A long time back when I actually hacked something, testing speech bubble formatting was easily one of the most tedious activities that I had to do. Granted, I didn’t go about it very efficiently, but I remember having to make corrections over and over again to fix line breaks and word choice so that certain lines of dialogue fit.
How do you guys go about this process? I’ve contemplated making a computer font using the FE7 in-game font, but supposedly creating a computer font is really complicated. What I’m currently doing now is simply writing dialogue in a Word document using the default Calibri font with columns set to a particular width. Even though Calibri isn’t exactly the FE7 in-game font, at least its character widths are better approximations of the in-game font than a fixed width font.
Pretty much just trial and error. I try to keep every thought or statement at the maximum at 2 lines, and edit the specific words according to fit in the bubble. Sometimes reading it aloud also helps with how large the length should be, but it’s sort of hit or miss.
I just have a sample line which I know is the maximum line length and then compare all my lines to that, and then take into account the fact that i’s and l’s (little I and little L) are a smaller width than the rest of the characters, which are otherwise the same length. Their impact on overall line length is minimal, anyway.
My dialogue does a first-parse in Microsoft Word (now Google docs for the sake of keeping it backed up) and then I format it individually on its own in Notepad++ which also forces me to proofread and chop/change dialogue as needed.
Doesn’t this highly depend on the character width? That’s kind of the problem that I’m trying to work around. I’m fairly certain that “i,” “l,” spaces, and punctuation marks are narrower than average and “m” and “w” are wider than average.
That’s the general rule I’ve been using while working on my hack and I haven’t really run into any trouble. Like I said, it might only apply to FE8 since the font is different.
Yes, but it’s best not to expand the bubble all the way anyway. Just make a line of capitalized M’s, and when you reach the max it will display properly ingame, subtract two, and consider that your character limit. Honestly though, I just go by eye in FEditor and usually estimate, I’m right 95% of the time. FEXP was betterfor me because expanded window width, and three lines of text meaning characters can say more, but if we could redo what Ryrumeli had done for his hack in GBA we could have three lines as well.