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17 min read
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How to do subtitles well – basics and good practices
How subtitles are presented, both visually and structurally, can have a significant impact on a player’s enjoyment of a game. The difference between a good and bad experience is usually down to the same few easily fixable issues.
Ian Hamilton
Blogger
July 15, 2015
How subtitles are presented, both visually and structurally, can have a significant impact on a player's enjoyment of a game. The difference between a good and bad experience is usually down to the same few easily fixable issues. This article discusses the top 3 basic fundamentals and top 10 general good practices, well established principles both from within gaming and from other related industries, together with some thoughts on gathering and sharing usage data.
Subtitles (speech) and captions (speech + important background sounds) are widely relied on by gamers, more than consumers of other types of media. They are used for all kinds of reasons – due to physical hearing loss, due to low quality mobile speakers, due to a noisy environment, because of unpredictable dynamic sounds mixes, to avoid waking the baby, because localisation has been done solely through subtitles, and many other reasons too.
So [...]