Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Asaresult,eachteamimplementstheirownsubtitleformat.Somesubtitleformatsmayuse
XML, which is a good solution, especially if the rest of the game data already uses XML.
Other games may choose to provide an .ini style file that is purely structured text, ulti-
mately the format chosen for the subtitles is not as important as following some guidelines
when implementing a subtitle system. Television has developed general standards that me-
dia companies must follow, it is prudent for game companies to begin doing the same.
(Griffiths, 2009)
The key things that a subtitle system must provide are:
Clean, readable font, must not get lost with other UI elements.
The font selected for subtitles should be crisp and readable, avoid choosing a font that will
get lost or can be easily confused with other elements in the UI.
Text styling to allow for emphasis, bold, italics.
Allow writers to convey emphasis or emotion, provide means for them to stylize the text
within subtitles.
Ability to include timing information within text.
Allow writers some control over the duration subtitles need to remain on-screen, it helps
synchronize them better with the audio track.
Support for different aspect ratios (4:3, 16:9) will ensure proper subtitles across
devices.
Ensure that subtitles are drawn within the title safe areas of the screen with a reasonably
sized font that remains readable even when scaled down.
Give subtitles their own background.
Game environments may vary in brightness, for example a white subtitle in front of snowy
landscape may be difficult to see. Providing an alpha blended background behind the sub-
title text improves visibility.
Use Unicode encoded files to store subtitles.
Unicode is a character encoding standard designed to provide a unique number for every
character regardless of platform, application or language. It supports three forms of encod-
ing, UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 each form has different advantages, the number in the
encoding refers to the number of bits used to represent each character. UTF-8 has the ad-
vantage of sharing the same byte values as ASCII, allowing for some degree of compatib-