Hexzen speaks English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Finnish, Czech, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic. Even without dialogue on the board, there are still the menus, the settings, the help, the level and campaign editors, and above all the story content. People sometimes think Hexzen has no story; it does. Its official campaign, The Echo of the Runes, has a quiet story running through it: five Major Runes to awaken, echoes to collect from node to node, a Codex that fills up as you play. It's playable today in fourteen languages; the Arabic version is translated and will be switched on in an upcoming update.

Every writing system has its own constraints. A full Chinese font weighs about 16 MB; the game only ships the glyphs its text actually uses, which comes to half a megabyte for all five non-Latin scripts combined. The main-menu logo has a transliterated version for Japanese, Korean, Russian and Chinese (ヘクスゼン, 헥스젠, Хексзен, 六角禅). Russian is how my title font found out it didn't know Cyrillic. And if a single translation string is missing, the game refuses to compile. It's brutal, but no English text can slip into your Czech playthrough by accident.

The menu in Korean, a game in Simplified Chinese: two scripts, two glyph subsets cut to fit.

Arabic piled on three things I'd never dealt with. It's written right to left. Its letters change shape depending on where they sit in a word: the text shapes itself, like cursive. And it's written with two systems of numerals, the Eastern ٠١٢٣ and the Western 0123 you already know.
Right to left means the whole interface mirrors: the menu's column of buttons switches sides, so does the settings sidebar, the back button points right, the HUD counters move to the left. But not everything: a number never flips, and neither does a universal icon like the pause symbol. Deciding, element by element, what mirrors and what stays put: that was the real work.

A few chosen moments, with the screenshots to back them up:

• My first attempts showed Arabic letters detached from each other, laid out in the wrong order. Since I don't read Arabic, I thought it looked rather elegant. It was unreadable.

• The big runic tile on the main menu ignored the mirroring and stayed on the wrong side of the screen.

• The icons didn't flip: the back arrow kept pointing left, against the grain of the whole interface.

• The timer in Eastern numerals (٠٤:٣٠) showed empty boxes: the board font didn't know those glyphs, so I had to swap it out on the fly.

• My favorite: the numbered rune clues, like ᚠ·٣, need a Germanic rune and an Eastern Arabic digit to live in the same font. That font didn't exist. So I built it.

Before / after: the main menu in Arabic, with the glowing runic tile facing the wrong way

The board in Arabic, Eastern numerals and numbered runes included.

It's not all perfect yet: Arabic text still sits badly with some accessibility options (the font meant for dyslexia, for instance, only covers the Latin alphabet). I'm working on it, without promising miracles: Hexzen is still a game made by one person.

Over the past few weeks, a lot of Arabic-speaking players took the time to explain what they actually want from a game in their language. I read all of it. Three points kept coming up.
Modern Standard Arabic, not a dialect: that's already what Hexzen uses. In a game, most prefer Western numerals (0-9) over Eastern ones (٠-٩), which is the exact opposite of my default. I got that wrong. And last: if you translate your game, say so. A localization nobody hears about is no use to anyone. This post exists partly for that.

The Numerals setting will be offered in every language, with Western (0-9) as the default everywhere and Eastern (٠-٩) as an option. The board clues, the timer and the numbered runes switch live, even mid-game.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to write to me, including the ones who wrote to disagree. The game is better because of you! 🏃