This article comes from WeChat public account “3type” ( Email hi@3type.cn ), the author Wei Li, the original title “From Selda to Motion: Is it wrong to use variety in the game? “, Ai Faner released with permission.
Yesterday, I was preparing to land on the island. When the office and the two raccoons checked in, I felt that what they said was a bit wrong. What’s going on?
This is not a problem for the raccoons, but the Chinese font used in the game is a bit strange. In “Gather! In the official Chinese version of Animal Friendship Society, the fonts used for subtitles are variety style .
What kind of font is Variety?
Even if you haven’t heard the name “variety style”, you must be impressed with this font-because its style is too obvious. The strokes are highly geometric, and almost every stroke is deformed into a straight line, but the smaller arc angle at the end of the skimmer is retained. At the lower right corner of the square structure, an extra arc treatment is also performed.
▲ Variety shows are also regulars in street shops
The variety show was born in the 1970s and was designed by Hong Kong designer Guo Bingquan. It marks the emergence of a modern Chinese character library called “Art Word”. Later, Guo Bingquan sold this font toThe Japanese writing research company added a pseudonym design (designer: Suzuki Maki) to it, and launched a font family for photoengraving under the name “Chuangju Lan”.
▲ There are many differences in details between the Chuang Lan and the variety show, but the design methods are completely the same.
The general-purpose computer font “variety” was developed by Huakang Corporation and has since returned to the mainland. Later, almost all major font manufacturers launched their own variety shows.
Apart from Chuang Lan and Variety Show, using similar design techniques to geometrically process the strokes of Chinese characters, more “Fine Art” style fonts are obtained. Mona ’s super-rigid black, Hanyi ’s rhombic body, Zhang Haishan sharp line body, wordmaking workshop version of the black body, and so on. As far as the treatment of the deformation of the Chinese character bones can be described, they are the same. This is also the most modern geometric Chinese font design One of the commonly used techniques.
▲ The ever-popular Hanyi Lingxin body is a variant of variety variety
This type of font has been used in headline advertisements and other occasions since its design.
“Words for reading” and “Words for reading”
In short, fonts can be divided into two categories: English is called text and display, and Chinese is literally translated as “text” and “display”, or extended as “orthographic” and “title”.
The so-called “orthodox text”, as the name suggests, is usually used for large sections of text. The main requirement is “easy to read”; in addition, for formal publications, the glyphs must also be “standard” and conform to the standard Chinese character writing.
Generally speaking, Chinese body fonts can be divided into Song, Hei, and FangThere are four types of Song and Kai style, and under each type, there are more or less different types of fonts. For example, “Chinese black body”, “Founder Lanting black” and “Siyuan black body” are all black bodies, but the design is completely different. This design difference is usually not noticed by ordinary readers, but the impact on the actual reading experience is subtle; and letting large paragraphs of text “read without fatigue” is the goal that text font designers want to pursue.
▲ Siyuan Song (left) and Chinese Song (right) text layout effects
The “headline” pays more attention to “new style, eye-catching and beautiful, attractive, easy to recognize and understand, both artistic and practical.” What we see on street signs or website banners , With a little creative fonts, mostly belong to this category.
▲ Open a shopping app, the font you see on the homepage is “title”
In German, Text and Display fonts are called Leseschrift and Schauschrift, which literally means “Lese-” and “Schau-” fonts. This is not only the design purpose that the font designer should consider, but also the guide for graphic designers (font users).
But in actual use, the demarcation between the two is not very clear, especially similar to the bold bold type in the figure above. Some text fonts are magnified and used for title display. However, for headline words, it is usually inappropriate to use it to arrange large sections of body content.
In contemporary western font design, sometimes the same family of fonts also distinguish TextAnd Display uses. The two are usually distinguished by a parameter called “visual size”, which has the same meaning as “how many” looking elements “to include.
▲ Two styles of a variable font, as well as a typographic effect.
Use of “Title Font” in the game
After reading this, everyone must already know “Assembly!” What’s wrong with the fonts in the Animal Friendship Society? Although the subtitles in the game are not the “big paragraphs” of the text, they are undoubtedly “words for reading”, but they use a variety show designed for headline advertisements.
p>
▲ Variety place names in Breath of the Wild
The official Chinese version of “Forked Traveler” has been used in the interface. New Wei style . Xinwei style was originally a calligraphic font, which was designed as a printed font in the 1970s. At that time, it was believed that “the style of the New Wei style is novel and the strokes are very regular, which is very suitable for making printed movable characters and typesetting books and newspapers as titles.”
Using small fonts in games (especially on the small screen of the Switch) is very fuzzy. Of course, “it’s not impossible.”
▲ The new Wei style in “Forked Traveler”, the full-width numbers in this font are also difficult to say.
I also looked at mobile games. Recently, some of the more popular games use boldface as the main font (the background settings of these games are also serious, wasteland science fiction and the like), but there is also the phenomenon of using the “title word” as the text and even interface elements. For example, “Forever Seven Days Capital” also uses variety shows as dialogue subtitle fonts.
▲ Two more fonts are used for the character name and interface elements in this screenshot
There are other examples, such as the following two games.
Although such use deviates from the original intention of font design, it can only be regarded as an option in the art design of game interface. I don’t plan to make too much evaluation on this. As far as the several localized games mentioned before, we might as well change the angle and see how to choose fonts for the localized design of other languages.
What kind of Japanese is Morimori? Can’t I “copy” directly?
Let ’s take a look at “Gather! How did the English version and the Japanese version of Animal Friendship Society choose dialogue?
As you can see, in both languages, bold / sans-serif, which looks more common, has been selected as the subtitle font. This font is called “ ロ ダ ン わ ん ぱ く “, and Japanese and English are the same fonts that match the design. So, is it better for the Chinese version to use ordinary black type directly?
Yes, of course. For example, let’s try to replace this content with Siyuan bold.
▲ Screenshot replaced with Siyuan bold. (Homemade)
Is this really better? Maybe you think that Chinese fonts are more serious than English and Japanese. For example, we replaced the English version of the subtitles with San Francisco (the system font for Apple phones / computers):
▲ Screenshot replaced with SF Text. (Homemade)
This involves an important issue in the design of English-Chinese font matching: the diversity of text font styles, or “tolerance”.
For English body text, it can be as serious as Helvetica can also be geometric like Futura. Because of the simple structure of the English alphabet, these fonts are not used to affect the readability of large sections of text. However, the body text of Chinese characters can only be used in a small range. Once you have done too much, it can no longer be called a “body font.”
▲ Different styles of sans-serif body
What about Japanese? There are also Chinese characters in Japanese, so it ’s okay to face the Japanese version of “copy job” right? -Really not necessarily. Although Japanese includes Chinese characters that we may know, Chinese characters do not account for more than half of modern Japanese. And those parts we do not know-Hiragana and Katakana, are the decisive factors for the effect of a Japanese text.
The current Japanese font design, especially the body font, is increasingly inclined to use existing Chinese characters to match new kana. After all, there are thousands of Chinese characters and only two hundred pseudonyms, which play a more significant role and have more design space to play. From the perspective of font use, it is also common for designers to choose different fonts for Chinese characters and kana. Illustrator and InDesign software include such “composite font” features directly.
The pseudonym design of this “ロ ダ ン わ ん ぱ く” font used by Domori is quite lively. Suppose that the Chinese part of the Japanese dialogue is kept unchanged, and only the pseudonym is changed to Siyuan Hei, the entire text is a little less interesting.
