Hello everyone!
Today we want to talk about something that may look fairly simple from the outside, but turned out to be one of the more unexpectedly difficult parts of developing ORBA: localization.
ORBA will be available in three languages: English, German and Japanese.
We would have loved to support even more languages, but we made the decision to only localize the game into languages we actually have access to ourselves. Localization is more than putting a sentence into a translator and replacing the original text with the result. Especially once a game starts inventing its own terminology, context matters a lot.
German and Japanese are the two languages besides English where we felt we could properly judge whether something sounds natural, fits the game and - most importantly - actually means what we want it to mean.
As it turns out, one of them was considerably easier than the other.
English came first
When we started developing ORBA, localization was not really on our minds yet.
All text was written in English first: menus, tutorials, dialogue, item descriptions, names for mechanics and all the little bits of text scattered throughout the Tower.
At that point, we simply wrote whatever worked best in English. We didn't think about how long a sentence might become in another language, whether a fictional term would translate well or whether the font we were using could even display another writing system properly.
Which, in hindsight, is something we would definitely approach differently today.
As development progressed and ORBA became a much more complete game, we started thinking about additional languages. Since we already had all of the English terminology established by then, localization became less about designing three languages alongside each other and more about figuring out how to make the other two fit the game we had already built.
For German, that worked surprisingly well.
German fit right in
Translating ORBA into German was generally very straightforward.
Of course, German sentences have a tendency to become longer than their English equivalents - which is not exactly ideal when your menus and dialogue boxes have been designed around short English text - but in terms of wording, most things translated quite naturally.
We could usually preserve the meaning and tone of the original English text without having to reinvent it.
Terms used throughout the game, tutorial instructions and even most of ORBA's more unusual vocabulary could be adapted in a way that still felt like the same game.
Japanese was a very different story.
What's a Custodian in Japanese?
ORBA uses quite a few words that only really make sense within the context of ORBA.
There are Lucky Charms, the Custodians, Young Leaf, a Grappling Hook, the different Trials, and many other names that slowly became completely normal to us while working on the game.
Then we tried translating them.
A word like "Custodian", for example, has a fairly clear meaning in English - but none of the obvious Japanese translations necessarily describe the strange stone figures waiting for you throughout ORBA's Tower. So for the Japanese localization, we settled on "Shugojin", a term that roughly translates to "guardian deity" and felt much closer to their role and appearance in the game.
The same challenge came up with other terms as well. Should "Young Leaf" be translated literally, or should we preserve the feeling of the English name instead? Should "Grappling Hook" describe exactly what the ability does, or should it simply be easy to understand at a glance?
In cases like these, we often chose clarity over a direct translation. "Grappling Hook", for example, became "Shuriken Rope" in Japanese - a name that immediately gives a clearer idea of what the ability looks like and how it works, while also fitting naturally into ORBA's Japanese-inspired setting.
There usually wasn't one objectively correct answer.
Sometimes the most literal translation sounded unnatural. Sometimes a more natural Japanese phrase changed the meaning too much. And sometimes a translation was technically correct but simply didn't feel like something that belonged in ORBA.
So Japanese localization became much more about finding equivalents than translating words one-to-one.
And then we ran into an even more fundamental problem:
Our pixels fought back
ORBA runs at a very low internal resolution and uses pixel fonts to match the rest of the game's visual style.
That works wonderfully for the Latin alphabet.
Japanese, however, needs considerably more detail.
A single kanji character can contain a large number of strokes that need to remain distinguishable from each other. When those characters have to fit into roughly the same amount of screen space as ORBA's tiny English letters, things start disappearing very quickly.
We tested different Japanese fonts, but our options were extremely limited. A font had to support the necessary characters, remain readable at a very small size and still look somewhat at home next to ORBA's pixel art.
In the end, we found one that worked reasonably well - but "reasonably well" is unfortunately the important part.
Some characters are still harder to read than we would like. Simply increasing the font size wasn't really an option either, as much of the game's UI was designed around the limited space available at ORBA's resolution.
So instead of only changing the font, we also had to change the language.
Top: タイム（Time）
Bottom: 成績（Stats）
Fewer kanji, more kana
For many pieces of text, we deliberately avoided complicated kanji where possible.
This wasn't because hiragana is somehow inherently a better way to write these words, but because at our tiny font size the simpler shapes are often much easier to distinguish.
Some terms are therefore written using more hiragana than you might normally expect.
For other words, especially names and game-specific terminology, we made use of katakana and English-derived loanwords instead. Apart from sometimes fitting the style of a game quite naturally, this also allowed us to avoid kanji that became almost impossible to recognize at ORBA's resolution.
It creates a Japanese localization that is occasionally a little unconventional, but readability was ultimately more important to us than forcing every term into the most traditional spelling possible.
It also made us realize just how much localization can depend on the visual design of a game.
The exact same Japanese sentence might work perfectly at 1080p with a normal font and become completely unusable when rendered as tiny pixel text.
One thing actually became easier
Luckily, ORBA's setting gave us an advantage as well.
The Tower has always been heavily inspired by Japanese architecture and imagery, which means some concepts actually feel more natural in Japanese than they do in English.
The Shrine is an obvious example.
The same is true for the idea behind the Lucky Charms. In English, we needed a term that communicates the idea of small objects granting special abilities while still fitting into ORBA's world. In Japanese, concepts like charms and shrine-related objects already have a cultural vocabulary surrounding them that fits the setting extremely well.
So while we struggled to find good solutions for words like "Custodian", other parts suddenly needed less explanation rather than more.
That was probably one of the most interesting things about the entire localization process: translation doesn't always move in the same direction.
Some English concepts become harder to express in Japanese, while other parts of ORBA almost feel like they were waiting to be written in Japanese from the beginning.
What we'll do differently next time
Looking back, the biggest lesson is that localization should not begin when the English version is finished.
It should begin when you design the game.
If we were starting ORBA today, we would test different languages much earlier. We would make sure UI elements can comfortably expand. We would experiment with Japanese fonts before committing to a particular visual style for text.
None of these problems made localization impossible, but solving them later certainly made it more complicated than it needed to be.
And despite all the difficulties, we are very happy that ORBA will be playable in English, German and Japanese.
We would still love to make the game accessible in more languages one day, but for now we prefer offering three localizations that we can actually understand, test and improve ourselves rather than adding languages that we cannot properly evaluate.
Working on ORBA's localization taught us much more than just how to translate ORBA.
It changed how we think about UI design, terminology, fonts and even how early in development languages should become part of the conversation.
Those are lessons we'll definitely carry into whatever we build next.
We hope you'll enjoy climbing the Tower - whether you're playing in English, German or Japanese.
See you soon!