All right, so it’s Windows style visual novel, then.
I like this because it has that sort of flowery feel that you get from some Japanese foundries (DynaWorks, etc) without being too distracting.
Good for emulating the thin serif typefaces you’d occasionally see in Chinese games.
Menu font or something
Font for letters from people who would have fancy handwriting
If you want something MS Gothic-y that might give off FFVIII vibes.
If you want the above but rounded a bit.
ETA:
For scifi or tech stuff.
Unusual but still feels very serious, probably good for like 20 minutes in the future settings.
I use this a lot for web stuff, but I think it’d look good as a dialogue font in smaller sizes.
Nice and big serifs.
Playful serifs.
Damn, that’s a lot to consider because those are really cool and some are even giving me new ideas about how I want the game to look and feel… Thanks a lot for going through all that work!
I think I’ll make a font or more general UI thread in the future to get more advice. One mistake I don’t want to repeat is not getting enough help from other people, which is a common solo indie dev thing
I really like the two FFVII style ones but maybe Trocchi takes the cake for me. It could just be the Italian sounding name that’s giving me ideas but somehow that looks really sexy
Over 20 people, you’ve almost certainly got a UI artist/designer who is probably specialized in graphic design. Whether they have taste is another matter.
Anything with a budget higher than, say, $2.5m, so, 7+ people, probably has a contract UI designer to spend a few months concepting and shaping up the UI am artist or designer or engineer had been building up to that point. It’s a similar time mismatch at this scale as sound production.
My ignorant assumption on the Square ports is that the Latin typesetting was done by the original cheap port team, by people who weren’t super-experienced with Latin alphabet fonts; unlike a modern Final Fantasy production, they didn’t have onsite localizers or UI designers able to guide them cross-language. Certainly I wouldn’t feel comfortable picking out fonts for Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and the like.
it has a formualic approach, Image/some examples on the left page, exemplary text on the right, third, smaller sidebar with info about the font used, specific settings etc.
Significant part of the book is presenting you with alternatives to Times New Roman’s Arial, and introduces the terminology you can use (and will most probably forget if you’re an armchair sportsman like me) to start exploring the finer details elsewhere.
If kerning, letterspacing or tracking are things you never heard or thought about, then yes, this can serve as a starting point.
If you have read about type before/worked with it, i don’t think there’s enough to learn to necessitate having it. As a quick/handy guide for some alternative fonts and what to consider for a specific textblock you’re setting is nice to have though.
The limitation of games being only allowed to be at most 2 GB in size to work is interesting. Are people going to be creating specific rips of DVD-size games to be able to be played on this now? Will they need to split them up into multiple discs with specific instructions included of when you’re supposed to switch to the next one?