Screenshot replaced with Siyuan kana. (Homemade) When I did it, I found that the kana in the Japanese subtitles did not turn on the widening option and did not set the spacing between the characters—the spacing between ん and て seemed too large.
I guess, maybe this is the reason why the Chinese version chose to use variety shows: it only seems too serious to use the bold type, so choose one”Design a bit stronger” font.
Localization of “Another Path”
The Breath of the Wild is another case. The English font in this game is the “ Zelda Glyph ” font made by Nintendo. The style of this font is the same as that of the early “Zelda” title word “Zelda”. Its sharp triangle serif is its main feature. Capital letters with decorative elements, used with small capital letters.
▲ The Legend of Zelda series logo (Wikipedia)
The Japanese font uses the Kanji part of Laglan Punch , and the kana part of “ ロ ゴ G ブ ラ ッ ク “. Both of these fonts are super bold headings. From this perspective, there is nothing wrong with using variety shows in Chinese.
▲ Font selection during the development of The Legend of Zelda (jp.ign.com)
By the way, Laglan Punch is the prototype of the visually impactful font in the Trigger animation “The Girl Who Cuts” (roughened in the animation).
▲ Text performance in Killing Girl (kill-la-kill.fandom.com)
As for Forked Traveler, the font used in the Japanese version is New Cinema . This font is derived from designer Sato’s handwritten movie subtitle fonts made in the middle of the last century. Although it looks strong, it is designed to “eliminate the presence of subtitles” and is designed for a large screen environment. The readability itself is very strong-so it is still very clear even on the small screen of the Switch .
This font is also a frequent guest in cartoons. In January of this year, the ED of the new “Fictional Reasoning” used another version (with a notch) of New Cinema.
p>
▲ ED subtitles of “Fiction”
The English version of Forked Way Traveler uses a similar font called Skech (there is no t in the name).
The difficulty with the Chinese version here is that there haven’t been any Chinese fonts in this style. It is said that the traditional Chinese subtitles of “Monster Hunter: World” use the traditional Chinese extended version of this font, which does not seem to be official.
▲ Traditional Chinese subtitles for “Monster Hunter: World” (bilibili)
Anyway, the new Wei style of the official simplified Chinese version of Forked Way Traveler is strange. In particular, this edition of the New Wei style also matches the western part of the line style, where all numbers and money symbols appear extremely distorted. Perhaps the local design team wanted to convey a medieval style that fits the game background, but it was obviously not very successful.
Dilemma of Chinese font selection
The choice of fonts for in-game culture is not easy. The type of Chinese fonts is far less than that of English and Japanese, and there are also cases where the “style range is narrower” mentioned earlier. Except for the case where the original version uses a more conventional serif or sans serif, if you want to match Chinese with a stylized font, it is very unlikely that you can find a suitable font directly. Then, another idea is to find new fonts based on the overall style, like the Japanese / English version of “Break of the Wild” and the Chinese version of “Forked Stranger”.
Or, like Angry Birds or Royal Warfare, a custom Chinese font is launched. Of course, this must first be allowed economically.
p>
▲ Chinese Customized Font for “Royal War” (fontke.com)
In this case, the localization of many games has finally adopted the lowest cost and lowest risk method-regardless of the original version, the Chinese version is directly in bold. Many of the early games on the App Store were like this, and I was more impressed with the Red Alert in 20083 “. In the English version, a custom font with a strong sense of comics is used (it may be considered as an example of “the title is misplaced”), but in the Chinese version, it disappears.
▲ English version of Red Alert 3 (technogog.com) interface font
▲ Traditional Chinese version of “Red Alert 3” interface (pictured is “Expansion Moment”) (www.gamersky.com)
Another type of problem is with pixel wind indie games. Most pixel games cannot find a matching Chinese character pixel font. The main reason is that the structure of Chinese characters is complex and cannot be clearly expressed at a smaller size. In addition, today’s pixel games are only in style (technically, high-definition can be achieved), so some localizations will directly add high-resolution Chinese text on the pixel screen, creating a strong sense of dislocation.
3type The “Dingyu Dot Matrix” project under development in the past three years is to solve the lack of fonts in this area. “丁卯 点阵 体” is a family of Chinese fonts as small as possible, including 7 × 7 and 9 × 9. 9 × 9 is suitable for most pixel games, 7 × 7 is more extreme, you can useFor small captions, or for localized matching in 5-pixel English games.
▲ The official Chinese font of Rhythm Hailaru is not displaying well.
“src =” https://media.ifanrusercontent.com/user_files/wpdata/images/c2/79/c2794025665eb99a953bac56dc314a70018a9491-ce884b0b470e6d542a35cdf94926d0bbcf5a1e34.jpg “>
▲ The matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 9px” and the comparison of the original Japanese version
▲ The font in Tiny Tower Vegas is only 5 pixels high, making it difficult to match Chinese characters.
▲ Matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 7px”
Conclusion
The font designer Daqudu published a book “Arcade Game Typography” last year, which talked about font design in early video games: “… it’s clear that developers lacked knowledge of English and Latin The daily contact of letters …. You will find many strange places, they are best seen as a naive and childish product, not because of creativity. “
▲ The game interface of Pac-Man (1980), pay attention to the limited text, health and level numbers are marked with graphics below. Compromised the design of the letters E, Y, etc., resulting in excessive kerning (Wikipedia, image enlarged)
At the beginning of video games, the early gameplay was based on “algorithms”, such as “Ping Pong”, “Gluttonous Snake” and even “Tetris”. At that time, the text in the game was just to meet the most important functional requirements, such as a scorer or a prompt for “please coins.” Later, the game became more and more “narrative”. The importance of words became more and more important, and fonts became an indispensable element in the art of games.
This article only outlines a few ideas on the topic of “Chinese localization”, and “font selection in games”It can be a fairly ambitious topic. This article is just a guide, hoping that more players and designers can pay attention to this aspect.
reference source
Xue Xuecheng: “Talking about the Design of Printed Chinese Characters” 》
Gu Rongrong: “Chinese Font Square Geometry”
Bo Zhou: “History of Modern Chinese Text Design”
Toshi Omagari: Arcade Game Typography
IGN: “ゼ ル ダ の 伝 説 BtoW” ザ ー ザ ー イ ン タ ー フ ェ イ ス の コ ン セ プ ト セ プ 「な け れ ば な い ほ う が い い UI」 だ っ た https: //jp-ign-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/jp.ign.com/the-legend-of-zelda-hd/17077/news/btowui?amp=1
typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2018_07/DigdLYCU0AA_pbJ.png.d1b01bdc5bb336f76c8e6f50bf1d79b6.png
www.zhihu.com/question/267820679/answer/ 329731431
www.bilibili.com/video/av19057094 /
Thank Liu Yuhui, Li Zhiqian, and Du Xiyao for their help in this article.
▲ Variety shows are also regulars in street shops
The variety show was born in the 1970s and was designed by Hong Kong designer Guo Bingquan. It marks the emergence of a modern Chinese character library called “Art Word”. Later, Guo Bingquan sold this font toThe Japanese writing research company added a pseudonym design (designer: Suzuki Maki) to it, and launched a font family for photoengraving under the name “Chuangju Lan”.
▲ There are many differences in details between the Chuang Lan and the variety show, but the design methods are completely the same.
