Masahiro Sakurai is the mind behind Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series. While working closely with Nintendo, he has created many childhood classic games of this generation. Since August 2022, Sakurai is imparting his game development knowledge through his YouTube channel. Available in both English and Japanese, the channel is called Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games.

In his recent video, Sakurai talked about a key aspect of game development that goes unnoticed by many gaming fans.

Masahiro Sakurai talks about adding life to games

Sarukai uploaded a video on April 8, 2023, showcasing the importance of written text in game development. While many believe games to be more of a visual form of art, the written elements are important too. The way developers present the text to the players can change the experience of gaming drastically.

Sakurai went on to talk about how adding screen shakes or flash effects to the UI can lead to the grabbing of players’ attention. Sakurai dove deeper into the text styles, stating the preface of the game is necessary to select the text art style for the game.

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The games with more serious tones, like The Last of Us, try to keep their text effects to the minimum to not gain too much focus from players. Games with character interaction, like Animal Crossing, will gain an advantage from the way they present text. In these games, the way they show text can convey how the character speaking them is feeling.

Masahiro Sakurai’s guide to creating text effects

Talking about making games accessible, Sakurai urged developers to create a separate script system for the text presentation channels. If translators ever translated the game into another language, the developers would not have to change a lot of code. He believed he could measure the success of the script by how much the developer worked on the translation. If only the translator works on adding changes, the developer had created a successful script.

Drawing influence from Japanese manga culture, Sakurai talked about kakimoji and manpu. Kakimoji is sound effects written directly on the screen background. While manpu refers to drawing effects that don’t have actual words but still have meaning, like a light bulb drawn over the character’s head to show he had an idea.

What are your thoughts on different text effects in games? Let us know in the comment section below.

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