The original Chinese font (which we call "the Indienova font") was
received from the Chinese translators directly, and didn't come with
any license or copyright information other than that it was made by
Indienova. Questions have now been raised about the actual origin of
the characters in the font, and while we do have confirmation from the
translators that we're probably in the clear, they did suggest another
font for us to use, which we're switching to to be sure.
Some background information: the ideal font would probably be Ark Pixel
(https://github.com/TakWolf/ark-pixel-font/), but this font is not
finished yet. Therefore, the creators of Ark Pixel have made a font
that can be used as a placeholder to use in the meantime, Fusion Pixel
(https://github.com/TakWolf/fusion-pixel-font), which combines some
other fonts together in order to get full coverage. This is the font
we're now switching to.
It's not _that_ simple though - the ASCII part of Fusion Pixel is kinda
bad for us using it as a monospaced font. Normally I just replace the
ASCII set by the fullwidth characters, but in this font they were
almost entirely the same. So I instead picked the fullwidth characters
from Galmuri 12px, which is one of the "fusioned" fonts. Interestingly,
we happen to also use the 10px version of this as our Korean font, and
I like these Latin letters, so yay.
I also made the call to split the Chinese font into separate variants
for Simplified and Traditional Chinese. I was aware of the problem with
the Han Unification, but the Traditional Chinese translator said the
Indienova font also contains all the Traditional Chinese characters,
and they proofread the translation, so it was probably fine. Apparently
the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese variants of
the same characters are not that big, and it's acceptable. But
Fusion Pixel gives us separate versions of the font for Simplified and
Traditional Chinese, so this is a chance to get it right. Just kidding,
Fusion Pixel's Traditional variant switches out many characters that
were shared between Simplified and Traditional Chinese to Japanese
variants which are noticeably different. So it would be better to keep
using the SC font for TC, just like the Indienova font is SC only.
However: Ark Pixel does have a version with correct characters for
Traditional Chinese! So for the TC version of our font, I just took all
Chinese characters from the TC version of Ark Pixel where available.
That way, all characters I checked have changed to TC variants
correctly.
This will be needed for the Simplified Chinese translation, of which
the first version has just been delivered!
This is the first language with a font bigger than 8x8 (this is 12x12),
so it might be a little rough in some places. Most of the game is
already prepared for it, though!
The only changes I made from the previous version (which was uploaded
on Discord a few times and also sent to the translator) was the …
character - it's often used twice in a row, and it was a little uneven
(looking like - - - - - - instead of - - - - - -); and the
semicolon, which was missing some pixels.
