Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
5.10S
UBTITLES
Subtitles can be fairly straightforward to implement and are rarely given much thought or
attention, however, aside from being useful for localization, allowing the game to be trans-
latedandsoldinmultiple territories, theyalsoprovideaccessibility toplayersthatmayhave
disabilities, such as hearing impairment.
In addition to localization and accessibility, subtitles are a useful development tool for cer-
tain games. Many games are written and developed well before audio is recorded by voice
actors, after the final audio has been recorded, there may be some additional time before the
audioisavailableasagameasset;thegametext,however,maybeavailableearlyinthepro-
duction cycle and we may wish to display it, even if the final voice audio is not available.
When a subtitle is displayed concurrently with its audio, it is displayed for the duration of
the audio, when the audio finishes playing, the subtitle is removed. If the audio is not play-
ing, but we still wish to see the subtitle because it allows us to playtest the game, we will
need to estimate some amount of time for the subtitle to remain visible. We can do this by
assigning some small amount of time, in seconds, to each character that makes up the sub-
title, by making the time dependent on the length of text, we guarantee that short texts will
remain visible a small amount of time, while longer texts will remain visible long enough to
allow the text to be read.
t = length(subtitle) * 1.15
In practice this provides a reasonable amount of time to keep the subtitle visible.
Subtitle text is often not enough, sometimes, subtitles should also convey the intention of
thewriters.Apoorlytimedsubtitlecouldmeanthatalltheeffortbythewritertoconcealthe
some element of suspense would be lost. The solution is in encoding time information with-
inthesubtitleitself;parsingthesubtitlebeforedisplayingitwillallowustotakeanycustom
timings and split the subtitle so that we display it piecewise over the specified amount of
time.
There is no unified standard subtitle format, this could be due to the fact that unlike movies
and television, game subtitles cannot be stored as a single, continuous file of text that fol-
lows some set timing, except for pre-rendered cinematics. Games are typically dynamic and
unpredictable, an NPC may speak a random line of text as the player walks by and the only
way to display the subtitle is if it is linked in some way to the audio file that is played.
