Internationalization

Hello again,

I was wondering how you guys work on localizing your projects in different languages and regions.

Are you planning to localize games right from the start (which would require language files to replace the texts) or are you launching in one country first to test run the game before even thinking about internationalization?

Best thing, wheather you definetly will support multiple languages or not, is to start with your default encoding as UTF-8 for the whole project....sources,IDE, database, webcontainer...everything...

Comes in handy, when your projecthead descides to support a language that has some funny looking characters you dont have a clue of...like some asian language...

Myself...i plan on supporting de_DE, en_US and en_UK as locales. But didnt start localization yet...too lazy, and far too early for that (my game is still alpha). Good thing is, that most of my database entitys contain no language specific informations, so it will be not that hard....hopefully ;)

Mr.Maxx

Any particular reason why you're planning do differentiate between en_UK and en_US?
From my point of view an en_US version should be enough, as UK-based people are watching US television all day anyway, so they are used to the differences.

What do you guys think?

We gave a shot on home market first and then international. You can be in more close in contact with players and communication is much faster.

We are still working on our game, so we thought it's easyer to develop main parts with our community only speaking one language. With other languages you can reach new people, but you need also people who moderate the boards. It'd need more effort to "syncronize" the different languages/groups than developing the game.

For the Future we're planning at least the following Languages:

• French
• Italian
• English

So all people in our country can play our game. As a positive side-effect there new "markets" in other countries.

Based on my experience you should def. include Polish and German language versions as well, maybe even Portuguese. The German market is the leading market in browser-based gaming and with Brazil being one of the fastest rising economies and a huge amount of players speaking Portuguese, I think this might be worth it as well.