When we were handed Tunic’s Arabic localization, the situation was kind of a mess. As the (rather cliché at this point) result of hiring a generalist LSP to handle Arabic, the developer ended up getting an unusable localization.
Thus, Arabic wasn’t going to make it to launch—or possibly make it at all, ever. So Eternal Dream Arabization got involved to help get it up and running.
Since the multilingual agency contracted for the game credited no single person and had zero online presence (yet tons of corporate credits, somehow?), we wanted to know what we’d be dealing with on the linguistic side of things.
Let’s just say it wasn’t great. No clue how other languages fared, but Arabic simply was not great.
I was personally interested in the game, so we asked the dev if he’d like me to give the script another pass. He agreed, I edited (erm, rewrote) the script, and the rest is history.
That history is a story for another day. Today, we’re looking at something else.
A big part of Tunic is the mystique, mostly carried by its “Trunic” cipher, a phonetic script based on English pronunciation.
Proper language usage is rare; there are precious few real words sprinkled here and there to nudge you in the right direction, and they’re often surrounded by blocks of the aforementioned “Trunic” script—making them seem like barely visible nuggets of ancient lost lore.
As it turns out, that lore wasn’t entirely lost. Trunic was a completely readable script.
While doing research for the rewrite, I found a player-made complete decode of all the in-game Trunic, as well as a guide mapping the symbols to English phonetic sounds.
Why not take full advantage of this post-launch status, I figured? So I edited the whole script again with the decoded lore entries in mind.
Now, if anyone was unhinged enough to decode the Trunic cipher as they played, the visible Arabic words would slide right into place between the decoded runes with zero grammatical friction.
At the time, I convinced myself that I was doing this in case a “true” mode was added for New Game + or something… But that update never ended up materializing.
Now we’re at the final third of this post, known as the close, where you’ve been conditioned to expect me to neatly wrap up this humblebrag yap-sesh with an inspiring grand takeaway about the virtues of going above and beyond, or on what decoding fictional runes taught me about B2B sales and client retention.
Sorry to disappoint, but I’ve got nothing of the sort.
Our localization was very well received, sure. The client and players were very happy.
But that was the result of the initial script rewrite and technical fixes. This particular fancy of mine had nothing to do with it—I doubt many, if any, even noticed.
But sometimes you just do things because they’re fun, and because you can. And that’s what makes it all worth it.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.