Today's entry is from User Interface's Nakano. He first explains what User Interface is, explaining that they designed the UI (the looks, layout etc) together with the director and planners. In this entry, he focuses on fonts. For this game, they had to design many more fonts compared to previous games.

The first reason is that there are two courtrooms this time, each sporting their own fonts.
Director Yamazaki & Assistant-director Fuse: We'd like different designs for the "Guilty" and "Not Guilty" verdicts for both Japan and Kurain.
Nakano: (*゜▽゜) Yessir!!

Director Yamazaki & Assistant-director Fuse: Perhaps also different designs for when the testimonies/cross-examinations begin...?
Nakano: ( ゜∀゜) Yessir!

Director Yamazaki & Assistant-director Fuse: Also different designs when the court starts...
Nakano: ( ゜v゜) Yessir.

Director Yamazaki & Assistant-director Fuse: While you're at it, the life bar...
Nakano: ( ゜-゜) Ye-yessir.

So the UI work doubled because they needed to design everything for both places.

The second reason they used many more fonts this time comes from the Spirit Channeling Vision. The senses besides sight projected in the water mirror are written out, and each of those sensations needed to have different fonts to clearly convey the 'feeling' of those sense (i.e. you can't write "it hurts!" in a cute font). So they use a variety of fonts here. Nakano was free in choosing the fonts based on the script, and it happened just once that *somebody* said to him that they thought the font didn't suit their image of a particular sensation. That person was... the scenario writer Fukuda.

Next time is Fujii of Animation.

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I wonder how hard it was for the localization to choose the "correct" fonts for this game and if they also worked with the Japanese development team (e.g. maybe scenario writer Fukuda also felt bad about the choices for the English font at some point).

I'd assume that most fonts that do Japanese do Latin too. It's kinda expected and a rather low investment compared to how many characters there are in Japanese.

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I actually think there's some company-internal "rules" (for lack of a better word) for what fonts they use.

I noticed that both DD and Monster Hunter 4 use the same fontstyle, only, rather smaller in MH4, and I know they are all fonts developed by DynaComware, so they have a somewhat delimited array of fonts to choose from.

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Today's blog entry was by character animator Fujii, who tells us a bit about the points the animators were picky about. The first is the appearance of the 3D character models on the screen. Sometimes the 3D models can look a bit out of focus on the screen. It's something they can't predict beforehand when posing the models, but if it happens, they do little position adjustments to get the model back in focus (see examples on the blog). A second point of interest was the wavy stuff, like Nayuta's robe-thingy and hair for example. Nowadays, lots of games do this stuff with physics models, but they didn't use that for this game for the simple reason that it doesn't look cool. It's realistic, yes, but that doesn't mean it actually looks right. It wouldn't fit with the AA series. So the animators had to do all that themselves. (Fujii sorta 'complains' to character designer that there are quite a lot of characters with wavy stuff this time).

Next time is character modeler Ueda.

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Today's blog entry is by (Norihide) Fujii, an artist who has worked on AA4, GK2 and AA6. For AA6, he worked on modeling, event stills and the mini-characters. (This Fujii is not the same Fujii who wrote an entry last week). In the blog, he talks about drawing the familiar event still shots you often see as event cutscenes and in evidence like photographs. For AA6, he needed to prepare loads of event stills besides the ones you usually see in evidence. There are four stages to drawing up such a scene (See the blog for images). He used the photograph of the victim in Case 1 as an example.

Stage 1: First he gets the assignment from the planners. It includes a map with all the crucial information/clues and data on what's important. These 'photographs' assignments take quite some time, as they are vital to the gameplay.

Stage 2: First sketch. Everything that's necessary in the photograph is included.

Stage 3: Check by the planners/art director. In this example, the two places the player needs to point out are hard to spot, so they needed redrawing to set them apart a bit.

Stage 4: Another check. Now the arm has to moved, because it might lead to a contradiction in the story (which they obviously don't want).

Stage 5: Ready!

This thursday, Master Eguchi, one of the writers and "Legendary Operator", will post an entr

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I just realized, there's actually a contradiction in the picture of the revolutionaries.

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Could be an oversight, but I can sorta imagine it to be a conscious choice too:

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So I'm working on something new here, where I translate Ace Attorney-related materials completely (rather than just provide a summary). So in case people are interested, I have a translation of Monday's developer's blog, about how they made the music sync with the testimony text early in the game.

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Thanks a bunch. It's always a great read.

I have a full translation for today's post too on Gyakuten Saiban Library, by art director Fuse about some random topics.

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