{
 "id": 39618,
 "slug": "game-localisation-how-snake-97-supports-45-languages",
 "url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/game-localisation-how-snake-97-supports-45-languages/",
 "language": "en",
 "title": "Game Localisation — How Snake '97 Supports 45+ Languages",
 "subtitle": "From Arabic to Vietnamese — internationalising a game for a global audience.",
 "summary": "Snake '97 is played in over 100 countries and supports 45+ languages — including right-to-left scripts like Arabic and Hebrew. Here's how one developer localised a game for the entire world.",
 "topics": [
  "creating",
  "programming"
 ],
 "created": "2026-04-03T19:49:21.074000+02:00",
 "updated": "2026-04-03T19:49:21.077000+02:00",
 "full_article_url": "https://willem.com/en/2018-02-21_updating-snake-97/",
 "author": {
  "name": "Willem L. Middelkoop",
  "url": "https://willem.com"
 },
 "note": "A short distillation of a longer willem.com post. Not currently published on willem.com itself.",
 "answers_question": "How do you localise a game into 45 languages, including right-to-left scripts?",
 "text": "Localisation in Snake '97 goes beyond translating menu strings. The game adapts its UI layout for right-to-left languages, adjusts font rendering for CJK characters, and handles the dozens of edge cases that arise when a single-developer game reaches a global audience.\nThe translation workflow: each language is a simple key-value file. Community contributors submit translations through a lightweight process — no professional translation agency, just players who love the game and speak the language.\nThe biggest challenge: fitting translated text into UI elements designed for English. German words are longer. Japanese characters need different line heights. Arabic reverses the entire layout direction.\nWith 40 million installs across 100+ countries, even a 1% mistranslation affects hundreds of thousands of players.\nFrom Willem's full Snake '97 story.",
 "markdown_url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/game-localisation-how-snake-97-supports-45-languages/snippet.md"
}