The general-purpose computer font “variety” was developed by Huakang Corporation and has since returned to the mainland. Later, almost all major font manufacturers launched their own variety shows.
Apart from Chuang Lan and Variety Show, using similar design techniques to geometrically process the strokes of Chinese characters, more “Fine Art” style fonts are obtained. Mona ’s super-rigid black, Hanyi ’s rhombic body, Zhang Haishan sharp line body, wordmaking workshop version of the black body, and so on. As far as the treatment of the deformation of the Chinese character bones can be described, they are the same. This is also the most modern geometric Chinese font design One of the commonly used techniques.
▲ The ever-popular Hanyi Lingxin body is a variant of variety variety
This type of font has been used in headline advertisements and other occasions since its design.
“Words for reading” and “Words for reading”
In short, fonts can be divided into two categories: English is called text and display, and Chinese is literally translated as “text” and “display”, or extended as “orthographic” and “title”.
The so-called “orthodox text”, as the name suggests, is usually used for large sections of text. The main requirement is “easy to read”; in addition, for formal publications, the glyphs must also be “standard” and conform to the standard Chinese character writing.
Generally speaking, Chinese body fonts can be divided into Song, Hei, and FangThere are four types of Song and Kai style, and under each type, there are more or less different types of fonts. For example, “Chinese black body”, “Founder Lanting black” and “Siyuan black body” are all black bodies, but the design is completely different. This design difference is usually not noticed by ordinary readers, but the impact on the actual reading experience is subtle; and letting large paragraphs of text “read without fatigue” is the goal that text font designers want to pursue.
▲ Siyuan Song (left) and Chinese Song (right) text layout effects
The “headline” pays more attention to “new style, eye-catching and beautiful, attractive, easy to recognize and understand, both artistic and practical.” What we see on street signs or website banners , With a little creative fonts, mostly belong to this category.
▲ Open a shopping app, the font you see on the homepage is “title”
In German, Text and Display fonts are called Leseschrift and Schauschrift, which literally means “Lese-” and “Schau-” fonts. This is not only the design purpose that the font designer should consider, but also the guide for graphic designers (font users).
But in actual use, the demarcation between the two is not very clear, especially similar to the bold bold type in the figure above. Some text fonts are magnified and used for title display. However, for headline words, it is usually inappropriate to use it to arrange large sections of body content.
In contemporary western font design, sometimes the same family of fonts also distinguish TextAnd Display uses. The two are usually distinguished by a parameter called “visual size”, which has the same meaning as “how many” looking elements “to include.
▲ Two styles of a variable font, as well as a typographic effect.
Use of “Title Font” in the game
After reading this, everyone must already know “Assembly!” What’s wrong with the fonts in the Animal Friendship Society? Although the subtitles in the game are not the “big paragraphs” of the text, they are undoubtedly “words for reading”, but they use a variety show designed for headline advertisements.
p>
▲ Variety place names in Breath of the Wild
The official Chinese version of “Forked Traveler” has been used in the interface. New Wei style . Xinwei style was originally a calligraphic font, which was designed as a printed font in the 1970s. At that time, it was believed that “the style of the New Wei style is novel and the strokes are very regular, which is very suitable for making printed movable characters and typesetting books and newspapers as titles.”
Using small fonts in games (especially on the small screen of the Switch) is very fuzzy. Of course, “it’s not impossible.”
▲ The new Wei style in “Forked Traveler”, the full-width numbers in this font are also difficult to say.
I also looked at mobile games. Recently, some of the more popular games use boldface as the main font (the background settings of these games are also serious, wasteland science fiction and the like), but there is also the phenomenon of using the “title word” as the text and even interface elements. For example, “Forever Seven Days Capital” also uses variety shows as dialogue subtitle fonts.
▲ Two more fonts are used for the character name and interface elements in this screenshot
There are other examples, such as the following two games.
Although such use deviates from the original intention of font design, it can only be regarded as an option in the art design of game interface. I don’t plan to make too much evaluation on this. As far as the several localized games mentioned before, we might as well change the angle and see how to choose fonts for the localized design of other languages.
What kind of Japanese is Morimori? Can’t I “copy” directly?
Let ’s take a look at “Gather! How did the English version and the Japanese version of Animal Friendship Society choose dialogue?
As you can see, in both languages, bold / sans-serif, which looks more common, has been selected as the subtitle font. This font is called “ ロ ダ ン わ ん ぱ く “, and Japanese and English are the same fonts that match the design. So, is it better for the Chinese version to use ordinary black type directly?
Yes, of course. For example, let’s try to replace this content with Siyuan bold.
▲ Screenshot replaced with Siyuan bold. (Homemade)
Is this really better? Maybe you think that Chinese fonts are more serious than English and Japanese. For example, we replaced the English version of the subtitles with San Francisco (the system font for Apple phones / computers):
▲ Screenshot replaced with SF Text. (Homemade)
This involves an important issue in the design of English-Chinese font matching: the diversity of text font styles, or “tolerance”.
For English body text, it can be as serious as Helvetica can also be geometric like Futura. Because of the simple structure of the English alphabet, these fonts are not used to affect the readability of large sections of text. However, the body text of Chinese characters can only be used in a small range. Once you have done too much, it can no longer be called a “body font.”
▲ Different styles of sans-serif body
What about Japanese? There are also Chinese characters in Japanese, so it ’s okay to face the Japanese version of “copy job” right? -Really not necessarily. Although Japanese includes Chinese characters that we may know, Chinese characters do not account for more than half of modern Japanese. And those parts we do not know-Hiragana and Katakana, are the decisive factors for the effect of a Japanese text.
The current Japanese font design, especially the body font, is increasingly inclined to use existing Chinese characters to match new kana. After all, there are thousands of Chinese characters and only two hundred pseudonyms, which play a more significant role and have more design space to play. From the perspective of font use, it is also common for designers to choose different fonts for Chinese characters and kana. Illustrator and InDesign software include such “composite font” features directly.
The pseudonym design of this “ロ ダ ン わ ん ぱ く” font used by Domori is quite lively. Suppose that the Chinese part of the Japanese dialogue is kept unchanged, and only the pseudonym is changed to Siyuan Hei, the entire text is a little less interesting.
Screenshot replaced with Siyuan kana. (Homemade) When I did it, I found that the kana in the Japanese subtitles did not turn on the widening option and did not set the spacing between the characters—the spacing between ん and て seemed too large.
I guess, maybe this is the reason why the Chinese version chose to use variety shows: it only seems too serious to use the bold type, so choose one”Design a bit stronger” font.
Localization of “Another Path”
The Breath of the Wild is another case. The English font in this game is the “ Zelda Glyph ” font made by Nintendo. The style of this font is the same as that of the early “Zelda” title word “Zelda”. Its sharp triangle serif is its main feature. Capital letters with decorative elements, used with small capital letters.
▲ The Legend of Zelda series logo (Wikipedia)
The Japanese font uses the Kanji part of Laglan Punch , and the kana part of “ ロ ゴ G ブ ラ ッ ク “. Both of these fonts are super bold headings. From this perspective, there is nothing wrong with using variety shows in Chinese.
▲ Font selection during the development of The Legend of Zelda (jp.ign.com)
By the way, Laglan Punch is the prototype of the visually impactful font in the Trigger animation “The Girl Who Cuts” (roughened in the animation).
