Time and time again, we see some of the same mistakes still coming up in the industry. Though graphics increasingly improve, sound plays an even more vital role in games, and great gameplay is essential to a memorable game. The one issue still comes up. The difficulty of localization can frustrate everyone, but the rewards of great localization bring about great rewards. Another example of this is with the game “Combat Of Heroes“ by Ohayoo Games.
Combat Of Heroes is a game built with Cocos Creator, which has you in control of a stick figure fighting a band of evil stick figures. You defeat them by timing your attacks with two buttons: A left and a right button. Use the button to swipe and slash your way to the top.
The company launched the game back in September for the Chinese market. The game was a huge success reaching the tips of the chart in less than a month on the Apple App Store. It’s one of the great successful games for the company being in the top three of the free games on the app store for the next two months. This was also thanks to an advertising blitz for the game.
Since the growth, the company decided they should start production of the game internationally, with little or no translation involved for its release. The first international version was released in Japan in December of last year with terrible results. It ended up not even being in the top 1000 games in the free section of the App Store.
It wasn’t until January and February of this year that they released an updated version specifically for English speakers and Japan, and the results are amazing. In Japan, they changed the name of the game to fit Japanese culture as well as UI and social media for the area. You can see from the graph that the growth of Combat Of Heroes snowballed after the update.
From there, Apple also added their love by placing the game on the front of their home page in Japan for one month. This increased the popularity and has kept Combat of Heroes one of the top 10 games of the year for the past three months.
The same happened in the USA after the English localization was completed. This makes it a game that has been featured in 3 different languages and locations. A great accomplishment for a Cocos-created game.
This story was adapted from a Chinese article found here.