Episode 211: Worth a Thousand Words, The PAX East Panel

[Troy Goodfellow]

PAX East 2013 was host to the second ever Three Moves Ahead panel, and this time we took on interface design. Troy and Rob were joined by Rob Daviau (IronWall), Eric Lee Smith (Shenandoah) and Nels Anderson (Klei)

 

Listen Here.

 

Get the PowerPoint slides here.

[hexgrid]

If possible, could we please have the slides in pdf?  I can't speak for others, but I don't have Office (and am not usually running Windows), and my experience with other powerpoint players has not been hugely positive...

[Colourful Stuff]

Slides? Idle Thumbs is embarrassed by your professionalism.

[osmosisch]

The easiest powerpoint fix is to run them through google docs, like so:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iR1SOyMBfs1GqVn0SHjsYR4Ph_gWmQLJOnMBkyUESIY/edit?usp=sharing

[Colourful Stuff]

I was born in Birkenhead, nuking it is a reasonable solution.

[bdmarvel]

The last question was from a solo indie developer asking about the legality of fonts.  I tried to find him (seatless studios?  seat lay studios? I couldn't make it out) but came up empty so I registered here.  If anyone knows him, or has a similar question, I wanted to pass along a link to http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ as a fantastic resource for fonts which are free for commercial use.  I'm a solo indie developer myself and consider this a vital resource.

[hexgrid]

  On 3/28/2013 at 1:24 PM, bdmarvel said:

The last question was from a solo indie developer asking about the legality of fonts.  I tried to find him (seatless studios?  seat lay studios? I couldn't make it out) but came up empty so I registered here.  If anyone knows him, or has a similar question, I wanted to pass along a link to http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ as a fantastic resource for fonts which are free for commercial use.  I'm a solo indie developer myself and consider this a vital resource.

 

Font licensing is all over the place, but for games (often) the main thing to consider is whether you're going to be drawing the font directly from source (ie: using freetype or OS font calls) or whether you're going to be baking glyphs into a texture and rendering text with textured quads.

 

If you ship the source font (truetype or whatever) with your game you normally need a distribution license, which is usually prohibitive; it's typically a per-unit-sold rate, probably several times the sale price of your game.  The assumption is that every copy of the game you sell includes a usable copy of the font which you're effectively reselling to the game buyer.

 

For most font designers, if you ship only rasterized versions of the font (ie: texture pages with glyphs), you don't need a distribution license, only a commercial use license, and that's usually a flat one-time fee that's south of $100.

 

Things differ between different font designers; I know some developers who are terrified to go near anything that might be within reach of Monotype's legal department, for example.  Always talk to the designer and make sure the license is ironed out; most font designers are one-person-shows or small shops, so you'll have plenty of common ground for understanding.  Explain to them what you want to do; I've had nothing but good experiences with font designers so far, and have had no trouble getting an unambiguous license for in-game use at a reasonable price.  Of course, our games are all using pre-rasterized fonts, which makes the discussion easier.

 

It's arguably best to go that way anyways, at least for the near term.  If you have access to non-pc platforms (consoles, mobile...) or want to port to multiple platforms with a minimum of friction, texture-based fonts make a giant pile of hassles go away.

 

Do be careful of free font sites.  Perhaps things have changed, but for a while there were a lot of repackaged non-free commercial fonts floating around masquerading as free fonts; typically they were Adobe Postscript fonts that had been run through ps->ttf converters and had the copyright strings stripped.  As a developer, you want to be able to point to a license if someone's legal department comes knocking.

 

That said, it does look like a lot of the fonts on fontsquirrel are fonts I know are properly free.  That site looks legit to me, and maybe it's all you really need if you can find something that has the look you want.

[hexgrid]

That was a good panel; I wish I could have attended.  It would be nice to hear some more discussion on UIs, actually; for example, whereas Battle of the Bulge seems to strike a good balance between hiding information and burying the screen in it, there is the other end of the spectrum where everything you want to do is nested several menus deep.

 

There's also the classic capability problem, especially in real-time games; the AI doesn't have to use the UI.  This shows up spectacularly in RTS games, where the AI can be adjusting orders instantaneously across the entire map while the player can only operate on the things they can see (or hotkey select) and the locations that are currently visible.  Another example of this would be Sacrifice, where the AI leaders could splash spells around far more effectively than the player because they didn't need to navigate pie menus to choose spells and then manually target them.

 

There's the question of good UI design for people with vision impairment as well; I remember a pitch meeting where we were showing an RTS on a handheld device to a producer at THQ, where most of the action took place on a zoomed-out map with iconic units (due to screen size contstraints, mostly).  It turned out he was colorblind, and couldn't tell (IIRC) full-saturation cyan from full-saturation magenta, so it was just a sea of identical icons.  The sides were indiscernable to him.  Or a friend of mine who's fully color blind but could play Puzzle Bobble (or Bust A Move, if you like) competetively because the little bubbles also had unique shapes in them; he was matching moons and stars instead of matching blues and greens.

 

I'd really enjoy a podcast episode (maybe even multipart) on the synthesis of complexity management, UI, and games that teach themselves.

[doctorfrog]

  On 3/28/2013 at 12:39 AM, hexgrid said:

If possible, could we please have the slides in pdf?  I can't speak for others, but I don't have Office (and am not usually running Windows), and my experience with other powerpoint players has not been hugely positive...

LibreOffice worked great for me.

[Michael]

Here's a link to the presentation in Google Docs. I have it set to "Public" so hopefully everyone can get to it.

[hexgrid]

Thanks for the suggestions and links!

[osmosisch]

  On 4/1/2013 at 11:23 PM, Michael said:

Here's a link to the presentation in Google Docs. I have it set to "Public" so hopefully everyone can get to it.

Mine didn't work?

[Michael]

  On 4/3/2013 at 2:59 PM, osmosisch said:

Mine didn't work?

It said I didn't have access and had to send a request to view it. (Also I had missed that you posted it.)

[osmosisch]

Oh, sorry, I must have messed something up in the settings

 

e: ah, fixed it.