ChillyRoom: The gaming studio’s perspective on localization

ChillyRoom is an indie game studio based in Shenzhen, China. Their mission is to create interesting games and support creative talent in the Chinese game industry. Known for its diverse portfolio of games across genres like roguelike dungeon crawlers and simulators, ChillyRoom’s most popular title is Soul Knight, a pixel action shoot’em up which currently boasts 200 million+ global downloads.

ChillyRoom prides itself on its creative culture, which includes bottom-up creativity, a focus on fun, and tolerance for failure. Teams are small, around 4-5 people, and the company as a whole can work on 10+ projects concurrently, which reflects the studio’s ethos of trying to provide as many creative opportunities for team members as possible. ChillyRoom believes that truly energetic developers have more ideas than they can implement in their lifetimes, and the company aims to cater to that level of creativity.

We talked to Sijing Yu, Overseas Operations Lead at ChillyRoom, to find out more about the inner workings of this driven indie studio.

ChillyRoom has been around for a while now. Sijing, how would you describe the company’s growth and evolution since 2018? 

At ChillyRoom we’re always thinking about expanding our games portfolio. ChillyRoom has broadened its game offerings beyond just Soul Knight to include various genres like ARPGs, card games, and simulation games. While most projects target mobile platforms, some are developed for PC and consoles, with potential for more in the future. Notable additions include Soul Knight Prequel (a pixel ARPG) and The World of Kungfu (a Wuxia-themed RPG). Soul Knight and Otherworld Legends have both received local indie awards (like Indieplay) and are frequently featured on app stores.

Our philosophy, in terms of how we develop our titles, centres on an openness to exploring varied gameplay mechanics. We prioritize developer growth over guaranteed success, allowing projects to launch and fail if it benefits the team’s development.

In terms of working practice, our team has expanded significantly from fewer than 10 to over 100 employees, and we’ve also adopted hybrid working to offer our team members greater flexibility.

Can you tell us how the partnership between ChillyRoom and Alpha Games came about?

ChillyRoom has grown a lot since 2018 and, as the number of projects has increased, so have our localization needs. We started looking for additional support to handle this demand while keeping within our limited indie studio budget. Alpha Games had been recommended to us by an industry insider and we saw that their services aligned well with our quality expectations and resource limitations.

They say that every player plays their own unique game, a factor which can vary even more across different regional markets. What has been your experience of player expectations across key markets like North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, and how do you adapt to the differences therein? 

At ChillyRoom, we’re still in the early days of tailoring features to specific regions, but we’ve seen some regional patterns through player feedback and performance data. Players in Southeast Asia, for example, tend to value offline support and compatibility with a wide range of devices. We’re already taking these factors into account when optimizing our games. North America is a stable market for us, while Europe has not been a major focus in recent years, and we currently localize into only a limited number of European languages.

Overall, while we don’t specifically adapt gameplay content for each region, we’re keeping an eye on feedback from our global audience and making improvements to enhance player experience wherever possible.

There’s no doubt that localization plays a key role in your overseas success. What does “good localization” mean to ChillyRoom? 

To us, good localization means delivering a clear, natural, and engaging experience that feels native to players. But it also means keeping the player experience smooth by ensuring that UI, tutorials, and in-game instructions are clear, intuitive, and consistent.

Yes, we rely heavily on our localization partners to help bridge cultural gaps and flag anything that might confuse or alienate players. And that collaboration is a key part of what makes localization work for us.

Looking back at ChillyRoom’s collaboration with Alpha Games so far, what have been some memorable localization challenges or successes? 

The experience of working on Soul Knight Prequel really stands out for me. With Soul Knight Prequel, we ventured into new territory in a number of ways. For a start, we localized directly from Chinese into most of the Asian languages supported in the game, which is not often done. Without relying on a pivot language, as is customary, we can make sure that mistranslations introduced via the pivot language can be reduced. 

We’ve also taken advantage of some of the other services which Alpha offers, such as DTP and LQA. There was a carefully executed coordination process at the outset to ensure the correct workflow was implemented in both cases, but Alpha’s PMs successfully navigated all of the complexities.

And, generally speaking, the partnership between ChillyRoom and Alpha Games has worked well over the years. We really appreciate how responsive and adaptable your team has been — especially given the fast-paced, sometimes unpredictable nature of game development and live operations.

Alpha Games has consistently delivered high-quality localization even with tight deadlines or shifting priorities. We also value the open communication and feedback loop. When issues come up, they’re addressed quickly.

So, from your perspective, what qualities does ChillyRoom value most in a localization partner? 

Reliability. Game development moves quickly, and schedules often shift with little notice. A reliable localization partner not only delivers high-quality work on time, but also demonstrates solid project planning and the flexibility to adapt when things change. Having a partner we can count on allows us to stay focused on development without worrying about delays or miscommunication.

Let’s talk a little bit about the future: how do you see the collaboration between ChillyRoom and Alpha Games evolving as your titles reach new audiences? 

We’re finding now that our workflow has shifted in recent projects, and we’re working toward a more MTPE-based approach as a way to balance quality and cost, which we look to explore together with Alpha Games in the future.

Alpha has always had a deep reservoir of highly professional linguistic talent, and we believe that’s exactly what makes MTPE work. After all, when AI handles the basics, it’s the high-end professionals who elevate the final product with nuance, tone, and context that machines still miss.

I mean, LLMs have been a game-changer for ChillyRoom, as well as having a major impact on the industry. The LLMs have shown impressive performance, especially in higher-resource languages, but they don’t yet achieve perfect translation quality across all languages. And current automatic evaluation metrics aren’t always totally reliable for assessing LLM-based translations – this is something we’re lacking. We’d love to see how our collaboration with Alpha Games could evolve in this new space.

And finally, to end on a tough question, how do you see the future of Chinese game developers on the global stage? 

Yeah, that is a tough question! I guess that, from where we stand, Chinese developers are becoming increasingly competitive globally, but there’s still a learning curve when it comes to localization, cultural adaptation, and long-term publishing strategies overseas.

Some Chinese game developers still face challenges when it comes to building truly global products. There’s often a mindset that the domestic market is large enough on its own, which can lead to less emphasis on internationalization during development. Of course, this, in turn, can make localization much harder later on.

That said, the potential is definitely there. If more developers begin to think globally from the early stages of development, we believe Chinese games could have an even stronger presence worldwide.

A big thank you to Sijing from ChillyRoom for taking the time out to talk with us about their thoughts on localization in general, and Alpha Games in particular.

If you’d like to find out more about the services which Alpha Games offer, make sure to reach out.