▲ Text performance in Killing Girl (kill-la-kill.fandom.com)
As for Forked Traveler, the font used in the Japanese version is New Cinema . This font is derived from designer Sato’s handwritten movie subtitle fonts made in the middle of the last century. Although it looks strong, it is designed to “eliminate the presence of subtitles” and is designed for a large screen environment. The readability itself is very strong-so it is still very clear even on the small screen of the Switch .
This font is also a frequent guest in cartoons. In January of this year, the ED of the new “Fictional Reasoning” used another version (with a notch) of New Cinema.
p>
▲ ED subtitles of “Fiction”
The English version of Forked Way Traveler uses a similar font called Skech (there is no t in the name).
The difficulty with the Chinese version here is that there haven’t been any Chinese fonts in this style. It is said that the traditional Chinese subtitles of “Monster Hunter: World” use the traditional Chinese extended version of this font, which does not seem to be official.
▲ Traditional Chinese subtitles for “Monster Hunter: World” (bilibili)
Anyway, the new Wei style of the official simplified Chinese version of Forked Way Traveler is strange. In particular, this edition of the New Wei style also matches the western part of the line style, where all numbers and money symbols appear extremely distorted. Perhaps the local design team wanted to convey a medieval style that fits the game background, but it was obviously not very successful.
Dilemma of Chinese font selection
The choice of fonts for in-game culture is not easy. The type of Chinese fonts is far less than that of English and Japanese, and there are also cases where the “style range is narrower” mentioned earlier. Except for the case where the original version uses a more conventional serif or sans serif, if you want to match Chinese with a stylized font, it is very unlikely that you can find a suitable font directly. Then, another idea is to find new fonts based on the overall style, like the Japanese / English version of “Break of the Wild” and the Chinese version of “Forked Stranger”.
Or, like Angry Birds or Royal Warfare, a custom Chinese font is launched. Of course, this must first be allowed economically.
p>
▲ Chinese Customized Font for “Royal War” (fontke.com)
In this case, the localization of many games has finally adopted the lowest cost and lowest risk method-regardless of the original version, the Chinese version is directly in bold. Many of the early games on the App Store were like this, and I was more impressed with the Red Alert in 20083 “. In the English version, a custom font with a strong sense of comics is used (it may be considered as an example of “the title is misplaced”), but in the Chinese version, it disappears.
▲ English version of Red Alert 3 (technogog.com) interface font
▲ Traditional Chinese version of “Red Alert 3” interface (pictured is “Expansion Moment”) (www.gamersky.com)
Another type of problem is with pixel wind indie games. Most pixel games cannot find a matching Chinese character pixel font. The main reason is that the structure of Chinese characters is complex and cannot be clearly expressed at a smaller size. In addition, today’s pixel games are only in style (technically, high-definition can be achieved), so some localizations will directly add high-resolution Chinese text on the pixel screen, creating a strong sense of dislocation.
3type The “Dingyu Dot Matrix” project under development in the past three years is to solve the lack of fonts in this area. “丁卯 点阵 体” is a family of Chinese fonts as small as possible, including 7 × 7 and 9 × 9. 9 × 9 is suitable for most pixel games, 7 × 7 is more extreme, you can useFor small captions, or for localized matching in 5-pixel English games.
▲ The official Chinese font of Rhythm Hailaru is not displaying well.
“src =” https://media.ifanrusercontent.com/user_files/wpdata/images/c2/79/c2794025665eb99a953bac56dc314a70018a9491-ce884b0b470e6d542a35cdf94926d0bbcf5a1e34.jpg “>
▲ The matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 9px” and the comparison of the original Japanese version
▲ The font in Tiny Tower Vegas is only 5 pixels high, making it difficult to match Chinese characters.
▲ Matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 7px”
Conclusion
The font designer Daqudu published a book “Arcade Game Typography” last year, which talked about font design in early video games: “… it’s clear that developers lacked knowledge of English and Latin The daily contact of letters …. You will find many strange places, they are best seen as a naive and childish product, not because of creativity. “
▲ The game interface of Pac-Man (1980), pay attention to the limited text, health and level numbers are marked with graphics below. Compromised the design of the letters E, Y, etc., resulting in excessive kerning (Wikipedia, image enlarged)
At the beginning of video games, the early gameplay was based on “algorithms”, such as “Ping Pong”, “Gluttonous Snake” and even “Tetris”. At that time, the text in the game was just to meet the most important functional requirements, such as a scorer or a prompt for “please coins.” Later, the game became more and more “narrative”. The importance of words became more and more important, and fonts became an indispensable element in the art of games.
This article only outlines a few ideas on the topic of “Chinese localization”, and “font selection in games”It can be a fairly ambitious topic. This article is just a guide, hoping that more players and designers can pay attention to this aspect.
reference source
Xue Xuecheng: “Talking about the Design of Printed Chinese Characters” 》
Gu Rongrong: “Chinese Font Square Geometry”
Bo Zhou: “History of Modern Chinese Text Design”
Toshi Omagari: Arcade Game Typography
IGN: “ゼ ル ダ の 伝 説 BtoW” ザ ー ザ ー イ ン タ ー フ ェ イ ス の コ ン セ プ ト セ プ 「な け れ ば な い ほ う が い い UI」 だ っ た https: //jp-ign-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/jp.ign.com/the-legend-of-zelda-hd/17077/news/btowui?amp=1
typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2018_07/DigdLYCU0AA_pbJ.png.d1b01bdc5bb336f76c8e6f50bf1d79b6.png
www.zhihu.com/question/267820679/answer/ 329731431
www.bilibili.com/video/av19057094 /
Thank Liu Yuhui, Li Zhiqian, and Du Xiyao for their help in this article.
▲ Siyuan Song (left) and Chinese Song (right) text layout effects
The “headline” pays more attention to “new style, eye-catching and beautiful, attractive, easy to recognize and understand, both artistic and practical.” What we see on street signs or website banners , With a little creative fonts, mostly belong to this category.
▲ Open a shopping app, the font you see on the homepage is “title”
In German, Text and Display fonts are called Leseschrift and Schauschrift, which literally means “Lese-” and “Schau-” fonts. This is not only the design purpose that the font designer should consider, but also the guide for graphic designers (font users).
But in actual use, the demarcation between the two is not very clear, especially similar to the bold bold type in the figure above. Some text fonts are magnified and used for title display. However, for headline words, it is usually inappropriate to use it to arrange large sections of body content.
In contemporary western font design, sometimes the same family of fonts also distinguish TextAnd Display uses. The two are usually distinguished by a parameter called “visual size”, which has the same meaning as “how many” looking elements “to include.
▲ Two styles of a variable font, as well as a typographic effect.
Use of “Title Font” in the game
After reading this, everyone must already know “Assembly!” What’s wrong with the fonts in the Animal Friendship Society? Although the subtitles in the game are not the “big paragraphs” of the text, they are undoubtedly “words for reading”, but they use a variety show designed for headline advertisements.
p>
▲ Variety place names in Breath of the Wild
The official Chinese version of “Forked Traveler” has been used in the interface. New Wei style . Xinwei style was originally a calligraphic font, which was designed as a printed font in the 1970s. At that time, it was believed that “the style of the New Wei style is novel and the strokes are very regular, which is very suitable for making printed movable characters and typesetting books and newspapers as titles.”
Using small fonts in games (especially on the small screen of the Switch) is very fuzzy. Of course, “it’s not impossible.”
