Springing Forward: Implementing and Optimizing Text

Long time no see! We hope you have all been well. Since our last blog post in November about the delay, we decided to simply make our posts when we have something more substantial to say than “We’re alive!” Some have noticed us saying as much on Twitter. Regardless, we thank you all for your kindness and patience along the way.

With that said, we have an update to share this month!

As the title implies, we are currently working on implementing and optimizing the game’s text. This covers the main scenario script, menus, skits, cutscenes… everything. What does that mean, though? Let’s take a look.

Menus

For the menus, we are combing through the text to make sure it all displays nicely. Some lines are simply longer in English than they are in Japanese, causing some formatting issues. Take these field camera options as an example:

At the bottom, you can see that the Left/Right Camera Rotation and Reverse (airship) Camera option text is too long. It overlaps with the text on the left, making things unattractive and difficult to read.

We’re playing around with some solutions for this, such as shortening terms and phrases or condensing the font in those areas. We ran into a similar issue in the tactics menu but fixed it by condensing the font and moving the windows around a bit.

Please note that this is still a work in progress and is not yet finalized, though!

Skits

As mentioned in a previous blog post, we decided to use subtitles instead of the original skit approach for Tales of Destiny 2. To recap, Tales of Destiny 2‘s skit text scrolls, similar to news headlines. It also shows multiple characters talking at a time in the text, even when only one character is speaking.

We found this to be distracting and difficult to read quickly in a non-native language. Therefore, we are using subtitles. However, this requires manually subtitling all 608 skits and ensuring the timing of those subtitles looks good.

Although we briefly mentioned it before, now that all the text is translated, subtitle timing is what we are working on right now. This means making sure subtitles only appear when characters are actually talking, shortening lines if the English is too long to read alongside the Japanese audio, and breaking lines up when there are pauses.

For example, here we see that within the highlighted time frame, there is a large pause with silence:

This is a good opportunity to break up a line into two. So we went ahead and did so here:

While doing this, we are also looking for and fixing any remaining typos. We already have a few hundred skits finished, but we still have a handful to go. (For context, this is skit 377!)

How does this all look within the game? Well, we’ll soon find out, once we finish these optimizations…

…as well as other tasks! Alongside everything else, we’re working on getting the patch running on hardware.

For now, we press on!