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Gaming / Mobile Game Development
Ongoing in-game text localization for a live mobile game, growing from an initial set of languages to a much wider list as the game kept shipping new content and patches
PlayDucky needed to localize the in-game text - skills, items, UI strings - for their action survival mobile game into many languages beyond English, while preserving exact formatting: color-coded tags, line breaks, and smart-format placeholders, and keeping ability and item names consistent everywhere they repeated across the game. Because interface space is tight, translations also had to stay close to the original length so text wouldn't overflow the UI, and for CJK languages in particular, recurring stat abbreviations needed to be fully localized rather than left as Latin letters mixed into the target script.
Built and refined a shared glossary of recurring skill, item, and stat names for each language, so the same term translated the same way everywhere it appeared across the game's text.
Delivered iterative, reviewed translations - starting with a single pilot language, incorporating the client's own native-speaker feedback each round - before rolling the same glossary and prompt rules out to each new language.
Preserved every technical marker (color-code tags, line breaks, smart-format placeholders) and kept translations close to the original length, so nothing overflowed the game's UI or broke when pulled back into the client's localization pipeline.
Applied a one-click translation tool directly inside the client's own Google Sheets workflow, letting the team run new translations themselves as new content shipped, without needing every batch processed by hand.
Localization coverage grew from an initial handful of languages to include multiple Chinese variants, Arabic, and Portuguese, as the client kept adding new locales with each new patch.
Client feedback on the self-serve translation tool, after two weeks of live use: consistently correct translations at solid speed, with only minor edge cases needing a manual touch-up.
The relationship grew from a first, single-language pilot into an ongoing, repeat engagement spanning a full year of the client's feature launches
Before Algebras: PlayDucky translated in-game text through its own script, with inconsistent terminology, capitalization, and abbreviation handling across languages, and no shared process for keeping repeated skill and item names aligned as new content shipped.
After Algebras: A shared glossary and prompt rules keep terminology, tone, and formatting consistent across a growing list of languages, with a self-serve tool applied to the client's own spreadsheet so their team can translate new content themselves as it ships.
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