Handling Fonts for Multiple Languages

cocos2d-x
#1

Hello Developers,

I am quite sure that all of you must have came across situations where you need to implement fonts for multiple languages in your games.

My Problem :

I have a game to be released in couple of weeks, and I have the game localized in 9 languages.
To my bad, I had to use SystemFont like Courier-Bold to compensate the font requirement.

The actual reference given by the designer has great looking fonts, but that font doesn’t support multiple languages and other fonts won’t support the design requirements.
How do you manage to handle this ?

How do you manage to sustain both design perspective and multiple-language support ?

Example :
The game is a pixel based game and the font reference is also following the same design guidelines, which looks good but doesn’t support multiple languages.

Any ideas how to maintain both ?

#2

Games I have worked on in the past used a language dictionary and a font dictionary. Multiple bitmap fonts were used for different font families.

Depending on the user’s language preference, we would use a different string dictionary and font to render the UI.

#3

Thanks for reply @corytrese

any of your game in playstore uses this method for multiple languages. ?

#4

None of the games I have published with my current company, but other games and companies I have worked for used this approach successfully.

The question really is how do you get the Bitmap fonts and Unicode strings to play nice. That part isn’t easy, but is highly testable.