Week 2, barnyard

This is an edi­tion of Robin Sloan’s video game devel­op­ment diary.

Welcome: to returning readers as well as everyone newly subscribed. If you missed it, week 1 sets up the moti­va­tion behind this project.

The k in the hea­dine at the top of the page is just as wonky this week as it was last week.

We shelter in its wonk­i­ness.

Wot I got

After this week’s writing and typog­raphy work, I have got: a pro­to­type game, totally raw and minimal, newly in pos­ses­sion of an opening chapter that sets you off on your quest. In addi­tion, I have the begin­nings of a larger under­standing of the world of the game.

You set up a little factory

I will be candid: it was a chal­lenging week! From my notes:

The writing: really really hard! Fig­uring out HOW to write for this game specifically. Form and con­tent emerging together.

There’s a reason people don’t do this! It sucks!

A good reason, btw, to lean on genre a little. Hold one vari­able steady while the rest whirl around.

I’ve pro­duced enough writing of dif­ferent shapes and sizes that I can say, with confidence: this is how it goes. But, just as the recog­ni­tion of depres­sion doesn’t mag­i­cally make you not depressed, the recog­ni­tion of the cre­ative task I have set for myself doesn’t mag­i­cally make it not … a task

Happily, this par­tic­ular kind of chal­lenge is front-loaded. Once you suc­cess­fully invent the Way in Which You Are Going to Write, you’re off to the races, and the mate­rial can stack up very quickly, since it is, after all, just text. Working on Neo Cab, it took a long time to deter­mine what a single “ride” was sup­posed to be … and thereafter, about a day to draft one, start to finish.

In my notes this week, I also wrote:

The chal­lenge, in any of these projects, is making the inchoate into “a thing you can do.” A widget you can produce.

The appeal of not only genre but format — even a format as broad as “a blog post” or “a newsletter”—is that the pro­duc­tion of More Stuff becomes “a thing you can do,” step by step. You deter­mine the shape of your widget. You set up a little factory. It’s nice.

This week, I was dig­ging my factory’s foundations. Pos­sibly in a swamp.

I have a Ruby script that watches my Ink files — the “source code” for the game’s branching story, which looks a bit like a movie script — and, when it detects I’ve updated one, slurps it up and drops it into the pro­to­type, which I can access in my web browser.

So the rhythm of the week was:

1. Work on the opening chapter in Inky, some­times only changing a few words, then

2. bounce over to the browser to tap through what I’d just written, testing the flow, the feel.

I want to talk more about that flow and feel, but first I need to tell you

Why text in games is bad

For me, when text in games is bad, it’s because of pacing: because video game makers can’t bring them­selves to just blorp the words onto the screen.

The game Night in the Woods relies on text to com­mu­ni­cate its whole story, and its cre­ators obvi­ously made specific, thoughtful choices about typog­raphy and presentation. The treat­ment is unques­tion­ably “good.”

And yet!

Watching these text bub­bles unfurl, I feel my atten­tion con­stantly bumping up against the end of the line:

Night in the Woods

Now: I’ll allow that I am a very fast reader. But I’m not alone! In the year 2020, a lot of people spend a lot of time reading a lot of text on screens. We just chew this stuff up, almost every moment of every day.

Here’s another text treat­ment that is per­fectly “good.” In the latest Zelda game, the text zips onto the screen, fading in a few syl­la­bles at a time:

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

For me, it is just wayyy toooo slowww. Now, in Zelda — as in most games — you can press a button to accel­erate the text’s animation, which the­o­ret­i­cally addresses my complaint, except that I end up playing these games con­stantly tap­ping B-B-B-B-B-B, lending the expe­ri­ence an unpleasant under­cur­rent of agitation: yeah-yeah-yeah, more-more-more.

I have an opinion, per­haps not fully defen­sible but nev­er­the­less firmly held: this whole approach is fun­da­men­tally broken.

When we read, whether it’s on the page or the screen, our eyes don’t move in a smooth con­tin­uous motion. They do not, and cannot, track the ani­mated assembly of a line of text.

Rather, our gaze shifts sharply from point to point, making little jumps which have a deli­cious name: “saccades.” Sac­cades work great with a text block (like the text of this newsletter); your eyes jump how­ever quickly they need to jump, and the text always “shows up” right on time, because it’s already there.

