Part 1: Creating the Game Font Library

One of the first things artists should do when starting to work on a game UI is identify a set of potential font styles that will be used throughout the game. They can decide, for example, that there will be a unique font type for all titles, while another type is used for the rest of the text in the game. After this decision is made, additional font types should not be used in any of the game’s UI screens without very careful consideration. There are three main reasons for enforcing such a limitation:

1. By using the same fonts, artists make sure that all of the game content appears consistent to the user. If different game screens used different fonts, they would produce a disorganized UI that is harder to read and comprehend.
2. During internationalization, development fonts often need to be substituted to different fonts that have characters for the target language. Having a predetermined fixed set of fonts allows this to be done easily.
3. Having a fixed set of fonts that is shared through many UI screens allows font data to be shared in memory, significantly reducing memory use and reducing screen load times. Since font data can occupy a lot of memory, this is a very important technical consideration.

Under the Scaleform imported font substitution approach described in the next part, the process of selecting a font set for a game is formalized into creation of a font library consisted of a set of files, one per language (“ e.g. fonts_en.swf”, “fonts_kr.swf”, etc). Artists can create these file by creating named font symbols in the Flash file library and then exporting them into a corresponding SWF. After the library files are created, their font symbols can be imported into the other Flash files and used during development. The upcoming sections describe the details of font symbol creation and how they can be used to create a game font library.