▲ The new Wei style in “Forked Traveler”, the full-width numbers in this font are also difficult to say.
I also looked at mobile games. Recently, some of the more popular games use boldface as the main font (the background settings of these games are also serious, wasteland science fiction and the like), but there is also the phenomenon of using the “title word” as the text and even interface elements. For example, “Forever Seven Days Capital” also uses variety shows as dialogue subtitle fonts.
▲ Two more fonts are used for the character name and interface elements in this screenshot
There are other examples, such as the following two games.
Although such use deviates from the original intention of font design, it can only be regarded as an option in the art design of game interface. I don’t plan to make too much evaluation on this. As far as the several localized games mentioned before, we might as well change the angle and see how to choose fonts for the localized design of other languages.
What kind of Japanese is Morimori? Can’t I “copy” directly?
Let ’s take a look at “Gather! How did the English version and the Japanese version of Animal Friendship Society choose dialogue?
As you can see, in both languages, bold / sans-serif, which looks more common, has been selected as the subtitle font. This font is called “ ロ ダ ン わ ん ぱ く “, and Japanese and English are the same fonts that match the design. So, is it better for the Chinese version to use ordinary black type directly?
Yes, of course. For example, let’s try to replace this content with Siyuan bold.
▲ Screenshot replaced with Siyuan bold. (Homemade)
Is this really better? Maybe you think that Chinese fonts are more serious than English and Japanese. For example, we replaced the English version of the subtitles with San Francisco (the system font for Apple phones / computers):
▲ Screenshot replaced with SF Text. (Homemade)
This involves an important issue in the design of English-Chinese font matching: the diversity of text font styles, or “tolerance”.
For English body text, it can be as serious as Helvetica can also be geometric like Futura. Because of the simple structure of the English alphabet, these fonts are not used to affect the readability of large sections of text. However, the body text of Chinese characters can only be used in a small range. Once you have done too much, it can no longer be called a “body font.”
▲ Different styles of sans-serif body
What about Japanese? There are also Chinese characters in Japanese, so it ’s okay to face the Japanese version of “copy job” right? -Really not necessarily. Although Japanese includes Chinese characters that we may know, Chinese characters do not account for more than half of modern Japanese. And those parts we do not know-Hiragana and Katakana, are the decisive factors for the effect of a Japanese text.
The current Japanese font design, especially the body font, is increasingly inclined to use existing Chinese characters to match new kana. After all, there are thousands of Chinese characters and only two hundred pseudonyms, which play a more significant role and have more design space to play. From the perspective of font use, it is also common for designers to choose different fonts for Chinese characters and kana. Illustrator and InDesign software include such “composite font” features directly.
The pseudonym design of this “ロ ダ ン わ ん ぱ く” font used by Domori is quite lively. Suppose that the Chinese part of the Japanese dialogue is kept unchanged, and only the pseudonym is changed to Siyuan Hei, the entire text is a little less interesting.
Screenshot replaced with Siyuan kana. (Homemade) When I did it, I found that the kana in the Japanese subtitles did not turn on the widening option and did not set the spacing between the characters—the spacing between ん and て seemed too large.
I guess, maybe this is the reason why the Chinese version chose to use variety shows: it only seems too serious to use the bold type, so choose one”Design a bit stronger” font.
Localization of “Another Path”
The Breath of the Wild is another case. The English font in this game is the “ Zelda Glyph ” font made by Nintendo. The style of this font is the same as that of the early “Zelda” title word “Zelda”. Its sharp triangle serif is its main feature. Capital letters with decorative elements, used with small capital letters.
▲ The Legend of Zelda series logo (Wikipedia)
The Japanese font uses the Kanji part of Laglan Punch , and the kana part of “ ロ ゴ G ブ ラ ッ ク “. Both of these fonts are super bold headings. From this perspective, there is nothing wrong with using variety shows in Chinese.
▲ Font selection during the development of The Legend of Zelda (jp.ign.com)
By the way, Laglan Punch is the prototype of the visually impactful font in the Trigger animation “The Girl Who Cuts” (roughened in the animation).
▲ Text performance in Killing Girl (kill-la-kill.fandom.com)
As for Forked Traveler, the font used in the Japanese version is New Cinema . This font is derived from designer Sato’s handwritten movie subtitle fonts made in the middle of the last century. Although it looks strong, it is designed to “eliminate the presence of subtitles” and is designed for a large screen environment. The readability itself is very strong-so it is still very clear even on the small screen of the Switch .
This font is also a frequent guest in cartoons. In January of this year, the ED of the new “Fictional Reasoning” used another version (with a notch) of New Cinema.
p>
▲ ED subtitles of “Fiction”
The English version of Forked Way Traveler uses a similar font called Skech (there is no t in the name).
The difficulty with the Chinese version here is that there haven’t been any Chinese fonts in this style. It is said that the traditional Chinese subtitles of “Monster Hunter: World” use the traditional Chinese extended version of this font, which does not seem to be official.
▲ Traditional Chinese subtitles for “Monster Hunter: World” (bilibili)
Anyway, the new Wei style of the official simplified Chinese version of Forked Way Traveler is strange. In particular, this edition of the New Wei style also matches the western part of the line style, where all numbers and money symbols appear extremely distorted. Perhaps the local design team wanted to convey a medieval style that fits the game background, but it was obviously not very successful.
Dilemma of Chinese font selection
The choice of fonts for in-game culture is not easy. The type of Chinese fonts is far less than that of English and Japanese, and there are also cases where the “style range is narrower” mentioned earlier. Except for the case where the original version uses a more conventional serif or sans serif, if you want to match Chinese with a stylized font, it is very unlikely that you can find a suitable font directly. Then, another idea is to find new fonts based on the overall style, like the Japanese / English version of “Break of the Wild” and the Chinese version of “Forked Stranger”.
Or, like Angry Birds or Royal Warfare, a custom Chinese font is launched. Of course, this must first be allowed economically.
p>
▲ Chinese Customized Font for “Royal War” (fontke.com)
In this case, the localization of many games has finally adopted the lowest cost and lowest risk method-regardless of the original version, the Chinese version is directly in bold. Many of the early games on the App Store were like this, and I was more impressed with the Red Alert in 20083 “. In the English version, a custom font with a strong sense of comics is used (it may be considered as an example of “the title is misplaced”), but in the Chinese version, it disappears.
▲ English version of Red Alert 3 (technogog.com) interface font
▲ Traditional Chinese version of “Red Alert 3” interface (pictured is “Expansion Moment”) (www.gamersky.com)
Another type of problem is with pixel wind indie games. Most pixel games cannot find a matching Chinese character pixel font. The main reason is that the structure of Chinese characters is complex and cannot be clearly expressed at a smaller size. In addition, today’s pixel games are only in style (technically, high-definition can be achieved), so some localizations will directly add high-resolution Chinese text on the pixel screen, creating a strong sense of dislocation.
3type The “Dingyu Dot Matrix” project under development in the past three years is to solve the lack of fonts in this area. “丁卯 点阵 体” is a family of Chinese fonts as small as possible, including 7 × 7 and 9 × 9. 9 × 9 is suitable for most pixel games, 7 × 7 is more extreme, you can useFor small captions, or for localized matching in 5-pixel English games.
▲ The official Chinese font of Rhythm Hailaru is not displaying well.
