Welcome to the Duck Detective Localization Guide!

This an aid to help you use the workshop to upload your own translations of the game.

In order to do this you will need to download two workshop items:

The Workshop Upload Tool: https://steamproxy-script.pipiskins.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3476404374

The English Language Template: https://steamproxy-script.pipiskins.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3476400254

The Workshop Upload Tool is a small windows only programme that allows you to upload a folder containing language files to the workshop.

The English Language Template contains all the files needed to be localized in the correct format to be read by the game.

You should duplicate the English Language Template folder and move it somewhere else so you can begin to edit it into a new language

The rest of the guide will go through what each file is and then finally how to use the Workshop Tool to upload a translation.

Two important disclaimers:
- Not all characters are included in the game by default. If your language's characters are missing, please reach out to us and we can look into getting it included.
- All the text files need to be in UTF-8 encoding for the game to be able to read them

Setup.txt just contains two important things to change:

Name_Key - the internal name you want to give your language

Identifier - A small prefix for the game to track language specific files such as: EN or DE

LLL_Lock - This determines the order of the symbols for the L.L.L lock puzzle. The default (in English) is 2,3,1, but you can change it to suit your needs if the puzzle requires a different order of symbols. The 4 symbols are between 0 & 3.

Be sure not to put any spaces between the ":" as it won't be read correctly by the game.

Remember the name you use for the Name_Key as it is important it gets added to the UI.csv file in the next section of this guide.

UI.csv contains all the UI text in the game.

The first thing you should do is update the first line of the file to correspond with your language name:


Deducktions start around line 800, and you can re-order where the blank words go. For example:



%BLANK1 spent his/her last money on %BLANK2 for %BLANK3.

could be changed to:

%BLANK2 was bought by %BLANK1 for %BLANK3.

And now the words bread, rent, and tulips would be in the first blank. Wouldn't make a good deal of sense in English, but will be necessary to change the order in other languages.

All 5 Act.csv files contain the dialogue in the game, split into different acts to make it easier to parse.

There are some basic tags mixed in with the text:

<orange> </orange> makes a word orangey-yellow - which is used for clue words you unlock during dialogue.

<shake> makes the text shake and is normally at the beginning of a sentence when someone is angry.

This is the most complicated file so I will try my best to give a good explanation:




This file allows you to assign alternative spellings to words for deducktions.

By default (in English) everything uses just one spelling for a word, but other languages have more complicated grammar rules, for example, in German, there are more than 10 different forms for the word "the".

Because of this you are able to assign a specific blank in any given deducktion a separate grammar rule or spelling.

Take for example the first deducktion: The Duck Detective spent his/her last money on bread for the Duck Detective.

The last blank (%BLANK3) is accusative because the bread is for that person. In German, this means a different spelling, so we go from 0,0,0 in the file to 0,0,2 (we're using type 1 for dative in German).

Then in the UI.csv we add a new spelling for the words that would show up in the deducktion:

Clue.Word.DD,The Duck Detective
Clue.Word.DD.1,The Duck Detective (dative)
Clue.Word.DD.2,Duck Detective (accusative)

You have up to 8 extra alternative spellings for words and you simply add them to the UI.csv by adding a new key with a .1 .2 etc added to the end of the original words key. Like what is shown above but up to .8

If a word is missing its alternative spelling in UI.csv it will display the default case.

It's important to note that you can change the order of the blanks in UI.csv but this does NOT change the order of the blanks in this text file. They always use the base-English order for this file.

So %BLANK1 always refers to the first value in a list, even if you moved it to the end in UI.csv.

This file contains the x,y co-ordinate positions for clues on inspections in the game. As you localize text on these inspections, the positions of the correct word are likely to move. This text file gives you the ability to move the position of the clue spot so that it can correctly match up with your localized images.




The values currently in the document are those for English, to give you an idea where the positions are. If you don't localize an inspection image there is no need to change the values for it.

It might take some trial and error to figure out the correct x,y co-ordinate for a clue, unfortunately, we haven't come up with a better solution yet to allow you to move these clue spots.

Inspections are made up of two files: the detailed and undetailed versions.



The folder contains only the detailed versions. (The undetailed versions are found in the Sprites folder, explained in the next section)

This folder contains all the images of the detailed inspections that need to be localized. You can open these up in your preferred photo editing software and localize the relevant parts.

If you don't want to localize an image, you can delete it from the folder before uploading.

Everything in the sprites folder is optional! If you don't want to localize an image you can just delete it from the folder.



There are some inspections in here - this is because when you edit their detailed counterparts, the squiggles will no longer match up with the new written text. You can edit these photos so the squiggles better match your new text.

Once you've completed your translation, or would like to give it a test, you can use the Workshop Tool to upload it to Steam.

The tool is not very pretty, apologies for my programmer art, but it is fairly straightforward to use!



You can press the "Create New Language" button to prepare a new workshop item.

Select an image as a thumbnail image for the workshop item. The max size for this image is ~800KB otherwise the upload will fail.

Select the Setup.txt file for the tool to find the content folder.

Add a title and description, set the visibility.

Be sure to press the save button otherwise changes will be lost.

Finally, before you can upload the files, you must press the test button and the tool will ensure that there are no major issues within the files.

If there are issues they will appear in a box so you can fix them.

If the testing passes, then you can press the submit button to upload your translation to the Steam Workshop :D

Be sure to accept Valve's terms for uploading to the workshop before uploading anything!

Thanks for taking a look at how to translate Duck Detective!

If you are working on a translation and need some guidance feel free to ask questions here, on the steam forums or on our discord.

This is a very basic set of tools we put together after seeing how much the community wanted to see translations even though we are unable to fully suppor them ourselves.

If you do upload a full translation of the game, please let us know!

~Happy Broccoli Team