Maria Myronenko, producer of Colorwood Words at Ukrainian IT product company Burny Games, talked about localizing the game and adding Ukrainian context.
Maria Myronenko, producer of Colorwood Words at Ukrainian IT product company Burny Games, talked about localizing the game and adding Ukrainian context.
«At the start, we planned a regular localization — adding Ukrainian to the interface, translating dozens of levels, adding some facts. It all started with a regular technical task: adding a new language, as we had done before. But it quickly became clear that we could do more,» Mironenko said in her blog on Gamedev DOU.
According to her, the developers initially wanted to add a few references to their team in Colorwood Words, but then they «got fired up» by the idea and decided to make a large cultural pack with Ukrainian memes and historical facts.
«Now in Colorwood Words, players can fill in the missing letters in modern Ukrainian memes, compose phrases from folk songs, recognize quotes from historical and cultural figures, and even learn correct Ukrainian swearing. Players from Ukraine have access to more local humor and context, but many new levels have been added for the global patch,» the producer notes.
She added that the developers tried to create something interesting and educational and deliberately avoided «brain rot» memes or «random chaos.»
Colorwood Words is a mobile puzzle game created in 2024. The player’s task is to fill in the missing letters to form a word, phrase, or sentence. By the end of May, the number of downloads of the game had exceeded 1.1 million.
The game is available for free on the App Store and Google Play. The Ukrainian language is selected automatically for the user or enabled manually in the game settings.
