Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
and menus on the screen confuses players and makes your game less accessible to
casual players (see “Managing Complexity,” earlier in the chapter). Second, unless
you use the desktop model, try to avoid making your buttons and menus look too
much like an ordinary personal computer interface. The more your game looks like
any other Windows or Macintosh application, the more it harms the player's immer-
sion in the game. Make your screen-based controls fit your overall visual theme.
Text
Most games contain a fair amount of text, even action games in which the player
doesn't normally expect to do much reading. Text appears as a feedback element in
its own right, or as a label for menu items, screen buttons, and to indicate the
meaning of other kinds of feedback elements (a needle gauge might be labeled
Voltage
, for example). You may also use text for narration, dialog (including subti-
tles), a journal kept by the avatar, detailed information about items such as
weapons and vehicles, shell menus, and as part of the game world itself, on posters
and billboards.
LOCALIZATION
Localization
refers to the process of preparing a game for sale in a country other
than the one for which you originally designed the game. Localizing a game often
requires a great many changes to the software and content of the game, including
translating all the text in the game into the target market's preferred language. In
order to make the game easily localizable, you should store all the game's text in
text files and never embed text in a picture. Editing a text file is trivial; editing a
picture is not.
DESIGN RULE
Keep Text Separate from Other Content
Never
have the programmers build text into the program code.
Never
build text that the
player is expected to read into an image such as a texture or a shell screen background.
Store all text in one or more text files.
The only exception to this rule applies to text used purely as decoration when you don't
expect the player to read it or understand what it says. A billboard seen in a game set in
New York should be in English and remain in English even after localization
if
the bill-
board text doesn't constitute a crucial clue.
Note that a word and its translation may differ in length in different languages, so
that a very short menu item in English can turn into a very long menu item in, say,
German. When you design your user interface, don't crowd the text elements too
close together; the translations may require the extra space.
