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Andrew Perepechay
Andrew Perepechay

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How I Started Attracting International Players to My Game With AI Automation

In previous articles, I wrote about how I built a browser-based city-building game called "Growing City" in three days using AI, and then how I spent a couple of weeks polishing the lobby, bots, and interface. This time, I want to talk about something that could genuinely help a lot of people on the market.

International players

A Game That Doesn't Care Who's Playing

An economic city-building board game isn't tied to any particular region. The rules are exactly the same whether you're in Moscow, Madrid, or New York: roll the dice, build something, outplay your opponents. There's nothing in the mechanics themselves that only works for one audience.

And yet the site was only available in one language. Not because I decided that on purpose — simply because when you're putting together an MVP in three days, you're not thinking about a three-language interface, you're thinking about making the thing work at all. But it started to feel wasteful to artificially cut off part of my audience with a language barrier that the game itself doesn't actually have.

Translating Isn't the Hard Part. It's Genuinely the Easiest Part

Here's what I did on the technical side, briefly: every piece of interface text got moved into separate dictionary files — one for Russian, one for English, one for Spanish — all sharing the same set of keys. A "Buy" button isn't text hardcoded into the code; it's a key that gets swapped depending on the selected language. I also had to separate the card names the player sees (translatable) from the internal names the game engine uses for logic (which must never change). Otherwise, translating the interface would have quietly broken the game itself.

The neat part was how I handled the default language. There's no need to ask the user anything on their first visit — the browser already knows what language the person's system is set to. Someone arrives with a Spanish OS, and the interface is instantly in Spanish, no extra click required. And if they manually switch the language afterward, that choice is remembered and never gets silently overwritten again.

The Real Surprise: Not the Translation, But Everything Around It

Writing an article isn't hard. Translating it into English and Spanish isn't hard either — that's literally one prompt. But after that comes exactly what I described in my first article: the difficulty shifts away from code and onto everything surrounding the product.

Publishing routine

Publishing an article across a dozen different platforms for different audiences used to mean manually opening every single site, pasting in the text, and adjusting the headline to fit each community's format. Honestly, that routine was eating me alive — the kind of repetitive work you'd love to avoid entirely.

That's where Claude for Chrome came in. It's a browser extension that can see the page in front of it and click, fill out forms, and publish content on its own. I just handed it a link to a finished article and asked it to post it to public platforms. Done — it was already live. Literally one prompt and about ten minutes, and the article was sitting on international platforms, kind of like this one (happy to write up the exact steps if anyone's curious — it's genuinely simple).

What's Next

The game is still live at rastushiy-gorod.ru, now available in Russian, English, and Spanish depending on who's visiting. No registration required — you can play with friends, against bots, or get matched with a total stranger from the other side of the world in the same open lobby.

International players have already started showing up. It's too early to draw conclusions, but I'll share numbers and early observations in the next article.

As always, I'm collecting feedback and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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