The Chinese character is broad and profound
But at what cost?
I never thought that a game would be able to show me a grand scene with just a few lines of thin text under a black screen.
In the world of "Word Game", which is only composed of square characters, the player as the protagonist has the divine power to rewrite Chinese characters.Like Moses dividing the Red Sea, an incredible adventure was accomplished.
Blocked by a river? It's okay, "I" can turn into a "goose" by grabbing the "bird" by the river and fly across the river.
Cornered in the script? It's okay, activate the ability to change the text, and change the position of the word "no" to rewrite your fate.
The game uses a single black undertone, with no more than three colors of Chinese characters on it. It resembles the early form of video games, but it is not an interactive novel at all, but only borrows the "ideographic" attribute of Chinese characters.Let the text become an element in the construction of graphics, composing a variety of vivid scenes.
Looking at this dome composed of gems, the game takes advantage of the difference between the words "bao" and "stone", emphasizing the skeleton of the dome in the monochrome picture, a hole in the light pouring down, and the direct light emphasizes the focus of the picture. There is not a single image in "Word Game" that does not connect the meaning of the text and the characteristics of its appearance.
In this way, the use of Chinese characters as "bricks" requires the selection of fonts to be very elegant, and "Word Game" needs the effect of "a single word, a group of pictures", while taking into account the legibility and meeting the basic graphic needs of points, lines, and surfaces.Eventually, the production team found a font called "Zpix".
The "Nomad Starry Sky" under Zpix is quite good-looking
The Zpix font is compact and slightly complex, and the characters are squeezed into boxy blocks, so that artists can use them as "solid" bricks; The simple structure of the word is horizontal and vertical, without the decoration of the pen, can be regarded as a simple basic figure. With the blessing of these characteristics, the graphics of "Word Game" are "more comfortable to look at than to read".
However, in terms of legibility, Zpix's font is compact and compact, although the sparrow is small, the side is clear, and the font structure is clear, which does not affect reading and puzzle solving for players.
The back-and-forth between "easy-to-use" and "easy-to-read" fonts in "Wordgame" is not unique to the world of video games.In fact, as long as the game wants to add Chinese characters, it is inevitable that you will be "tortured" by Chinese characters.
Indie games are "miserable" by Chinese characters
Good looking, easy to read is the meaning of fonts, and even calligraphy, but now, pixel games have created a unique need that has never been seen before: small. On a cramped pixel screen, they needed a font size that was small enough.
Chances are you've never paid attention to the "size" of the font. In fact, since the invention of the first Chinese characters to be displayed on a computer screen, the smallest Chinese characters on the screen have been set at 11*0 pixels, and the Zpix font we mentioned above, which is 0*0 pixels large, is a very later typesetting size.
Early computer kanji manuscripts
Why 16? This has to do with the storage method of the computer, to put it simply, it's like if you buy a U disk, 0GB is not enough, you can only choose 0GB up, there is no intermediate option. Analog to the font is,16*0 is too small to see clearly, so you can only choose 0*0 upwards.(Considering the white space between words, strictly speaking, only 16*0 can be used for writing, and the number of pixels stored in the computer is counted here.) ）
However, the 16*0 font still has to abandon some details, such as the lower half of the word "police" has only one horizontal, and the upper part of the word "recruitment" has to be deleted by one horizontal.
It is such a "tattered" dot matrix font that has completed the general feat of "book with the same text", only a 16*0 pixel dot matrix screen,The Hanxian BP machine of the 90s can display Chinese characters.
可是，為什麼都到了2025年，你的電腦螢幕至少有1920*1080的解析度，現在的獨立遊戲卻放不下這區區16*16個圖元？
Compare how many pixels are needed for foreign characters in the same situation.
The standard English font on the FC platform, 4*0 pixels, Japanese kana, is also 0*0, and the English font of the early PC is smaller, 0*0 is enough. In order to pursue the art style of old-school game consoles, today's pixel-art indie games will try to follow the hardware limitations of that time as much as possible, and if you meet an indie game production team that likes to "go to extremes", the English alphabet can even be compressed to 0*0.
4*0 in English font
The gap between Chinese and foreign languages is painful for localizers and game developers.For the former, the text space reserved by the original game may not fit Chinese text, while for the latter, the game style that can be selected is very limited, and once the number of pixels of the picture and text does not match, it will be quite inconsistent. We can even say that indie games are "miserable" by Chinese characters.
