Nairobi Indie ShelfEast Africa · indie games

Wishlist · glossary dreams

Localization wishlist

This page collects the polite arguments we want engines, publishers, and toolchains to overhear: how East African players move between languages, registers, and jokes — and what “support” should mean when the map is not the territory.

World map spread open on a wooden desk.
Atlases lie gracefully; UI copy should admit its scale too.
Retro-styled game controller bathed in cyan and magenta light.
Borrowed jargon often arrives with borrowed lighting — worth naming out loud.
Hand writing notes on paper beside a keyboard.
Glossaries start as marginalia, not as product bullet lists.

Languages & register swings

Many players live inside daily code-switching: English for menus, Kiswahili for banter, Sheng fragments in party chat, and another home language for family text threads. A wishlist item, then, is not “more languages” alone — it is predictable places to pivot register without treating any single lane as the “neutral” default.

We want subtitle tracks that tolerate mixed lines, font stacks that respect diacritics and elongated vowels, and search fields that do not punish blended spelling. Saving language pairs per profile is a small feature with a large courtesy footprint.

  • Separate “UI language” from “spoken audio expectation.”
  • Let players pin two written languages without shame labels.
  • Expose glossary hover for genre jargon borrowed from English.

Cultural nuance & idiom debt

Localization is not tourism. When a game imports slang, religion, or politics, we look for footnotes in tone — not lectures, but the equivalent of a librarian’s pencil mark: “this line ages fast,” “this joke assumes a diaspora listener,” “this metaphor maps poorly to coastal timekeeping.”

Idiom debt accrues when writers ship English metaphors (sports, weather, money idioms) that localize into brittle equivalents. Our wishlist asks for writer rooms that budget time for rewrite, not only translation — a second pass that chases feeling instead of parity.

Finally, we want credit lines that name regional editors and testers with the same prominence as composers. A shelf shows who stacked it; a credits roll should do the same.