For our final project in Software & Games Localization this semester, my group decided to localize a mobile game called Western World, available in the App store and the Google Play store, into Japanese, French and German. Aaron Szucs, the creator of the game, kindly made the source code available for download on GitHub.
The game is a dressed-up version of rock-paper-scissors in a wild west setting, available in single player and multiplayer versions. The amount of text to be localized is moderate to high, with the most words appearing in the shop and the instructions. When we analyzed the source code, we found that the game was not at all prepped for localization; user-facing text is found in many different parts of the code, not just scripts, and most of the words the player sees are hard-coded as images. This meant that internationalizing by wrapping strings and externalizing the text would not be enough, so I took responsibility for creating images with corresponding Japanese, English and German text via desktop publishing (DTP) in Photoshop.
In undergrad, I minored in political science. My senior year I had a political theory class, and every week the professor expected a two-page critical response to the assigned reading. It was dense stuff, from Plato to Emma Goldman, and a lot of my classmates were tearing their hair out every week trying to complete the reading and then write an intelligent response to it. I didn’t want to spend more time on this assignment than I had to, so I came up with a system, which I’m sharing with you.