Supported engine · Godot Engine
Godot is the free, open-source engine behind a fast-growing slice of indie and Japanese doujin games — and a closed box for translators, because a shipped Godot game keeps everything inside a single .pck archive (often appended onto the .exe), with scripts compiled to GDScript bytecode (.gdc) and scenes saved as binary (.scn). RuneTranslate opens it. Using a bundled copy of GDRE Tools (the open-source Godot RE toolkit), it unpacks the pack, decompiles the GDScript back to .gd source, and converts the binary scenes to text, then lists every translatable string — dialogue and narration from the scripts, plus labels and UI text on the scenes. It reads hardcoded strings in .gd / .tscn / .tres / .cfg / .godot; it does not read .csv / .po / .translation localization tables. You translate with any provider, and on export it splices your translations into the recovered source and re-packs the game. Detection and extraction cover Godot 3.x and 4.x, but the pure-TS re-pack is Godot 4 (pack v2–v3) only, and export currently runs for games whose .pck is embedded in the .exe — standalone .pck and Godot 3 projects detect, extract, and translate, but can't be re-packed yet. Encrypted .pck files (key baked into the binary) aren't opened. The exported build relies on the engine compiling the loose source at runtime, so verify the translated copy runs before you rely on it. Source language is Japanese by default and configurable per project.
Godot dialogue is often stored as long arrays of lines in a single GDScript 'database' file, so a recurring character or place name shows up hundreds of times. Glossary your cast and key terms up front so every line renders them the same way. Glossary 101 →
Point RuneTranslate at the game directory — the folder with the .exe (the .pck is usually embedded inside it) or a standalone .pck / data.pck next to it. Engine detection recognises the embedded-pack signature automatically; your original files are never modified.
RuneTranslate runs its bundled GDRE Tools sidecar to unpack the .pck, decompile the compiled GDScript (.gdc → .gd) and convert the binary scenes (.scn → .tscn). It then scans the recovered source and lists every translatable string — script dialogue and scene/UI text — grouped by file, with engine markup masked behind placeholders.
Godot games are usually dialogue-heavy, so an LLM (OpenAI GPT-4o / Anthropic Claude) or DeepL reads best for story text; free Google Translate or a local model (Ollama / LM Studio) covers short UI strings, and you can point the OpenAI-compatible provider at OpenRouter or NanoGPT. An optional AI-refiner second pass tightens phrasing.
For games whose .pck is embedded in the .exe, RuneTranslate splices your translations into the recovered GDScript / scene source, re-packs a fresh .pck (dropping the compiled .gdc / binary .scn so the engine loads the translated source), and re-embeds it into a copy of the .exe. Standalone .pck and Godot 3 projects can be translated in the editor but don't export yet. Run the exported copy and it plays in your language.
Because the exported build relies on the Godot runtime compiling the loose translated source, launch the exported game once and confirm the dialogue and menus show your language before sharing it.
