October 23, 2026 · In Kazan
Cutting before translating, and a Japanese font twice the size
In English and Japanese, some of Kazan's messages came out in Spanish and cut short. The translations weren't missing: the text was being trimmed before it was looked up in the dictionary. And in Japanese everything was crowded for another reason: the kanji was twice the size of the letters.
Kazan is written in Spanish, and every text that reaches the screen is looked up verbatim in a dictionary for the chosen language. The top messages were drawn with mensaje.slice(0, 52) so they wouldn't overflow, and card names with nombre.slice(0, 8). The cut came before the translation: «ASERRADERO» became «ASERRADE», which is in no dictionary, and that's what showed in all three languages. Same with composed strings: «2 SOLDADO» or «CUARTEL 300/300» aren't dictionary entries.
// Antes: se recorta en español y ya no se encuentra.
L.texto(d.nombre.slice(0, 8), x, y);
// Ahora: se traduce y luego se recorta a lo que quepa, midiendo.
function cabe(s, ancho) { let t = tr(s); while (t.length > 1 && L.anchoTexto(t) > ancho) t = t.slice(0, -1); return t; }The Japanese problem was size. The game's Latin font is 3×5 pixels and advances 4 per letter; Japanese was drawn with PixelMplus10, at 10 pixels. Each kanji took the room of two and a half letters, and the top bar, laid out with fixed positions, piled up: the clock on the right ended up on top of the exit button. First it was fixed by measuring everything and laying it out in a row; then, at the root, by changing the font.
Japanese games of that era barely used kanji, because at that resolution they can't be read: kana, abbreviations, names of four or five letters. Retro-style games today often use 美咲フォント (Misaki) by Num Kadoma: 8×8 with the kanji drawn in 7×7 and a free licence, commercial use included. A full-width character is 8 wide and a half-width one 4, exactly the size of one of our letters. Cut down to the 688 characters the game uses, it weighs 12 KB, less than the old one.
One deliberate exception: The Procession of the Sleepers kept PixelMplus10. Its Latin font is 8 pixels, not 3×5, and it's a story game with plenty of kanji dialogue: there, the 10-pixel size reads better and doesn't get in the way.