Week 7: Mastering Localization in Unity

Last week, I dove deep into the world of localization for Grandpa’s Bee Haven 🍯🐝. To many, localization seems like a simple 1:1 mapping of words. However, once you start implementing it, you realize there is so much more to consider! 🤯

I’m using Unity’s official Localization Package. It’s fantastic because it supports CSV and Google Sheets, allowing translators to work their magic without ever having to touch the Unity Editor! 📊✨

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🎨 Step 1: Creating the Fonts

In game dev, your first hurdle is rasterizing fonts. For our project, we chose Google’s Noto Sans 🅰️. It’s open-source and supports almost every language we need. 🌏

The Setup: Download these .ttf files:

• ✅ NotoSans-Regular
• ✅ NotoSansSC-Regular (Simplified Chinese)
• ✅ NotoSansTC-Regular (Traditional Chinese)
• ✅ NotoSansJP-Regular (Japanese)
• ✅ NotoSansKR-Regular (Korean)

⚠️ Pro-Tip on Padding: I noticed that with a 5px padding, Latin letters looked blurry in-game. Switching to 10px fixed it! However, 10px assets for CJK fonts are massive (over 100MB! 😱), so I kept CJK at 5px. Luckily, blurriness is much less noticeable on complex CJK characters.

✨ TextMeshPro Font Asset Creator Settings

Go to Window -> TextMeshPro -> Font Asset Creator and use these specs:

Language	Resolution	Padding	Character Set / Unicode Range
Latin	1024x1024	10px	Extended ASCII
Cyrillic	1024x1024	10px	400-4FF, 500-52F
Greek	1024x1024	10px	370-3FF, 1F00-1FFF
Latin Extended	1024x1024	10px	0100-017F
Japanese	4096x4096	5px	Hiragana, Katakana, Katakana Extensions, Full-width forms, Kanji (3040-309F,30A0-30FF,31F0-31FF,FF00-FFEF,4E00-9FFF)
Korean	4096x4096	5px	1100-11FF, 3130-318F, AC00-D7AF, FF00-FFEF
Simp. Chinese	4096x4096	5px	3500 Common Characters
Trad. Chinese	4096x4096	5px	4E00-9FA5, FF00-FFEF

The Result: You’ll end up with a library of SDF assets. Select your main font (NotoSans-Regular SDF) and in the Inspector, add all the other SDFs to the “Fallback Font Assets” list. Unity will now automatically swap to the correct font when it sees a specific character! 🧠💡

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📦 Working with the Package

The official guide is great for the basics, but here’s my workflow:

1. UI Elements: It’s incredibly easy! Click the three dots (context menu) on any TextMeshPro component -> Click Localize.
2. Unity adds a Localize String Event automatically.
3. Just pick your string from the table, and you’re done! 🎯

For the Coders 💻: Use LocalizedString to reference your entries and call GetLocalizedString() to fetch the data:

public class ItemInfo
{
    private readonly LocalizedString rawName;

    public string Name
    {
        get => rawName.GetLocalizedString();
    }
}

📺 Need a visual? This YouTube video is an excellent resource: Unity Localization Tutorial.

☁️ Google Sheets Integration

The official Google Sheets Service Provider guide is very detailed.

I opted for OAuth for authentication. By setting the API to “Testing” mode, I can strictly limit access to specific user accounts. Even if someone gets hold of the OAuth credentials, they can’t access the data without being on the allow-list. Safety first! 🔒🛡️

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Is this over? No, there are very long words in different languages, these have to be polished manually. 😅

To read about making a language selection feature, please forward to this blog.