Localization

The more languages you have available in your game, the more people will be able to play and enjoy it. Localization will improve engagement for players as they will be able to understand what is happening in-game, especially for any game that has text. For the Poki audience, as we are worldwide, non-localized text based games struggle in countries not localized so it's really important to think this through when creating your game.

Prepare early

Localization gets expensive when it's an afterthought. Keep all text in one place (a single .json file, for example) so translating doesn't mean hunting strings one by one. Make sure text fields and layouts survive longer translations.

Genres where localization pays off most: story games, clicker and idle games, quiz games, and anything where mechanics, items, or powerups are explained through text.

Which languages, in which order

  1. EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish): the broad base across Europe and the Americas. We recommend adding Turkish to this first batch; it's an increasingly popular locale.
  2. CJK (Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean): a huge market, but costlier to translate into, so invest when you're confident it's worth it.
  3. Brazilian-Portuguese, and Russian to cover the remaining bases.

You will have covered a strong base of widely-spoken languages with these, so you should have no issue with reaching a big audience.

Detect the player's language

Use PokiSDK.getLanguage() to choose the language your game shows when it first loads. This synchronous function returns the player's language as a lowercase base language code. For example, it returns en for en-US and pt for pt-BR.

Check the returned value against the languages your game supports and use a fallback when it is not supported:

const supportedLanguages = ['en', 'de', 'es', 'fr', 'it', 'pt'];
const playerLanguage = PokiSDK.getLanguage();

const languageToShow = supportedLanguages.includes(playerLanguage)
    ? playerLanguage
    : 'en';

loadTranslations(languageToShow); // Your game's translation-loading function.

Use the Poki Inspector language selector to test each language your game supports and verify your fallback behavior.

Displaying languages

A simple toggle in the menu works. Use the detected language as the initial default, but let the player's manual choice override it.