“src =” https://media.ifanrusercontent.com/user_files/wpdata/images/c2/79/c2794025665eb99a953bac56dc314a70018a9491-ce884b0b470e6d542a35cdf94926d0bbcf5a1e34.jpg “>
▲ The matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 9px” and the comparison of the original Japanese version
▲ The font in Tiny Tower Vegas is only 5 pixels high, making it difficult to match Chinese characters.
▲ Matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 7px”
Conclusion
The font designer Daqudu published a book “Arcade Game Typography” last year, which talked about font design in early video games: “… it’s clear that developers lacked knowledge of English and Latin The daily contact of letters …. You will find many strange places, they are best seen as a naive and childish product, not because of creativity. “
▲ The game interface of Pac-Man (1980), pay attention to the limited text, health and level numbers are marked with graphics below. Compromised the design of the letters E, Y, etc., resulting in excessive kerning (Wikipedia, image enlarged)
At the beginning of video games, the early gameplay was based on “algorithms”, such as “Ping Pong”, “Gluttonous Snake” and even “Tetris”. At that time, the text in the game was just to meet the most important functional requirements, such as a scorer or a prompt for “please coins.” Later, the game became more and more “narrative”. The importance of words became more and more important, and fonts became an indispensable element in the art of games.
This article only outlines a few ideas on the topic of “Chinese localization”, and “font selection in games”It can be a fairly ambitious topic. This article is just a guide, hoping that more players and designers can pay attention to this aspect.
reference source
Xue Xuecheng: “Talking about the Design of Printed Chinese Characters” 》
Gu Rongrong: “Chinese Font Square Geometry”
Bo Zhou: “History of Modern Chinese Text Design”
Toshi Omagari: Arcade Game Typography
IGN: “ゼ ル ダ の 伝 説 BtoW” ザ ー ザ ー イ ン タ ー フ ェ イ ス の コ ン セ プ ト セ プ 「な け れ ば な い ほ う が い い UI」 だ っ た https: //jp-ign-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/jp.ign.com/the-legend-of-zelda-hd/17077/news/btowui?amp=1
typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2018_07/DigdLYCU0AA_pbJ.png.d1b01bdc5bb336f76c8e6f50bf1d79b6.png
www.zhihu.com/question/267820679/answer/ 329731431
www.bilibili.com/video/av19057094 /
Thank Liu Yuhui, Li Zhiqian, and Du Xiyao for their help in this article.
▲ Screenshot replaced with Siyuan bold. (Homemade)
Is this really better? Maybe you think that Chinese fonts are more serious than English and Japanese. For example, we replaced the English version of the subtitles with San Francisco (the system font for Apple phones / computers):
▲ Screenshot replaced with SF Text. (Homemade)
This involves an important issue in the design of English-Chinese font matching: the diversity of text font styles, or “tolerance”.
For English body text, it can be as serious as Helvetica can also be geometric like Futura. Because of the simple structure of the English alphabet, these fonts are not used to affect the readability of large sections of text. However, the body text of Chinese characters can only be used in a small range. Once you have done too much, it can no longer be called a “body font.”
▲ Different styles of sans-serif body
What about Japanese? There are also Chinese characters in Japanese, so it ’s okay to face the Japanese version of “copy job” right? -Really not necessarily. Although Japanese includes Chinese characters that we may know, Chinese characters do not account for more than half of modern Japanese. And those parts we do not know-Hiragana and Katakana, are the decisive factors for the effect of a Japanese text.
The current Japanese font design, especially the body font, is increasingly inclined to use existing Chinese characters to match new kana. After all, there are thousands of Chinese characters and only two hundred pseudonyms, which play a more significant role and have more design space to play. From the perspective of font use, it is also common for designers to choose different fonts for Chinese characters and kana. Illustrator and InDesign software include such “composite font” features directly.
The pseudonym design of this “ロ ダ ン わ ん ぱ く” font used by Domori is quite lively. Suppose that the Chinese part of the Japanese dialogue is kept unchanged, and only the pseudonym is changed to Siyuan Hei, the entire text is a little less interesting.
Screenshot replaced with Siyuan kana. (Homemade) When I did it, I found that the kana in the Japanese subtitles did not turn on the widening option and did not set the spacing between the characters—the spacing between ん and て seemed too large.
I guess, maybe this is the reason why the Chinese version chose to use variety shows: it only seems too serious to use the bold type, so choose one”Design a bit stronger” font.
Localization of “Another Path”
The Breath of the Wild is another case. The English font in this game is the “ Zelda Glyph ” font made by Nintendo. The style of this font is the same as that of the early “Zelda” title word “Zelda”. Its sharp triangle serif is its main feature. Capital letters with decorative elements, used with small capital letters.
▲ The Legend of Zelda series logo (Wikipedia)
The Japanese font uses the Kanji part of Laglan Punch , and the kana part of “ ロ ゴ G ブ ラ ッ ク “. Both of these fonts are super bold headings. From this perspective, there is nothing wrong with using variety shows in Chinese.
▲ Font selection during the development of The Legend of Zelda (jp.ign.com)
By the way, Laglan Punch is the prototype of the visually impactful font in the Trigger animation “The Girl Who Cuts” (roughened in the animation).
▲ Text performance in Killing Girl (kill-la-kill.fandom.com)
As for Forked Traveler, the font used in the Japanese version is New Cinema . This font is derived from designer Sato’s handwritten movie subtitle fonts made in the middle of the last century. Although it looks strong, it is designed to “eliminate the presence of subtitles” and is designed for a large screen environment. The readability itself is very strong-so it is still very clear even on the small screen of the Switch .
This font is also a frequent guest in cartoons. In January of this year, the ED of the new “Fictional Reasoning” used another version (with a notch) of New Cinema.
p>
▲ ED subtitles of “Fiction”
The English version of Forked Way Traveler uses a similar font called Skech (there is no t in the name).
The difficulty with the Chinese version here is that there haven’t been any Chinese fonts in this style. It is said that the traditional Chinese subtitles of “Monster Hunter: World” use the traditional Chinese extended version of this font, which does not seem to be official.
▲ Traditional Chinese subtitles for “Monster Hunter: World” (bilibili)
Anyway, the new Wei style of the official simplified Chinese version of Forked Way Traveler is strange. In particular, this edition of the New Wei style also matches the western part of the line style, where all numbers and money symbols appear extremely distorted. Perhaps the local design team wanted to convey a medieval style that fits the game background, but it was obviously not very successful.
Dilemma of Chinese font selection
The choice of fonts for in-game culture is not easy. The type of Chinese fonts is far less than that of English and Japanese, and there are also cases where the “style range is narrower” mentioned earlier. Except for the case where the original version uses a more conventional serif or sans serif, if you want to match Chinese with a stylized font, it is very unlikely that you can find a suitable font directly. Then, another idea is to find new fonts based on the overall style, like the Japanese / English version of “Break of the Wild” and the Chinese version of “Forked Stranger”.
Or, like Angry Birds or Royal Warfare, a custom Chinese font is launched. Of course, this must first be allowed economically.
p>
▲ Chinese Customized Font for “Royal War” (fontke.com)
In this case, the localization of many games has finally adopted the lowest cost and lowest risk method-regardless of the original version, the Chinese version is directly in bold. Many of the early games on the App Store were like this, and I was more impressed with the Red Alert in 20083 “. In the English version, a custom font with a strong sense of comics is used (it may be considered as an example of “the title is misplaced”), but in the Chinese version, it disappears.
