Localising a game made of words: making the English version feel native
The flagship synthesis game was designed and written in Chinese first, and the work right now is bringing it to English for the public web release. For most games, localisation means translating menus. Here it cuts much deeper, because the material of the game is language itself: every creation’s name and description is text a model writes at the moment of synthesis. So the English version cannot be a translation layer bolted on top — the synthesis has to think in English.
Most of the recent experiments are about what makes a generated name delightful, because the answer is different in every language. Chinese rewards compact compounds that read as if they had always existed; English wants portmanteaus, alliteration and the occasional pun. The same model, prompted the same way, writes charming names in one language and flat ones in the other — so the prompts, the style examples and the scoring are being tuned per language rather than translated. Getting "boulder" from rock + rock is easy; the fun lives in the thousands of combinations that have no obvious answer.
The systems around the game are being anglicised with the same care: mana for the resource each synthesis spends, gold dust and soul for the currencies, purity and tiers for how a creation is judged. The shop follows the same rule the rest of this site already documents: everything is a one-time purchase, and nothing renews.
One question still open: whether every language shares a single world of discoveries, or each language forges its own element tree from scratch. Being first to create something is recorded permanently, so the choice matters. Next up: hardening the safety filters around English generated names and descriptions, a closed test of the English build, and then the public web release. The title and launch date will be announced here first.