Development
Every sign in Paper Lantern is art, not text. Four languages meant four passes of the same fifteen rooms.
Paper Lantern has no text layer. Every readable thing in the game — shop signs, a note on a door, the numbers on a meter — was drawn on paper and scanned. That was a good decision for the look and an expensive one for localisation.
Four passes
Turkish, Japanese and Italian each required redrawing every readable asset in the same hand, at the same scan resolution, on the same paper stock. Japanese also required re-composing three puzzles where the solution depended on the shape of a Latin letter.
Fig. 03What we would do differently
Nothing about the drawn approach, but we would identify puzzle-critical text at the design stage and keep it language-independent. Three redrawn puzzles is three too many.