"Animal Well" uses a 7*0 size Chinese character font as a whole, but the space for the word "Chinese" in the lower right corner is only enough to use a 0*0 size font
But in turn, in the HD era, pixelated indie games are pretty much the only driving force behind making Chinese characters smaller.
We need font heroes
This is a rather contrasting space-time dilemma - people in the past wanted more font details, but the cost of storage limited their room to play; And now people have almost infinite storage space,However, for the sake of aesthetics, I hope to compress the font, and even do not hesitate to make the Chinese characters look "out of shape".
This is the entire character list for The Legend of Zelda: The Triforce of the Gods, and Nintendo is still adding strokes to the font despite its limited functionality
We have been talking about Zpix, as a 16*0 large font, in fact, in the past binary storage format and 0*0 occupies the same space, it not only "wastes" storage space, but also more difficult to read, put it decades ago is simply outrageous, but it was born now, carrying the aesthetic needs of modern people.
"The Land of the Wind" also uses a 16*0 size font, which perfectly caters to the painting style of its 0-bit computer
And when it comes to the aesthetic needs of Chinese character fonts, it doesn't just plague indie games,It also plagues countless high-definition games that use Chinese characters.
Many of you have probably heard of DOOM Eternal and Assemble! Animal Crossing uses the same font for the story. The two games have a huge contrast in style, but they have the same release date and use the same Chinese font, which really made players have a lot of fun at the time, but strictly speaking, the blood-soaked and hell-piercing DoomGuy uses a soft and cute font, which looks like a dereliction of duty on the part of the localization team.
A collection of Doom Eternal fonts in English
The Chinese font for Doom Eternity
Behind these strange phenomena is the lack of Chinese font libraries.In the field of fonts, in fact, Chinese do not have many choices.There is no shortcut to drawing fonts, it is basically a drawing one by one. Compared to English, which has only 3000 letters, and Japanese, which has a mixture of 0 kana and 0 and 0 kanji, the number of kanji is so large that it makes you want to be discouraged.
How many words should be drawn in a set of fonts has national standards. A looser standard, simplified and traditional Chinese have about 9000 to 0 characters each; On top of this, if you want to pursue high standards and strict requirements, there are more than 0 words of "extended" standards. Although it is an additional "expansion DLC", you will actually encounter a lot of commonly used words in life, such as the "啰" of "minions", which were only included in this standard at the earliest. Under the back and forth compromise, the standards introduced by font companies to cover various commonly used words are the products of summarizing and deduplicating on the basis of the previous ones, but there are still as many as 0 words.
The character set supported by Hanyi Yunhei font
However, there is also an embarrassing hot knowledge here: the general literacy of Chinese is only about four or five thousand Chinese characters,But if you are not careful, you will use a few "rare words", especially in today's Internet terminology.
At this point, you can probably realize how "painful" it is to draw fonts, for individual creators, the workload is extremely large, and you feel that you are doing a lot of useless work; For business owners, the cost is high, the production cycle is long, and the probability of error is high. As a result, there are very few fonts to choose from, and even fewer are free to use, and at the same time, the overall environment lacks individual authors, and the space for commercial creation is limited......
Fortunately, with the growth of various needs, these problems are gradually being solved in recent years, and there are still many individuals and companies that are launching new fonts, such as the pixel dot matrix font market that we have been talking about at the beginning is quite active, from 7*0 to 0*0, and even 0*0 There are ready-made solutions.
The "Ding Mao Point Array" launched by 7type supports a minimum of 0*0 pixels
Wait a minute, didn't we say that 8*0 can't put Chinese characters?
Indeed, 8*0 can't put such a decent font,But if you are willing to "cut corners", it is not impossible.
If you look at these fonts, as the number of pixels decreases, the details of the text itself become less and less, and even if you look closely, they are not glyphs. But the magic of them is that when you glance at the line, that familiar feeling returns.
Preview of the effect of the "Ding Mao dot matrix" demonstration on the official website
I believe you are also aware of this feeling: many times you are not literate, but you are recognizing the "demeanor" of each character, which is the "familiarity" that overrides the glyph, which is a "sixth sense" that only belongs to Chinese.
After thousands of years of pursuit of "elegant" and "chic", Chinese characters for the first time excavated the conch shell dojo between a few pixels,These full-screen "mosaic" games are continuing to write the future of square words in a strange way.