This portfolio is based on a project of localizing a game called The Hunter completed by my teammates Roxy Ma, Michelle Huang and me in the course Software & Games Localization during the 2017 fall term. The portfolio is divided into three parts: the brief introduction of the project, the basic workflow of the project, and thoughts from the angle of project management based on the project. The other two team members focus on the aspects of flowchart localization and voiceover localization of the game respectively, and their blog posts can be found through these links:

• https://sites.middlebury.edu/softwareandgameslocalization/2017/12/13/fungus-game-localization-the-hunter/
• http://sites.middlebury.edu/michelle/2017/12/13/software-and-game-final-portfolio/

Brief introduction of the project

Our project is to localize a Fungus game called The Hunter in Unity from English into Chinese, Spanish and Russian. Fungus is an interactive story-telling extension for Unity3D. People all over the world have used it to create visual novels role-playing games. Fungus has lots of features for creating character dialogues and localization and interacting with animating scene objects. For this particular game, there are different options for a user to select that trigger different dialogues in different storylines. The following link can take you to the short demo of the original game: Demo of the original game .Our goal is to localize all the options, dialogues and character names into three languages and add a language menu at the beginning of the game.

Basic workflow of localizing the game

Our process of localizing the game includes preparation, translation and adding the language picker.

Preparation

During the preparation stage, we first imported the I2 package into Unity and created the localization function through the Tools tab -> Fungus -> Create -> Localization. At the point, the internationalization has been implemented pretty well since when we exported the localization file through the button on the right, the exported file was a CSV file containing all the texts that needed to be translated. The file is already ready for translation.

Translation

During the translation stage, we imported the CSV file into Memsource and translated the texts there. Then we exported the completed files and copied the translations into the CSV file like this:

Adding language picker

This was the most important and challenging stage for our team. Since the entire game is configured based on a flowchart logic, we created a logic of language setting menu based on the flowchart.

What we did was we created four language blocks in the chart and within each language block, we used the set language command of Fungus to activate languages by setting the language code which we have previously defined in the CSV file so that the game would use the particular translation that is consistent with the language code written here.

In spite of all the challenges we have including failure to find scripts, messed-up texts for translation and logic errors in flow chart design, we eventually successfully localized the game into three languages. The final version can be seen here: Final version of the localized game.

 

Thoughts from the perspective of project management

Even though all of our team members play the roles of localization engineers and translators during the project and no project management was involved, project management in this case may involve complicated steps and is never easy. There are mainly three reasons for it:

• In this project, engineers have to export the localization CSV file and import it into CAT tools for translation. However, compared to the original CSV file above, the file in CAT tools looks like that the steps in the flowchart and characters are extracted and the item row including “Key”, “Description” and “Standard” are also listed here for translation, which means engineers have to figure out how to hide those items before importing into CAT tools. Project managers at this point should check the prepped file prepared by engineers to see whether it is clean for translation. If this step is missed, translations may translate those unnecessary items and the whole localization file will be damaged.

• When a game is being localized, text truncation will be a major issue if the text boxes are not expandable. Engineers may want the translators to make some tweaks and have a shorter version of the translations, which requires project managers to communicate with the translators about the need. This problem didn’t happen in our project since each piece of the dialogues was not too long. But one of our challenges was that some tags couldn’t be filtered in the Memsource, the CAT tool we used during the project. To make things simpler, we just copied and pasted the tags when doing translation. But in real world, this can cause so much trouble since even a parenthesis may mess up the file. Project managers are supposed to make sure either engineers filter the tags out before handing over to translators or MQA check the tags carefully.

• Last but not least, localization testing is a major step that project management should be involved in as much as possible. Many potential issues will show up in testing and project managers need to in which step things goes wrong and return to people responsible for that step for modification.