then you also have to deal with advertising to people in those different languages and, unless you want to just ignore them, be able to translate back to English to do support.

Might as well drop using XNA, too, so we can support the non-Windows users. And what about people without computers? Should we make a board game version for them? Unless you expect to be able to market in an unknown territory (another language) or that your game will even be good enough to, your concentration should be in one language until you get that one down. I'd rather see a game be smooth and fluent in just English than have a not-so-great support or advertisement for 30 languages.

It's not difficult per se, it's just a huge pain in the ass.

You have to program in a very generic fashion for anything that has text in it. Fixed positions have to become relative, the game has to have resizable menu's/tables to account for varying word length, your fonts have to be able to handle various accented characters, you have to put all your text in an external source (versus using "magic strings" in your code), the offline source will need additional documentation to record contexts for strings, some languages like to mutate words depending on genders that may not be obvious from the string itself.. And then you have to find and manage the people that do the actual translation work.

Just wanted to chime in...

Whilst I don't think many XNA developers should really *need* to worry about localization in it's entirety (It's hard enough to build a full game to completion, even the simplest one, let alone throwing something like localized assets into the mix) I do feel like anyone who has goals & is serious about building something they want to take all the way (i.e. XBLA) would de well to consider localization from the onset..

Currently I'm still fleshing out the core of my game engine but I do intend to setup my game with localization in mind so that, come further on down the road if I manage to secure a publishing contract, I won't have to rip apart & rebuild most of the game to support multiple SKUs (because a commercial game WILL have to support multiple language SKUs)..
I plan taking a strict approach to localizable assets & making sure all text is organised & read from an excel sheet (probably put a VBA macro button in their to write out the data to language specific text files before running a buildprocessor on the files to create the final localized string banks..) This should keep the process relatively clean & it also means that all text translation can be done remotely (by even multiple sources) without any requirement of the engine's source assets..
Other things to remember (for the sake of anyone reading who may want to consider localization support) are:

- Localize only what's necessary (no need to localize internal strings which won't be rendered)
- Try & keep the UI simple & avoid gfx clutter (will help you cope better with text scaling for variable length localized strings)
- Make sure no localizable strings are hard coded (no-brainer but you'd be suprised how often misshaps can occur..)
- Avoid using speech (this will be the biggest pain to localize IMO) & if you absolutely have to then make sure you design for it
- Avoid incorperating written text in textures unless it's revelant to the design (e.g. japanese symbol on a soldier's shoulderpad..)

I really want to release my build process into the community once i'm done with it (.xls sheet with built in macros + buildprocessor executable + source code + xna string bank importer source code) which should hopefully help out alot of people.. Might not be of use for everyone but at least if only one person benefits from it then it's a win in my book..

Abel García Plaza:

Björn Graf:

You forget the ignorance of native English speakers towards other languages there :)

But English speakers can look for volunteers to translate their texts. I don't understand German, but I can look for a German guy who can translate my game ;-) There are many contributors all arround the world who want a software to be located to their language and they do that dirty work.

So how would an indie developer go about finding these many contributors? Do they do the testing as well?

Abel García Plaza:

Machaira:

It's difficult enough for indies to even get a game completed, let alone worry about things like localization. I'd be willing to bet most don't even think about it, let alone attempt to design their games with such things in mind.

I don't agree. If an indie can face to things such as graphics design or AI, he can prepare his game to be localized. I think localizing a game is one of the most easiest things he can do in game development. It has some problems, but nothing to do with other game-related tasks.

"can" is different than "takes the time to plan for and makes the effort to do". An indie can make his game multiplayer and an indie can put in AI, but this things add another layer of complexity to a project that's probably already taxing and significantly increases the development time. It's the same with localization. Anything that's going to increase the time and effort for a project is probably not going to be high on the priority list.