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10. Selecting the right color
This covers a range of
potential issues:
-
Different color to system font
It is important that
the subtitles are of a different color to the rest of the system fonts, as we
need to ensure the user does not mix-up any dialogue accidentally, or that
words become jumbled.
It is also important
to pick the correct color for the subtitle. The recommended ones are white,
yellow, cyan, and green, against a solid black background to provide the best
contrast.
-
They should have their own background
When a subtitle is displayed, there is no
guarantee that the background will always be plain. Often the subtitle can
clash with what is happening in the game, making certain words extremely
difficult to read. Because of this, it is best to place it on a background to ensure
they stand out.
However, it may not
always be possible (or desirable) to have a full-on black background, so we can
make do with either using a subtle background color, or actually even place
them underneath the action. Figure 2 gives an example of this.
Figure 2 -- Example of subtitling underneath
the action
If neither of these is
possible, then at the very least we should use a drop shadow, to give the font
more visibility.
-
Differing colors between sentences when
multiple characters are on-screen
When there is just one
person on the screen, the subtitles will only need to be in one color. However,
if we have a conversation between characters X and Y, then the two need to be a
different color so the player is able to easily determine who is speaking.
11. Ensure staggered subtitles if in conversation
If there are two
people in the conversation, then we need to ensure that the player knows who is
talking. It is recommended that we stagger the subtitles to reflect who is
currently speaking. An example is:
Bob: Beware, you're in
danger!
Jack: Thanks. I almost fell into that pit.
Bob: No worries!
Additionally, where
the source of speech is not immediately apparent, the subtitle has a caption to
label the source. So, in the above (inspired dialogue!) example, the names of
the people speaking have been added before the subtitles. This is important if
there is more than one character and a fair amount of dialogue as it can be a
simple matter of losing track while reading.
12. Include captions and other relevant non-speech
information where necessary
When using subtitles,
we can also use them to display captions such as:
*Jack: (Sound of drawing
sword) You have met your match!
We can also add things
such as giving a very brief example of the mood of music being played. If this
is the case, then we should put a character before hand to indicate this. An
example is:
# (soft, haunting
music)
By doing this, deaf players,
or even those who are hard of hearing can get even more out of the game because
they are not only able to read the dialogue but also get the mood of the game
too.
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Valve's Half-Life 2 is the undisputed leader for subtitles - every single person who has to implement subtitles in their game should play that game with subtitles on and learn!
I am a close captioning advocate, designed the Doom3[CC] mod, which adds captions for dialog, music and sound effects. If anyone wants to see many of the guidelines Gareth suggests put into action please view this video of my mod in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnLyKbCjlog
I never knew of Gareth before reading this article, but we follow many of the same guidelines. Just goes to show how good and common sense they are I think.
Note: Subtitles cover only dialog, while closed captions cover the full spectrum of sound, including dialog, music and sound effects.
In games, sound effects are just as important, if not more so than subtitles because they can communicate vital feedback for players.
Keep up the good work Gareth.
I'd like to add one point: use subtitles rather than replacing / redubbing the spoken dialogue, including any movie cut scenes within the game. This is my biggest complaint; there's simply no need to redub in other languages, or at least no need to ONLY offer redubbed voices (not with the technology and space we've had since the late 1990s anyway). Even if the original acting is "bad" I'd prefer hearing the original, thank you. I'm particularly annoyed when Japanese games have their voices redubbed, of course, but this point applies to any language.
Film and TV have finally gotten onto the subtitle bandwagon but it's taken a very long time for them to do so. Imported films, including specific genres such as Japanese anime, have learned good and bad methods of subtitling over the years, and Hollywood and other film bastions have finally made subtitling more the rule than the exception. It would be better for the gaming industry to be much more proactive about this issue.
One example of poor subtitles... Bioshock. (sigh) There's no excuse for such a shoddy job on timing. There's plenty of people out of work (like me) who would be very happy to edit and time subtitles for companies.
We've added CC to our new games (the older ones had subtitles) precisely because of on-point information such as you present here, and from some very useful guidance from Reid Kimball, above.
