Amid all the hoopla around GameCircle’s expansion to iOS and a major update to Whispersync for Games, you may not have noticed two other powerful features were also released recently. The GameCircle team quietly added support for bulk creation of leaderboards and achievements on the Mobile App Distribution Portal, as well as the ability to internationalize them in up to eight languages besides US English. Both have been popular feature requests.

Internationalization means that GameCircle will display the title and description of your leaderboard or achievement in the language appropriate to your player’s locale, provided they have specified it in their mobile device settings. You can provide translated descriptions in any or all of these languages:

You enable these alternative versions by selecting them from the Add a Language dropdown list on the Leaderboard or Achievement view for your game. To view your game’s leaderboards, for example, go to the GameCircle configuration page and follow the View link in Leaderboards column.

Adding an additional language is not reversible, but you specify which ones to publish, so there’s no harm done if you change your mind or add the wrong one: simply don’t publish that version of the title and description.

Once you add a language, you will see a new corresponding line item for each leaderboard or achievement, which is independently editable.

Providing alternative versions for each title and description, while straightforward, may become unwieldy when you are translating for a lot of locales, or just have lots of leaderboards or achievements. In fact, as the number of leaderboards and achievements goes up, entering all of the other information required to create them definitely makes manual entry time-consuming.

This is where GameCircle’s new bulk upload facility becomes really handy. Rather than create each achievement individually, for example, you can create a file of comma-separated values (CSV) defining all of your achievements at once. From the list of Achievements for your game, click the Bulk Add Achievements button.

On the page that appears, download a CSV template via the click here link. Open the template and fill in the columns as appropriate, then save it locally. See the Create Multiple Achievements section of Implementing Achievements for more information on each column. You will notice, for example, that there are separate columns for each possible translation of title, locked description, and unlocked description. Icon ids for locked and unlocked versions of the achievement are shared across all languages.

Before you can upload the CSV file defining your achievement (or leaderboard) metadata, however, you must upload the icons it refers to. GameCircle provides an Icon Gallery for this purpose, which allows you to add, delete, and rename icons individually or by dragging and dropping them on a web page. You can view the Icon Gallery for your game from the GameCircle configuration page. See Using the Icon Gallery for more information.

Once the icons have been saved and the CSV file updated to reflect your achievement metadata, you’re ready to upload. Click Choose File and navigate to the file you just edited, and then upload it.

Mobile apps and games distributed through the Amazon Appstore for Android are available in nearly 200 countries worldwide, and now GameCircle allows you to provide title and description translations for several of them. Entering the metadata that defines your achievements and leaderboards also got easier, now that you can upload it as a CSV file. Added in response to developer feedback, these features were designed to complement each other and make working with GameCircle fast and simple.