We're happy to announce that They Bleed
Pixels is now available fully localized
into Japanese and DRM free on
Playism!
We've had this localized version in the
works with the Playism folks for a while
now, but have been waiting for the
Crimson Update to be complete before
going forward. I worked closely with
Playism, picking appropriate Japanese
fonts and altering layouts to work with
them and I'm honestly quite proud of the
results. I think we really managed to
incorporate the translated text while
preserving the original typography and
design, which can be a tricky
balance.
It's been an interesting
process. The Japanese character
sets are very different from
English. Not only are most words
shorter but many characters are denser,
more complex and have more curves and
less straight lines then the roman
character set. This creates a unique
challenge given much of our text layout
in They Bleed Pixels was built around a
blocky pixel font and a thin flowing art
nouveau script.
The solution I decided on is a mix of
finding a good blocky Japanese font with
a similar weight and (where it's
appropriate) leaving the original
English in and incorporating the
Japanese text as a design element. A
trick I borrowed from some of the better
visual localization I've seen in manga
and anime translated in the other
direction. I've included a bunch of
screenshots from both versions of TBP in
this post for comparison.