John Bannick
CTO
7-128 Software
First, I am not a native english speaker, for a long time I could only read and write english, never hear (because I never heard most of the words, thus I have no idea of how they sound like, and in fact there are several words that I still do not heard), thus games without subtitles screwed me, since I had to hear the cut-scene like 3 or 4 times before getting what word was that the person was saying, but since most of the games has no way to replay cut-scenes (Sands of Time I am looking to you... that do not has subtitles too...) I was pretty much lost in the storyline, something sad, since I enjoy VG stories...
After that problem was not a major program anymore, I have another problem: even in my own langauge, sometimes if there are more sounds than the spoken words, my brain fail to understand (ie: I hear everything perfectly, I am not deaf, it is like a auditive dyslexia to heard words instead of written words), and some games are particularly guild of having characters with bizarre accents, or wall of sound in the middle of conversations, and no cut-scenes.
And yes, Mass Effect button was evil... In fact MOST RPGs still use the SAME button to skip dialog (spoken, subtitled or only textual CRPG-like), and to initiate a dialog...
But any game should take care for that sort of unwanted actions to happen, like games that the camera suddenly inverts itself so fast that you get stuck in a infinite loop of going back and forth (with the camera switching too) with the only way to this not happen was take a action that do not need the button pressed for the character cross the line (like jumping or rolling), and such are really common in 3D games (Sands of Time, I am looking to you again, the multiple-door level... ow, and that one was also guilty of the soluting being hearing a certain sound in a certain place, and I was playing with my parents sleeping and turned off sounds, since the game had a tendency of have sound bugs that made sounds in the maximum volume sometimes... Since it had no closed captioning, I had to expend 1 hour to solve that by pure trial and error...)
It was still a bogus design decision though.
Another annoyance was that if you tried to press the skip button near the end of a line of dialog, you might end up accidentally pressing it right after the start of the next line instead. They should have implemented a short window at the beginning of each dialogue line (perhaps 400 ms) during which, if the previous line of dialog finished playing normally (i.e. it wasn't skipped), then the first skip button press during the window would do nothing. That would solve the problem, without preventing people from zipping through dialogue they had heard before.
One of the new games which I find really handles subtitles and cut-scenes very well is Fable 2. Here the user is able to hold down the A button to skip scenes. This is actually very useful because it can help minimise accidental pressing due to button mashing but also give the user control to skip the entire scene.
While I think close-captioning is a good start to inform hearing-impaired players of actions within the game, it inherently a). lacks positionality, and b). can take up lots of screen real estate. Much of this information can be relayed to the player through the interface. Our Project Lead has pointed out Metal Gear Solid 4's threat radar as a good example of a visual- based closed captioning system, where a circle around the player contains peaks of varying sizes based on threats near the player. If there's a large spike behind the player, they'll know they need to turn around as an enemy (or other POI) is there. The possibilities for extending this scheme to transmit other information to the player are immense. Even closed-captioning could be used to communicate positioning data, and that's really the point: to give hearing impaired players the chance to experience the game as closely as we envision for all players.
Our company has developed a technology that can also help both hearing and sight sensitive individuals get back another dimension to their game playing through the additon of Motion. We have created a method of adding motion to games that allows the player to experience the subtle and not so subtle pitch, roll, heave, and intelligent vibrations produced by the game, to get you right inside the action of the game, as if you're really there. In essence, they will be able to feel the effects within the game, instead of having to hear them.
We are very excited about what this new tehcnology to can bring to the gaming experience. Check out our Web site for more details, or to find out how we do it.
The brain process written information slower then oral information (this is why professional TV or movie captioning adapt and shorten lines - keeping main emotions) whereas according to Sony, Microsoft and Sony TRC/TCR, subtitles must match audio a 100%. They should modify their guidelines so we can have something both legible and practical.
More often than not, game subtitle systems are last minute patch-ups (subtitle plays as long as its associated audio file plays) both in terms of tech and layout design. We need to design systems earlier (preproduction).
Last but not least, the polyphony issue: most games use a wide set of AI lines that can potentially play simultaneously; depending on sound engine you can prioritize which lines will play over others. This needs to be accounted for in caption as well, unless you're planning to end up with a lot of on screen text overlapping.
Also check that your font supports all localized languages diacritical characters and have the UI designer think early about subtitle design so it looks good.