Arabic that renders correctly in your game

Metaphor runs on GFD, Studio Zero's in-house engine, the same family as Persona 5 and Catherine. Its text lives inside an 85 GB CRIWARE CPK archive under per-file CRILAYLA compression, with dialogue held in AtlusScript .msg files. The engine performs no Arabic shaping and no bidirectional reordering, and the usual trick of flipping the font's line metrics is dead here (GFD reads usWinAscent/usWinDescent, not signed metrics), so the text has to arrive already correct.

A custom CPK extractor handles the CRILAYLA decompression. An offline RTL baker then shapes each line into presentation forms, wraps it to a per-label box capacity derived from Atlus's own Japanese hand-wrapped line breaks, and reorders it visually: Latin islands stay in place, brackets get mirrored, and the hard line breaks land where the engine expects them. Colour tags, paired markup, and engine tokens survive the reversal intact. The Arabic font goes into all nine font slots, and UI sprites are round-tripped through BC7 textures. More than 75,000 message entries went through the pipeline end to end.

ForzaTech is Playground Games' in-house engine, with a UI layer built on NoesisGUI/AVUI. No public tooling or format documentation existed for it. Strings live in a custom binary string-table format. Fonts aren't TTF: they're a proprietary .vfont/.vfont0 pair that stores every glyph as a pre-built GPU mesh. Nothing in the engine expects a right-to-left script.

I reverse-engineered every format and verified it with byte-identical roundtrips: the string tables across all 287 files, and the mesh-font formats from scratch. A TTF-to-mesh generator builds engine-valid Arabic glyphs (395 across the Arabic and Presentation-Forms-B ranges). I added reshaping and BiDi where the engine had none, and repacked the locale archives slot by slot around the engine's silent integrity checks. Dialogue, UI, system text, fonts, and RTL shipped inside the build.

Glacier's localization lives inside a proprietary RPKG archive format with a custom block layout for UI strings, dialogue, and video subtitles. Its UI fonts run through a Scaleform GFX container where each glyph is baked into a binary font face, and that container crashes the moment an edit changes the byte length of the tag body around it.

I mapped the RPKG format and its block structure for round-trip read and write. Arabic glyphs went into six font faces without any net byte-length change: rare glyph slots were replaced, and each face was padded back to its exact original size. RTL reshaping and bidi run at the string layer, with placeholder and engine tokens masked so they survive reordering. The localized data went directly into the game's base chunks rather than a separate patch archive.

Silksong runs on Unity 6 (6000.0.50f1), but its text doesn't go through stock TextMeshPro. It runs through a forked version that lives in the engine's own TMProOld namespace, with a legacy font schema and no dynamic font fallback. Dialogue, UI, and item text are driven from compiled asset bundles and flat YAML string tables.

I extracted 93,491 words from the string tables and ran them through a build-time RTL transform that reshapes each line into Presentation Forms, reverses it per segment, masks placeholders and Latin runs, and preserves every engine tag so line breaks and page markers survive intact. A decompile of the game's own assembly settled where line breaks are converted (eight methods inside the game code, not the injector), so wrapping and reordering run at build time instead of fighting the runtime. Reintegration happens via BepInEx.