For Software & Games final project, Vanessa Prolow and I explored Godot engine game localization. I am going to talk about how to localize the game Hijinx into Russian. Since Russian is a different letter language, besides the .csv file, it also involves the import of a font that supports the language. I’ll elaborate on the details in this essay.
Right after we’ve decided to explore this new engine, we started researching and reading the tutorials to prepare for the localization.
Facts about Godot engine
- Godot is a 2D and 3D cross-platform (Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android) free and open-source game engine.
- Godot games are created either in C++, C#, languages or by using its own scripting language GDScript.
How to localise a Godot engine game?
Internationalisation
From the tutorials, we should be able to wrap the strings with tr()
Let’s find some strings first:
The above images are the main menu and the tip message. Before we wrap them in the code, we create our keys, the id column in the .csv file you see in the screenshot followed up.
Localization
Import Translation
We could use a .csv file to localise a godot engine game into different languages. Here is the screenshot of our strings.
Basically, we put all our keys under the column id, then add translations under different languages we want to support.
The file has to be saved as .csv (utf-8 delimited comma). This is the way how it works. We create a translation folder in the game folder and put the strings.csv file in here. All the files will be automatically imported to the engine. Respective translation files will be generated. Then add them to project – project settings – localization – translations:
Don’t forget to change the Label text into the keys we created in the code.
Now we have the Russian translations, we still need to import a Russian font to support the language. Download a Russian font if you don’t have one. Then move the font to the game’s fonts folder, again it will be automatically imported.
Then go to Project – Project Lettings – localisation – Remaps, where we can replace the current font with the newly imported Russian font.
One more step, go to Project – Project Settings – General – Local, change the Test into ru.
Now the menu and tips should be translated to Russian.
Struggle: Chinese and Japanese just won’t work.
We tried different Chinese and Japanese fonts, with the same way, Chinese and Japanese just won’t show in the localised game. It appears as blank. According to the sample we find on Godot’s website, Japanese should work. However, whichever way we try, it just won’t display. We wonder if it has something to do with this specific game. Anyway, if any of you knows the answer, we would love to hear about it.
Here are some links that will lead you directly to everything about Godot.
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/
A good place to ask questions and discuss them with other
Godot Docs
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/tutorials/i18n/internationalizing_games.html
Tutorials about internationalisation and localization, along with other Godot related documents
Gotut website
https://www.gotut.net/?s=godot
Features content focusing on the Godot 3.0 and upwards.