▲ English version of Red Alert 3 (technogog.com) interface font
▲ Traditional Chinese version of “Red Alert 3” interface (pictured is “Expansion Moment”) (www.gamersky.com)
Another type of problem is with pixel wind indie games. Most pixel games cannot find a matching Chinese character pixel font. The main reason is that the structure of Chinese characters is complex and cannot be clearly expressed at a smaller size. In addition, today’s pixel games are only in style (technically, high-definition can be achieved), so some localizations will directly add high-resolution Chinese text on the pixel screen, creating a strong sense of dislocation.
3type The “Dingyu Dot Matrix” project under development in the past three years is to solve the lack of fonts in this area. “丁卯 点阵 体” is a family of Chinese fonts as small as possible, including 7 × 7 and 9 × 9. 9 × 9 is suitable for most pixel games, 7 × 7 is more extreme, you can useFor small captions, or for localized matching in 5-pixel English games.
▲ The official Chinese font of Rhythm Hailaru is not displaying well.
“src =” https://media.ifanrusercontent.com/user_files/wpdata/images/c2/79/c2794025665eb99a953bac56dc314a70018a9491-ce884b0b470e6d542a35cdf94926d0bbcf5a1e34.jpg “>
▲ The matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 9px” and the comparison of the original Japanese version
▲ The font in Tiny Tower Vegas is only 5 pixels high, making it difficult to match Chinese characters.
▲ Matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 7px”
Conclusion
The font designer Daqudu published a book “Arcade Game Typography” last year, which talked about font design in early video games: “… it’s clear that developers lacked knowledge of English and Latin The daily contact of letters …. You will find many strange places, they are best seen as a naive and childish product, not because of creativity. “
▲ The game interface of Pac-Man (1980), pay attention to the limited text, health and level numbers are marked with graphics below. Compromised the design of the letters E, Y, etc., resulting in excessive kerning (Wikipedia, image enlarged)
At the beginning of video games, the early gameplay was based on “algorithms”, such as “Ping Pong”, “Gluttonous Snake” and even “Tetris”. At that time, the text in the game was just to meet the most important functional requirements, such as a scorer or a prompt for “please coins.” Later, the game became more and more “narrative”. The importance of words became more and more important, and fonts became an indispensable element in the art of games.
This article only outlines a few ideas on the topic of “Chinese localization”, and “font selection in games”It can be a fairly ambitious topic. This article is just a guide, hoping that more players and designers can pay attention to this aspect.
reference source
Xue Xuecheng: “Talking about the Design of Printed Chinese Characters” 》
Gu Rongrong: “Chinese Font Square Geometry”
Bo Zhou: “History of Modern Chinese Text Design”
Toshi Omagari: Arcade Game Typography
IGN: “ゼ ル ダ の 伝 説 BtoW” ザ ー ザ ー イ ン タ ー フ ェ イ ス の コ ン セ プ ト セ プ 「な け れ ば な い ほ う が い い UI」 だ っ た https: //jp-ign-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/jp.ign.com/the-legend-of-zelda-hd/17077/news/btowui?amp=1
typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2018_07/DigdLYCU0AA_pbJ.png.d1b01bdc5bb336f76c8e6f50bf1d79b6.png
www.zhihu.com/question/267820679/answer/ 329731431
www.bilibili.com/video/av19057094 /
Thank Liu Yuhui, Li Zhiqian, and Du Xiyao for their help in this article.
▲ The Legend of Zelda series logo (Wikipedia)
The Japanese font uses the Kanji part of Laglan Punch , and the kana part of “ ロ ゴ G ブ ラ ッ ク “. Both of these fonts are super bold headings. From this perspective, there is nothing wrong with using variety shows in Chinese.
▲ Font selection during the development of The Legend of Zelda (jp.ign.com)
By the way, Laglan Punch is the prototype of the visually impactful font in the Trigger animation “The Girl Who Cuts” (roughened in the animation).
▲ Text performance in Killing Girl (kill-la-kill.fandom.com)
As for Forked Traveler, the font used in the Japanese version is New Cinema . This font is derived from designer Sato’s handwritten movie subtitle fonts made in the middle of the last century. Although it looks strong, it is designed to “eliminate the presence of subtitles” and is designed for a large screen environment. The readability itself is very strong-so it is still very clear even on the small screen of the Switch .
This font is also a frequent guest in cartoons. In January of this year, the ED of the new “Fictional Reasoning” used another version (with a notch) of New Cinema.
p>
▲ ED subtitles of “Fiction”
The English version of Forked Way Traveler uses a similar font called Skech (there is no t in the name).
The difficulty with the Chinese version here is that there haven’t been any Chinese fonts in this style. It is said that the traditional Chinese subtitles of “Monster Hunter: World” use the traditional Chinese extended version of this font, which does not seem to be official.
▲ Traditional Chinese subtitles for “Monster Hunter: World” (bilibili)
Anyway, the new Wei style of the official simplified Chinese version of Forked Way Traveler is strange. In particular, this edition of the New Wei style also matches the western part of the line style, where all numbers and money symbols appear extremely distorted. Perhaps the local design team wanted to convey a medieval style that fits the game background, but it was obviously not very successful.
Dilemma of Chinese font selection
The choice of fonts for in-game culture is not easy. The type of Chinese fonts is far less than that of English and Japanese, and there are also cases where the “style range is narrower” mentioned earlier. Except for the case where the original version uses a more conventional serif or sans serif, if you want to match Chinese with a stylized font, it is very unlikely that you can find a suitable font directly. Then, another idea is to find new fonts based on the overall style, like the Japanese / English version of “Break of the Wild” and the Chinese version of “Forked Stranger”.
Or, like Angry Birds or Royal Warfare, a custom Chinese font is launched. Of course, this must first be allowed economically.
p>
▲ Chinese Customized Font for “Royal War” (fontke.com)
In this case, the localization of many games has finally adopted the lowest cost and lowest risk method-regardless of the original version, the Chinese version is directly in bold. Many of the early games on the App Store were like this, and I was more impressed with the Red Alert in 20083 “. In the English version, a custom font with a strong sense of comics is used (it may be considered as an example of “the title is misplaced”), but in the Chinese version, it disappears.
▲ English version of Red Alert 3 (technogog.com) interface font
▲ Traditional Chinese version of “Red Alert 3” interface (pictured is “Expansion Moment”) (www.gamersky.com)
Another type of problem is with pixel wind indie games. Most pixel games cannot find a matching Chinese character pixel font. The main reason is that the structure of Chinese characters is complex and cannot be clearly expressed at a smaller size. In addition, today’s pixel games are only in style (technically, high-definition can be achieved), so some localizations will directly add high-resolution Chinese text on the pixel screen, creating a strong sense of dislocation.
3type The “Dingyu Dot Matrix” project under development in the past three years is to solve the lack of fonts in this area. “丁卯 点阵 体” is a family of Chinese fonts as small as possible, including 7 × 7 and 9 × 9. 9 × 9 is suitable for most pixel games, 7 × 7 is more extreme, you can useFor small captions, or for localized matching in 5-pixel English games.
▲ The official Chinese font of Rhythm Hailaru is not displaying well.
“src =” https://media.ifanrusercontent.com/user_files/wpdata/images/c2/79/c2794025665eb99a953bac56dc314a70018a9491-ce884b0b470e6d542a35cdf94926d0bbcf5a1e34.jpg “>
▲ The matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 9px” and the comparison of the original Japanese version
▲ The font in Tiny Tower Vegas is only 5 pixels high, making it difficult to match Chinese characters.
