How to translate a Nova-box game?

Lire ce tutoriel en francais

Hello everyone!

Today I’d like to talk about something everyone can relate to: translation. As you know, our games are available in French and English, with a few exceptions (German and Chinese for Along the Edge; Latin American Spanish for Across the Grooves).

And yes, let’s be honest, we would love to translate our games into more languages so that as many players as possible can enjoy our stories. Unfortunately, translation costs for games of our scale (often over 100,000 words) are completely out of reach for a studio our size.

Maybe one day—if one of our games becomes as popular as a certain visual novel involving a princess (wink), we’ll be able to hire professional translators to bring our works to more languages.

In the meantime, there is a more DIY way to make it happen. You can translate our games yourself and add your translation directly into the game, without needing any coding knowledge. Here a small tutorial for you:

  • Go to your Steam library and click the Nova-box game you want to translate (you can do this for any of our games).
  • Right-click the game and select “Properties…”
  • Go to “Installed Files” then click “Browse.”
  • Open the folder “GameName_Data” (e.g., Echoes_Data), then “StreamingAssets”, then “Locales.”
  • Duplicate “en-US” if you want to translate from English, or “fr-FR” if you want to translate from French.
  • Rename the duplicated folder to the language you want (e.g., es-ES for Spanish).
  • Open your new folder, then open “config.json” (using Notepad, for instance) and change both “DisplayName” and “Locale” according to the new language.
  • Open “localizable.strings” and you can start translating the game directly by editing the French or English text depending on your source. Save your work when you’re done.

Now launch your game, select your new language, and—magic—you’ve just created a new translation!

Want to share your translation or ask questions?

Join our Discord, which now has more than 250 members! You can also drop by simply to chat, share fanart, or get exclusive announcements about our upcoming game:

JOIN THE NOVA-BOX DISCORD

Additional Notes

  • For Seers Isle, Across the Grooves and Echoes, you will find an extra “ui.strings” file to translate; this file is integrated directly in “localizable.strings” for Along the Edge and End of Lines.
  • The current font only supports Latin characters (so no Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.).
  • If you go to GameName_Data / StreamingAssets / fonts, you can add your own custom font. Then edit the “Config.json” file inside your new language folder (e.g., es-ES) and replace the original font name with the exact name of your added font.
  • In Config.json, you can also adjust the font size by editing the number after “Scale.” Be careful: this value is a multiplier. Setting it to 2 will double the font size and may break parts of the layout. Try 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, or even 0.9 / 0.8 for gentler adjustments.
  • You are free to use your own wording. However, if you change large portions of the original text, we kindly ask that you do not redistribute it publicly. Our games were written with care and passion, and we hope you’ll respect our work on this point.

That’s it for this little translation tutorial! We are incredibly grateful for your love and support after all these years. Take care, and see you very soon!

Antonio Davisseau,
Your Community & Marketing Manager