Anyone have good Simplified Chinese fonts?

dislekcia

I'm looking at doing some localisation in simplified chinese right now, the content and translation is all already done, I'm just having a hard time finding good fonts to use.

Any tips on where to look? Our translators are pointing at stuff like Microsoft Yahei and Arial seems to have some pretty good support somehow, but I'd like a couple more options than that ;)

Tuism

As the resident Asian...
...
... I have no idea XD

Would it help if I post a screenie with all the chinese fonts I have?

dislekcia

Tuism said:

Would it help if I post a screenie with all the chinese fonts I have?

Yes, actually :) That would help me see what's over the top or what doesn't work for the game, etc.

At the moment it looks like I might need to license a couple of fonts and that's expensive :(

Zaphire

dislekcia said:

[quote="Tuism;41603"]
At the moment it looks like I might need to license a couple of fonts and that's expensive :(

How much is expensive? (Just interested as you guys have made a lot of money from DD?)

skinklizzard

so turns out I have a bunch of Chinese fonts, no idea why (possibly something to do with language packs)
there is one here called fangsong which reminds me of chinese type scrolls.
otherwise one called DengXian is similar to the arial and yahei.
I don't remember any other source than the windows Chinese language pack so I assume support should be similar to
yahei and arial.

Tuism

Sorry for the ridiculously tiny fonts, but I have no way of doing this easily... So I'm grabbing from the illustrator font type dropdowns...





This last one is of Japanese fonts:

francoisvn

You could try Google Noto, which is under the OFL: https://www.google.com/get/noto/

This page might help identify what style you're looking for: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/the-complete-beginners-guide-to-chinese-fonts--cms-23444

I foresee having a similar issue done the line, but fortunately the more readily-available sans serif style should work for me.

Dipso

Searching for a free/cheap, good Chinese font consumed many of my waking hours :)

As @francoisvn pointed out, Google Noto is a good option.
We used Noto Sans CJK SC in a game.

(Might be a good idea to start a separate thread for font resources, which contain free/cheap fonts that can be used in games.)

TheFuntastic

If anyone is interest why chinese fonts are so thin on the ground, this is a fascinating behind the scenes about what goes into making a new typeface:
http://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/

dislekcia

Huge thanks for all the links and font suggestions everyone! I'm still working on this, at the moment I'm trying to get our text-wrapping to work with the localised chinese text... Oh, and figuring out a way to have the game automatically start up in the correct language if you buy it off Chinese Steam.

I was hoping to have a more general system for this, but it's looking less and less like it's going to be that clean :(

mattbenic

@TheFuntastic that was a really interesting read, thank you :)

Dipso

@dislekcia
I suggest you show a language select screen when game runs the first time.
A scroll list or dropdown list is fine.

dislekcia

Dipso said:

@dislekcia
I suggest you show a language select screen when game runs the first time.
A scroll list or dropdown list is fine.

That could be okay, but the game's only going to be offered in Chinese via very specific portals and through Steam - there's supposedly a way I can query Steam's native language settings. Step 1 is still getting the game playing right when fully localised though.

Dipso

@dislekcia
Ok, cool :)
But what happens when an Englishman (or Jamaican) in China downloads the game?


On a side note:
If you (or anyone else) using Unity, we used this localisation plugin for a game:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14884

It allows setting up the languages in a Google spreadsheet, which can then be imported into Unity.

We added code to our game, to allow (optional) scaling of each text element, based on the language.
(e.g. if "Play" button text is too long in Chinese then it can be scaled down.)


All the best with the localisation :)

dislekcia

Dipso said:

@dislekcia
Ok, cool :)
But what happens when an Englishman (or Jamaican) in China downloads the game?

Presumably they'd have their Steam set to English, which would then inform the game ;)

Dipso said:

On a side note:
If you (or anyone else) using Unity, we used this localisation plugin for a game:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14884

It allows setting up the languages in a Google spreadsheet, which can then be imported into Unity.

We added code to our game, to allow (optional) scaling of each text element, based on the language.
(e.g. if "Play" button text is too long in Chinese then it can be scaled down.)


All the best with the localisation :)

We've got a similar setup going - had to do some stuff a few versions-of-Unity-ago to limit dictionary lookup sizes because stuff was crashing in the webplayer, most localisation packages ignore this sort of issue and just assume that you won't have too much text in your game. (60 000+ words, yeah)

I'll look at optional scaling stuff, that's a good idea. I'm trying to avoid rewriting the seriously legacy text stuff that we've got in the game due to dev switching through so many different Unity setups though. I'm not certain this is a great spend of my time TBH, but I've got the localised text, so I may as well try it out.

mattbenic

@dislekcia out of interest, what has led you to target China as a market?

dislekcia

mattbenic said:

@dislekcia out of interest, what has led you to target China as a market?

A bunch of Chinese players had made a patch for the game that would translate all the in-game text they could access. We reached out to them to see if they wanted the raw spreadsheets to work off, and then when the Enhanced Edition dropped we thought why not all work together and see if we can localise the game without needing a patch.

Also, Steam China launched a couple of months ago, so there's that. It seemed like a relatively low-hanging test of localisation into the largest possible market we could target without investing a ton. Because translating an entire novel is expensive as hell. It's been pretty low-effort up until now, mostly just helping with translation questions.

mattbenic

ok. We found translation to Chinese to be a huge amount of work on the technical side, because of the sheer number of characters. Having sprite sheets for all the text sizes we needed would have been prohibitively expensive memory wise, so we had to dynamically build the sheets as we needed them. How are you getting around that, something similar?

Jason

Translating to China is a great idea and everyone should consider it if they think their game could get traction there.
I noticed the other day that Monument Valley released financial stats and it appears half of their $14 million revenue is from China.

For translations services, a friend who previously owned Eidos Sweden created a loc company called Localize Direct a few years ago. We get all our translations done here and they have a super cool tool to help with integration (you can basically localise in runtime). I would seriously advise having a look into their services and they can help with quotes. Let me know if you want an introduction to the team there (http://localizedirect.com).

I don't get any kickbacks, just referring a good friend :-)