One game, three scripts: the craft of rendering Telugu, Hindi and English

Round tiles that must hold టై and క्ष as beautifully as K — what it takes technically to make one word game feel native in Telugu, Devanagari and Latin script.

By the Akshara team · Published 2026-09-26 · All articles

Akshara offers three journeys — Telugu, Hindi, English — inside one game. That sentence hides most of the work. The three languages use three scripts with different shapes, different densities, and different rendering pitfalls, and a game that looks polished in one can look broken in another. Here is what it actually takes.

The tile problem

A Latin letter is compact and roughly square. A Telugu akshara like స్త్రీ or a Devanagari conjunct like क्ष is wider, taller, and detailed — vowel signs hang below the base line and rise above it. Tiles sized for K clip Telugu; tiles sized for Telugu make English look lost. Akshara's boards measure their available space at runtime and size cells from the actual level's grid, with floors tuned per script, so a dense nine-row Telugu board and a wide English board both fit without cutting a single glyph. Getting this right across phone sizes took more iterations than any other visual feature in the game.

Fonts you can trust

Indic script rendering on the web has a long history of silent failure — the dreaded empty boxes where syllables should be. Akshara ships its own Noto Sans Telugu and Noto Sans Devanagari fonts with the site rather than trusting each device's installed fonts, scoped by Unicode range so each script loads only what it needs. The Noto family is used under the SIL Open Font License, and it is the difference between అక్షర rendering as calligraphy or as tofu.

Words are not strings

In English, reversing or shuffling a word is character play. In Telugu and Hindi it is surgery: a combining vowel sign separated from its consonant is meaningless, and a conjunct split in the middle is garbage. Every word in Akshara is stored pre-segmented into its display units — aksharas for Telugu, syllable clusters for Devanagari — and the wheel, the board, the shuffle and the swipe detection all operate on those units. The game never splits a string and hopes.

Each language speaks for itself

Interface text is written natively for each language, not translated by template — the Telugu journey calls its bonus treasury పద నిధి, the Hindi one शब्द कोष, and on the home screen each journey announces its progress in its own language and script, whichever language you are currently playing. A Telugu speaker's game should never make Telugu feel like the guest.

The result, when it works, is invisible: a player in any of the three languages simply feels the game was made for them first. That invisibility is the point — and it is also why we wrote it down here, because the work deserves a record even when the whole goal is that you never notice it. More on the akshara design →