Valheim
A brutal exploration and survival game for 1-10 players, set in a procedurally generated purgatory inspired by Viking culture. Battle, build, and conquer your way to a saga worthy of Odin’s patronage!
Supported Platforms
Project Information
Featured screenshots
UNLOCTEAM INPUT
Bearded translators from UNLOCTEAM are thrilled to join this successful survival game and provide Ukrainian gamers with top-quality localization.
Localization
Speaking of text amount, Valheim is not a big game at all. But players simply lose themselves in the vast world for hundreds of hours already. And our task is to help them dive deeper into the game with an atmosphere that UI provides.
All the texts of lore and knowledge base are localized in a specific manner. Players will read Runestones as if they were written by skalds.
The game has short poems as well, and it was really nice small challenge to localize them, creating new rhymes, and keeping the context, so players won’t have problems understanding what to do.
The world of Valheim has both mythical known creatures and new ones, created by Iron Gate. And, of course, with the first ones, we follow the rules and practices of localization. But with the second type of creatures, we had full freedom to experiment and create nice and good equivalents and names. Listening and reading the comments from players gives us a clear picture of where our experiments succeeded, and where we needed to work further. As a result everyone is happy and all names are 100% fit to the game style.
Quality Assurance
started working on the project with the release of the game for temporary access on Steam, which means that it is not polished and is constantly evolving. And this is exactly the time when you can work on quality control and testing the game for professional suitability in the localization aspect. We have collected (and will continue to collect) more than 50 suggestions for improving the quality of the game in everything related to the texts:
- Small text windows for text. For most languages texts are on average longer than English, they need more space. We usually recommend developers to add +25% width to text slots.
- Inconvenient placement. For example, in this game, the language selection is placed in the Misc section, which is the last tab in the settings menu. New players, who may potentially do not know English, need to take too many steps to change the language. We suggested replacing Misc with the more common Gameplay and putting it as the first tab in the settings. In this way, players could immediately change the language and not look for the desired tab.
- Variables usage (coded sentences or words that are denoted by some symbols in the raw text, and in the game itself they will be replaced by desired words). For example, there is a line “You can’t eat more $1”, where any food will be placed instead of the variable $1 . Because all food names in the game are in the nominative case and begin with a capital letter, in some languages such a sentence will look awkward: “You can’t eat more Blueberries.” If you do not have access to the line with the variable, then it’s a shame because then any localization crutches will not help, it will still look awkward. And here’s what we managed to do as a result of cunning manipulations: “$1: can’t eat more of this.” Thus, we take the variable forward, keep the nominal case.
- Proofreading. No matter what others think, we can’t ignore places with mistakes, typos etc. And we always add the service of editing the text of the originals. After all, developers are also people, and a script-writer is not always a professional philologist with knowledge of their language. That is why they need help periodically. And we are happy to help.
All this and more are components of Localization Quality Assurance.
Fonts
The game has three typefaces with 2-4 fonts each. All of them had not Cyrillic support, that is why Unity (the game engine the game is built on) uses standard Arial font. And you can imagine how it looks bad in a Norse setting.
That is why our team worked on Cyrillic support, so our players could have the same experience as other players in the world.
If most game fonts are quite familiar to every user, there is one font we really proud to draw. It’s a runic-style and just check the image below to see how Cyrillic characters work fine with it.
Afterwords
We are proud to work on the project, and we will continue providing our official support to Iron Gate studio. This game deserves only the best attitude.
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