But when a line of text appears gradually, as in both exam­ples above, I believe it messes with those saccades. Your gaze is ready to jump, but there’s nowhere to go. There will be, in just a moment — not even half a second. But for that half second, you are waiting. Every half second: you are waiting.

(My under­standing of this biology comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book Reading in the Brain, which I am overdue to reread. As you might suspect: reading a book … about how you read books … starts to feel kinda weird, in a good way.)

(Fun fact: you are func­tion­ally blind during a saccade!)

I think video game makers resist blor­ping whole lines of text onto the screen because it feels raw; “unpolished.” In a modern video game, you can, like, make text coa­lesce out of glowing particles! Don’t you want to make text coa­lesce out of glowing particles?? Of course you do.

I con­tend that you should not. Make the magic sword coa­lesce. The text? Blorp it.

(This should not be con­strued as an argu­ment against all text animation. As long as it’s instantly avail­able for reading, you can wave it around how­ever you want. I am a entirely pro-WiggleTech™!)

For an example of fully blorped text — and, really, a kind of pro­to­type for the text treat­ment in Perils of the Overworld — you can tap through my app Fish, which is free. (There is a Win­dows ver­sion, which I never did figure out how to dis­tribute properly. I’ll hap­pily email you a down­load link if you send me a note at robin@robinsloan.com.)

For a quick demo that doesn’t require an app down­load, you can try tap­ping or clicking the link below, which will launch a tiny Fish-like expe­ri­ence. I coded this up very very quickly, and it might not work in your browser, but, let’s find out:

Give it a try.

Sound snack

In each newsletter, I’ll include a bit of the game’s music and its pro­duc­tion.

Here is Jesse’s first draft of a cue intended for the moment when the player is faced with a decision. This has the dis­tinc­tion of being the first bit of audio I added to the game, and when it played, it made the text absolutely come alive:

Details, old and new

Typog­raphy plays out on at least two scales. Here’s Jost Hochuli in his book Detail in Typog­raphy:

While macrotypog­raphy — the typo­graphic layout — is con­cerned with the format of the printed matter, with the size and posi­tion of the columns of type and illustrations, with the orga­ni­za­tion of the hier­archy of headings, sub­heading and captions, detail typog­raphy is con­cerned with the indi­vidual com­po­nents — letters, letterspacing, words, wordspacing, lines and linespacing, columns of text. These are the com­po­nents that graphic or typo­graphic designers like to neglect, as they fall out the area that is nor­mally regarded as “cre­ative.”

You should see the exam­ples in this book: text arranged with such care that it just feels … solid. Like you could eat dinner on top of it. Build a city on top of it. A civilization. And of course, the type­set­ting of the book itself is gorgeous. The whole thing is super-slim, just 64 pages. A treasure.

But:

Text does not have to be typo­graphically per­fect to be amazing. In fact, I’d argue that, for most of the his­tory of video game typog­raphy, it has been its mon­strous flaws—the result of pun­ishing tech­nical limitations — that made it so wonderful!

Here’s one of my absolute favorite books, in any genre, of the past sev­eral years: Arcade Game Typog­raphy by Toshi Omagari.

It is a com­pendium of vin­tage video game alphabets, every page packed with incred­ible solu­tions to totally unrea­son­able tech­nical and typo­graphical problems. Along­side its archival and aes­thetic value, the book’s great draw is Omagari’s mini-micro cap­sule reviews of these type­faces. He is a world-class type designer himself, and he judges what he sees with a totally win­ning blend of good-humored gen­erosity and frigid appraisal.

Arcade Game Typog­raphy, Toshi Omagari

Above: “The result was a set of unique but mediocre type­faces, all three of which should be dis­missed as bad fonts on a prac­tical level. However, they have a cer­tain charm that is dif­fi­cult to disregard.” 😅

Arcade Game Typog­raphy, Toshi Omagari

Above: “ … the designer has man­aged to com­press lots of com­plex detail into each pixel.” It’s really a lovely type­face, isn’t it? 👏

Arcade Game Typog­raphy, Toshi Omagari

Above: “Nearly every letter has some­thing wrong with it” 💀

Of course, video games don’t operate under these blocky, graph-paper con­straints anymore. Modern soft­ware is capable of ren­dering typog­raphy that is, basi­cally, per­fect.

