Game development *

The new year means new plans and new prospects. And if you were considering localizing your product last year, it might be the right time to take action instead of postponing it indefinitely.

That’s why we at Alconost have prepared a list of free e-learning resources that are sure to help explore the topic of localization and ultimately equip you to manage the whole process on your own. We use some of these courses for our internal training, and we hope you like them, too.

We’ve arranged the e-learning resources in an order that consecutively mirrors the localization process. We recommend that you go down the list step by step for best results.

This article explores the basic concepts behind character encoding and then takes a dive deeper into the technical details of encoding systems.

If you have just a basic knowledge of character encoding and want to better understand the essentials, the differences between encoding systems, why we sometimes end up with nonsense text, and the principles behind different encoding system architecture, then read on.

Getting to understand character encoding in detail requires some extensive reading and a good chunk of time. I’ve tried to save you some of that effort by bringing it all together in one place while providing what I believe to be a pretty thorough background of the topic.

I’m going to go over how single-byte encodings (ASCII, Windows-1251 etc.) work, the history of how Unicode came to be, the Unicode-based encodings UTF-8, UTF-16 and how they differ, the specific features, compatibility, and lack thereof among various encodings, character encoding principles, and a practical guide to how characters are encoded and decoded.

With the Asian market rapidly growing, almost every ambitious IT product sooner or later faces the challenge of localization for this region. And without knowing all its facets any localization project is rather doomed to fail. That’s why we at Alconost have decided to translate and share with you the article on localizing games for Asia by Plarium, a global game developer with solid experience in game localization. We found here some useful approaches that are also valid for our localization projects and hope that you’ll like the reading, too.

For Western developers, entering the Asian market is like entering outer space, only 30 megabytes heavier. Localizing games into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean requires a Herculean effort. You need to account for certain technical requirements and scrupulously research the market and the target audience’s mindset. But if this is your dream, keep reading — our experience should stand you in good stead.

About the game Streets of Rogue

In 2017 tinyBuild released Streets of Rogue, a unique visual successor to the hit game Punch Club. Streets of Rogue is remarkable for the variety of its game features and genre elements. The developers combined an intense top-down roguelike, a retro pixel art style, an atmosphere of irrepressible excitement, classic character levelling, and questing. The game revolves around playing through a series of randomly generated cities. This can be accomplished via brute force, stealth, or hacking — it’s up to you!

How and why the game needed to be localized

Streets of Rogue quickly garnered a warm reception from gamers and the press alike, so tinyBuild naturally decided to bring the game to a wider international audience.

What are the highest- and lowest-priority objectives when it comes to game localization?

The game industry is growing, especially among small, independent development companies. If you're looking for a game development company, let's take a glimpse at some top game development companies ranked, basing the list on games, as well as the number of existing players and uniqueness.