▲ Matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 7px”
Conclusion
The font designer Daqudu published a book “Arcade Game Typography” last year, which talked about font design in early video games: “… it’s clear that developers lacked knowledge of English and Latin The daily contact of letters …. You will find many strange places, they are best seen as a naive and childish product, not because of creativity. “
▲ The game interface of Pac-Man (1980), pay attention to the limited text, health and level numbers are marked with graphics below. Compromised the design of the letters E, Y, etc., resulting in excessive kerning (Wikipedia, image enlarged)
At the beginning of video games, the early gameplay was based on “algorithms”, such as “Ping Pong”, “Gluttonous Snake” and even “Tetris”. At that time, the text in the game was just to meet the most important functional requirements, such as a scorer or a prompt for “please coins.” Later, the game became more and more “narrative”. The importance of words became more and more important, and fonts became an indispensable element in the art of games.
This article only outlines a few ideas on the topic of “Chinese localization”, and “font selection in games”It can be a fairly ambitious topic. This article is just a guide, hoping that more players and designers can pay attention to this aspect.
reference source
Xue Xuecheng: “Talking about the Design of Printed Chinese Characters” 》
Gu Rongrong: “Chinese Font Square Geometry”
Bo Zhou: “History of Modern Chinese Text Design”
Toshi Omagari: Arcade Game Typography
IGN: “ゼ ル ダ の 伝 説 BtoW” ザ ー ザ ー イ ン タ ー フ ェ イ ス の コ ン セ プ ト セ プ 「な け れ ば な い ほ う が い い UI」 だ っ た https: //jp-ign-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/jp.ign.com/the-legend-of-zelda-hd/17077/news/btowui?amp=1
typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2018_07/DigdLYCU0AA_pbJ.png.d1b01bdc5bb336f76c8e6f50bf1d79b6.png
www.zhihu.com/question/267820679/answer/ 329731431
www.bilibili.com/video/av19057094 /
Thank Liu Yuhui, Li Zhiqian, and Du Xiyao for their help in this article.
p> ▲ Chinese Customized Font for “Royal War” (fontke.com)
In this case, the localization of many games has finally adopted the lowest cost and lowest risk method-regardless of the original version, the Chinese version is directly in bold. Many of the early games on the App Store were like this, and I was more impressed with the Red Alert in 20083 “. In the English version, a custom font with a strong sense of comics is used (it may be considered as an example of “the title is misplaced”), but in the Chinese version, it disappears.
▲ English version of Red Alert 3 (technogog.com) interface font
▲ Traditional Chinese version of “Red Alert 3” interface (pictured is “Expansion Moment”) (www.gamersky.com)
Another type of problem is with pixel wind indie games. Most pixel games cannot find a matching Chinese character pixel font. The main reason is that the structure of Chinese characters is complex and cannot be clearly expressed at a smaller size. In addition, today’s pixel games are only in style (technically, high-definition can be achieved), so some localizations will directly add high-resolution Chinese text on the pixel screen, creating a strong sense of dislocation.
3type The “Dingyu Dot Matrix” project under development in the past three years is to solve the lack of fonts in this area. “丁卯 点阵 体” is a family of Chinese fonts as small as possible, including 7 × 7 and 9 × 9. 9 × 9 is suitable for most pixel games, 7 × 7 is more extreme, you can useFor small captions, or for localized matching in 5-pixel English games.
▲ The official Chinese font of Rhythm Hailaru is not displaying well.
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▲ The matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 9px” and the comparison of the original Japanese version
▲ The font in Tiny Tower Vegas is only 5 pixels high, making it difficult to match Chinese characters.
▲ Matching test of “Dingji Dot Matrix 7px”
Conclusion
The font designer Daqudu published a book “Arcade Game Typography” last year, which talked about font design in early video games: “… it’s clear that developers lacked knowledge of English and Latin The daily contact of letters …. You will find many strange places, they are best seen as a naive and childish product, not because of creativity. “
▲ The game interface of Pac-Man (1980), pay attention to the limited text, health and level numbers are marked with graphics below. Compromised the design of the letters E, Y, etc., resulting in excessive kerning (Wikipedia, image enlarged)
At the beginning of video games, the early gameplay was based on “algorithms”, such as “Ping Pong”, “Gluttonous Snake” and even “Tetris”. At that time, the text in the game was just to meet the most important functional requirements, such as a scorer or a prompt for “please coins.” Later, the game became more and more “narrative”. The importance of words became more and more important, and fonts became an indispensable element in the art of games.
This article only outlines a few ideas on the topic of “Chinese localization”, and “font selection in games”It can be a fairly ambitious topic. This article is just a guide, hoping that more players and designers can pay attention to this aspect.
reference source
Xue Xuecheng: “Talking about the Design of Printed Chinese Characters” 》
Gu Rongrong: “Chinese Font Square Geometry”
Bo Zhou: “History of Modern Chinese Text Design”
Toshi Omagari: Arcade Game Typography
IGN: “ゼ ル ダ の 伝 説 BtoW” ザ ー ザ ー イ ン タ ー フ ェ イ ス の コ ン セ プ ト セ プ 「な け れ ば な い ほ う が い い UI」 だ っ た https: //jp-ign-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/jp.ign.com/the-legend-of-zelda-hd/17077/news/btowui?amp=1
typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2018_07/DigdLYCU0AA_pbJ.png.d1b01bdc5bb336f76c8e6f50bf1d79b6.png
www.zhihu.com/question/267820679/answer/ 329731431
www.bilibili.com/video/av19057094 /
Thank Liu Yuhui, Li Zhiqian, and Du Xiyao for their help in this article.
▲ The game interface of Pac-Man (1980), pay attention to the limited text, health and level numbers are marked with graphics below. Compromised the design of the letters E, Y, etc., resulting in excessive kerning (Wikipedia, image enlarged)
At the beginning of video games, the early gameplay was based on “algorithms”, such as “Ping Pong”, “Gluttonous Snake” and even “Tetris”. At that time, the text in the game was just to meet the most important functional requirements, such as a scorer or a prompt for “please coins.” Later, the game became more and more “narrative”. The importance of words became more and more important, and fonts became an indispensable element in the art of games.
This article only outlines a few ideas on the topic of “Chinese localization”, and “font selection in games”It can be a fairly ambitious topic. This article is just a guide, hoping that more players and designers can pay attention to this aspect.
reference source
Xue Xuecheng: “Talking about the Design of Printed Chinese Characters” 》
Gu Rongrong: “Chinese Font Square Geometry”
Bo Zhou: “History of Modern Chinese Text Design”
Toshi Omagari: Arcade Game Typography
IGN: “ゼ ル ダ の 伝 説 BtoW” ザ ー ザ ー イ ン タ ー フ ェ イ ス の コ ン セ プ ト セ プ 「な け れ ば な い ほ う が い い UI」 だ っ た https: //jp-ign-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/jp.ign.com/the-legend-of-zelda-hd/17077/news/btowui?amp=1
typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2018_07/DigdLYCU0AA_pbJ.png.d1b01bdc5bb336f76c8e6f50bf1d79b6.png
www.zhihu.com/question/267820679/answer/ 329731431
www.bilibili.com/video/av19057094 /
Thank Liu Yuhui, Li Zhiqian, and Du Xiyao for their help in this article.