So, now that the news is out, It's an honor and a pleasure to announce my involvment in the localization project for Ender Magnolia (for 10 languages) as a localization engineer!

Do not trust vector fonts (otf/ttf) if you want perfect bitmap fonts.

What I would do is to prepare a neat bmp atlas of ALL characters and ensure there's zero artifacts. Then, a text renderer that uses rectangles from that atlas at native size (or integer multiple)

Maybe bmfont + manual cleanup?

That's not to say Arabic isn't the only language that strived for excellence. Anyone fluent owes it to oneself to try it out in the available languages, because the other teams did a really amazing job. (I'm personally a fan of the Chinese logo!)

Please do give it a try, solo or with a friend!

Honoring that wish (instead of just romanizing the name or something) was its own technical back-and-forth discussion. You see, it's one thing to have multiple languages on a GBA game, it's another for them to coexist in the same screen...

We made it work with the RTL logic turned off, somehow ♥

2️⃣ The UI layouts
Going into this project, I expected some limitations imposed by hardware/engine restrictions, but the developers were incredibly accommodating.
Not only was the basic right-to-left implementation taken care of, but they went above and beyond and did dozens of adjustments.

Listing out some personal highlights of the project:

1️⃣ The pixel font
I wasn't quite sure if we could fit a readable and appropriate Arabic font within those dimensions (12px high and 7/6px high), but we somehow managed to make it work!

I do think the 8x8px Chinese font is even more impressive.