About fonts in the game.

[BadgerBadger]

So two comments. First, when I show the AIW2 GUI to people, I get consistent criticism on the font y'all are using. Are there plans to allow for the font to be changed/tuned? I can give a more precise critique if desired.

Second, how about this. As part of the tutorial, give people a tiny questionnaire about their monitor alongside the "Pick a username" instructions. Then have a few pre-set tuning packages that you can enable quickly.

[x4000]

On the tutorial, I think it might be too late then. But at the time of setting up the profile that might be a good idea. Actually we did that in Tidalis, go figure.

On the font, that can be changed or modded with ease. That said, I'd rather have a good default. Our goal with the font is something easily readable that also is reasonably compressed (aka character kerning is narrow enough to fit a decent amount of descriptive text in a multi-line area), and which is fitting with the Sci fi theme, and which doesn't feel tacky or basic or whatever else.

Font suggestions (fonts for us to use) are very welcome. Myfonts.com, etc, are great sources. Probably Blue should drive that conversation with feedback from folks here as much as possible.

[BadgerBadger]

I can find some more font-aware people for more in depth feedback. One piece of advice I got that I agree with is to use a variety of fonts. Use fonts that convey the a sci-fi, flavour theme in some places, and then just use a font intended for readability for larger blocks of text. Like maybe in the tooltip have the name of the ship be in a flavourful text, but the description be in something more boring intended for high readability.

[BadgerBadger]

Can we change fonts and so on without access to Unity or the Core code?

[x4000]

You have to have access to unity, unfortunately.  It requires rebuilding the asset bundle that contains the font, but before that it requires actually generating a textmesh-pro-style font, which looks at a ttf or otf font and then generates edge data images which allow for infinite zooming and scaling rather than being bitmap-based.

After a font asset is created in that way, it has to be applied to the various prefabs in the gui unity project, and then the asset bundle is built.  So it's not a super quick process, but it's not the slowest thing in the world, either -- for us, anyway.  If you don't already have unity and whatnot set up, it would be a particular pain.

Typically going through all that process is a bit wasteful anyhow -- it's a lot easier to just pop open photoshop or gimp, take a screenshot and blank out existing text with content-aware fill or similar, and then start inserting mockups directly.  Super duper fast way to get a feel for things.  In the cases of fonts that must be bought, we've even done the thing where we type a phrase into the font preview website, then screenshot that, remove the white, flip the black to white, and then use that in a mockup to see how the font feels in context.  Otherwise we'd be buying every font under the sun before finding the perfect one.