So, I con­tend that video game makers need to pick a path. Either

• adopt an arbitrary, vintage-era constraint, and revel in it, or
• use all the tools available in 2020 to meet Jost Hochuli’s standard.

It is my esti­ma­tion that most video games — Zelda included — hover some­where in the space between those two aes­thetic stations, offering typog­raphy that is, in fact, pretty good, which means it has none of the raw charm of the Omagari-verse but/and also lacks the foun­da­tional feeling of truly great type­set­ting.

Obvi­ously I am aiming for the latter in POTO.

The shape of things to come

This week, in addi­tion to writing, I spent per­haps a bit too much time eval­u­ating type­faces.

Said every writer from the year 1984 onward.

I had been pro­to­typing the game in Vol­lkorn, which is a basi­cally per­fect serif, offered for free; miraculous. I used Vol­lkorn in Fish, and it has a sturdiness — a little extra weight? — that really works on screen. I would not bet against Vol­lkorn appearing in the final product; its only weak­ness is its italic, which is, for me, not quite swoopy enough.

But what about a type­face for titles?

This week’s big sur­prise was Elfreth, a brand-new font that seemed, upon first encounter, almost com­i­cally well-suited to this project. But then … it just didn’t do any­thing for me!

I cycled through a few other fonts with these ~fantasy~ vibes — some new, some old — and they all fell flat. I find myself drawn to weirder type.

There’s the wonk­i­ness of Refraktury, of course, which pro­vides this page’s headline.

There’s the vari­ability of Seraphs. The sweeping morphs demon­strated on its spec­imen web­site sug­gest some inter­esting pos­si­bil­i­ties for text animation, subtle and not … 

There’s also Scott Vander Zee’s Scotch Gen­ovese:

Scotch Gen­ovese, by Scott Vander Zee

I really can’t get over how much I like this font — but/and a huge part of its appeal is the ways in which it seems “off” to me. If you’ll excuse the snooty metaphor, it’s like a very funky cheese, or a glass of wine with a “barnyard” note: some­thing is a little bit wrong … which is exactly what makes it right.

Here’s the type spec­imen that first com­manded my atten­tion. UGH it’s so GREAT:

Scotch Gen­ovese, by Scott Vander Zee

And there’s some­thing inter­esting, isn’t there, about a type­face that cuts against genre? It’s straight­for­ward to set the title of your fairy-tale book in Medieva, like so:

And … to be fair … that book is per­fect. But the type­face doesn’t actu­ally do any­thing, does it? Beyond affirm, “Yep! This is exactly the kind of thing you thought it was!”

Anyway, that’s all to say, I haven’t selected my final type­faces, but I do think I have them here among my candidates. Right now, for the main text, I’m using the trial ver­sion of GT Alpina; go check out that italic. Grilli Type is a dream — possibly my favorite foundry in the world. In recent years, I’ve used their type­face GT America for a dozen dif­ferent things, from web­sites to olive oil zines. So, speaking of cut­ting against genre:

Remember: the first words you see on the screen in Star Wars — before the crawl, before the bright swoopy logotype — are set in a plain gothic type­face.

Wot I’ll do

This week, I’ll keep writing (and enjoy seeing the results dis­played with a new font). My opening chapter sug­gests an ini­tial destination, cur­rently called Port Fabri, which will not be optional. I need to write Port Fabri. It’s in this first location — this first “widget”—that you’ll learn what kind of game you’re playing.

I was looking for some­thing in my notes and, horrifyingly, found this, dated April 2012, which means I jotted it down just after releasing Fish:

Sci­ence fic­tion or fantasy. With a map.

Do it fast. June-July-August

A web drama. Scroll drama. Tap drama. The key is, it’s open to all.

A budget! For art, music.

Pushing for­ward this new FORMAT. Text! Cheaper to produce, but just as much fun to consume.

We get where we need to go eventually. It takes a while, but we do.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. I’ll keep a run­ning list of all the books I men­tion in this newsletter over on Bookshop.

This has been an edi­tion of my video game devel­op­ment diary, sent by email every few weeks. You can subscribe: