Text isn't just about words. The fonts, colours, and places you use text have a huge influence your game's design.

1. 2013
Game Design 2
Lecture 3: Text
http://gcugd2.com
david.farrell@gcu.ac.uk

2. Reading
• Duarte 140 - 155
• Fox 87-98

3. Two Questions
• How can you use text visually to
accomplish design goals?
• How can text help you visualise data?

4. Anthropomorphised Fonts
• Fonts have personality.
• Serious
• Playful
• Friendly
•Tense
• Annoying
• Distressed

7. Functional Fonts
•fixed
width fonts {
useful for programming;
because characters line up;
}
•Other
fonts are suitable
for OCR
•(0
vs O)

8. Font components
play

9. Cap Height
play

10. Cap Height
X Height
play

11. Cap Height
X Height
Baseline
play

12. Cap Height
X Height
Baseline
play
Ascender

13. Cap Height
X Height
Baseline
play
Ascender
Descender

14. Serifs
Cap Height
X Height
Baseline
play
Ascender
Descender

15. Serifs
Cap Height
X Height
Baseline
play
Ascender
Descender
Counter

16. Serifs
Cap Height
X Height
Baseline
play
Ascender
Descender
Counter
Kerning

17. Kerning
• Fixed
width fonts look strange
because they force equidistant spacing
between letters.
• Kerning is the process of adjusting space
between letters to soothe the eye.

18. Serif Fonts
•The serifs connect letters
• useful at small point size
• or in large paragraphs
• problematic for dyslexics

19. Sans Serif Fonts
•Sans means ‘without’
• generally accepted as easier to read
• work better on computer screens

20. Ligatures
•firefly
• note how the ‘f’ and ‘i’ interact without
ligatures
•firefly
• Apple apply ligatures to ‘fi’ but not to ‘fl’

21. Mixing Fonts
• Paired fonts can be effective.
• one for header
• one for main text
• Have a really GOOD reason before going
to three or more fonts

22. Colour & Contrast
• Essential in menus & HUD
• If game is dark, use light text
• If game is light, use dark text
• If cannot guarantee background, add a
border to text
• can be x pixel border or container space

26. Animating Text
• Only animate if it adds meaning
• Nintendo style of conversation is to
animate blocks of text
• Colour change for rollovers == OK
• Colour change to make GUI shiny == bad

28. Using Text
• Where possible, show don’t tell
• but where necessary tell
• Tufte: “to clarify, add detail”
• Use little text
• Even in adventure games, people don’t read
• WOW - http://bit.ly/wowtextlimit
• Avoid UPPPERCASE in large quantities

29. Using Text
• Sparing use of colour or emphasis can
pass on important information
• If you allow resizing of text, test extremes
to see how your design holds up (especially
true of web browser based games)
• Consider fully justifying blocks of text

30. Text as visualisation
• Word Clouds

37. Internationalisation
• Not all fonts are compatible
• UTF-8 fonts should work
• Much care needed if copy / pasting
• If using dynamically loaded text, sometimes
text effects cannot be applied.

38. Questions?