What you'll need

• Time
  
• NotePad++ / any editor
  
• Even more time play-testing

Browse into your game folder

• Right-click Ace of Words in your Library
  
• Properties
  
• LOCAL FILES
  
• BROWSE LOCAL FILES...

Open the ...\content\messages folder and make a copy of GameMessages_EN.xml

I'll use german in this example and will rename the copy of GameMessages_EN.xml into GameMessages_DE.xml.

Now open the desired *.xml file with NotePad++ or any other editor and start translating everything that is between the quotes ("").

After doing all the possible localization changes we'll save the file with UTF-8 without BOM encoding.

Now we play-test what has been translated so far, if you see something not fit, you can use a line break (press ENTER) at certain words (but keep it a block of text) that may overlap buttons in the GUI (in the Tutorial for example).

Wrong

This is some text in the tutorial, it has the perfect length now and [BUTTON]
overlap a button. It also is a block of text and won't look like a 5th [BUTTON]
did this composition, did he?

Right

This is some text in the tutorial, it has the perfect length now and [BUTTON]
does not overlap a button. It also is a block of text and won't look [BUTTON]
like a 5th grader did this composition, did he?

It doesn't really matter in or for what resolution you translate, the game will be stretched to fit bigger resolutions and the text on screen remains in the same position, you don't need to worry about it and it'll have the same screen-position in all possible resolutions, big and small, it will automatically be resized respectively.

Once you have everything on it's place, good!

The last step is to make the game use the language without replacing the english localization file.
For this, we need to make a change to a config file.

Browse into ...\content\config and find config.xml, make a copy of it.

Open the copy with NotePad++ or any other editor and replace the english language code with the one from your own language, in my example i used german (DE).

with
This time we save the file with ANSI encoding.

The following language codes can be found in said config file (to date):
EN = ENGLISH, DE = GERMAN, FR = FRENCH, SP = SPANISH, IT = ITALIAN, JP = JAPANESE, RU = RUSSIAN, HR = CROATIAN

You might aswell use one of them.

Now where the localization is done and the config made aswell, the only thing left to do is collecting everything and making sure everything has correct names.

Create a new empty folder structure "content\messages" and copy your translated "GameMessages_XX.xml" into it.

Create another empty folder structure "content\config" and copy your changed "config.xml" into it, if you haven't renamed it properly yet, do it now.

Put the "content" folder into a new folder like "Ace Of Words - German localization", *.zip or *.rar it up or do so with just the "content" folder and send it to a friend having the game. =)


I thought, i'll attach the current german localization for v1.004 (or as of today, 28/04/2017), you can download it here[my.pcloud.com] (link updated: 10/05/2017).

Just unpack the archive into your game folder and start the game from within Steam.

Keep in mind, that the screen resolution is set to 1366x768 in the config.xml file you can find in the ./AceOfWords/content/config/ subfolder. You might want to change that to your liking after unpacking the archive, to fit your needs, before running the game.