Languages
Ship a game in more than one language — and get the fonts right, which is the part that actually breaks.
umicat's own interface is available in thirteen languages, and your game can be too. Three separate things are involved, and they're worth keeping straight:
- The game's own text — what a player reads while playing.
- Your store listing — the title and description on your game's page.
- The platform's interface — the editor and tools around your game.
The game's text
Ask for it as a feature, not as a translation job:
Support English and Chinese. Default to the player's own language and let
them switch on the title screen.The agent pulls every string into one table, adds a t() lookup, and wires a
language picker. That structure is the real deliverable — once the strings are
in a table, adding a fourth language is filling a column.
Default to the player's language. The platform tells your game which language the player is using, so most players should never touch a picker. Where their pick is remembered locally, it works for anonymous players too.
Fonts are the part that breaks
The default game font has no glyphs for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai or Arabic. Render those without the right web font and every character becomes an empty box — the classic "tofu" screen. This is not a style problem; it is the whole reason a naive translation looks broken.
The fix is a web font that covers the script, loaded before the game starts. The agent knows to do this, and knows which font covers which script. What is useful for you to know:
- A bitmap font cannot render CJK. Bitmap fonts are pre-baked images of each glyph, and there are thousands of CJK glyphs. If someone suggests one for a Chinese game, that's the tofu screen coming back.
- Check it yourself. Switch the game to each language and look at every screen. Boxes are obvious once you look, and invisible if you don't.
Dialogue is translated per line
Scripted conversations hold one text per language per line, not one string, and the Dialogue tool can fill a new language from an existing one with AI — then you edit. See Dialogue.
AI characters should answer in the player's language
If your game has living NPCs, tell the agent to keep them in sync with the game's language. An NPC replying in English in a Chinese game is the most visible kind of half-done localisation.
Your store listing
Title and description can each carry per-language versions, edited in Game Settings and in the Publish tool, with AI-assisted translation. A player sees your text in their language when you've provided it, and your original otherwise.
Two things to know:
- Search is unaffected. It matches your original title and description. A translated title is a display convenience, not a discovery feature.
- Tags are not translated. They're a shared key used to group games across the whole platform, so a translated tag would just be a second, separate tag.
The platform's interface
The editor, the tools and the site are translated into thirteen languages, picked from your account settings. Tool interiors are still largely English while they're changing quickly — that's known, not a bug you're hitting alone.