Feb 082009
Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering exhaustively goes through dozens of variations of word balloons and lettering choices in them.
I have often argued that in dealing with chat bubbles in MMOs, we should just steal these conventions, because so many people are familiar with them just by osmosis, even if they are not comics readers (many of these conventions are used in the funny pages too).
We had huge debates on SWG about whether to use “plain chat bubbles” or to invent something that was styled more like Star Wars. Plain won, in the end — and we ended up supporting regular, shout, thought, whisper, musical, caption, and more.
7 Responses to “Great primer on comic book balloons and lettering”
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Given that star wars comic books use the same types of bubbles, that, to me, certainly makes quite a bit of sense. Still, if there’s a convention like that one, I generally would state it is a good idea to go with it.
Interesting. I don’t remember chat bubbles in Star Wars Galaxies, although I did only play a trial. I thought There was the only virtual world to have used them – it does seem a much better way of communicating chat in a world with avatars than an IRC-style chat box in the corner.
Then you’ve never been to Coronet Starport 🙂
I don’t think many people knew about the various styles of chat bubbles. I only did because they took up a lot of space in the printable beta manual.
Many of them were triggered automatically, and you didn’t need to do anything too special to get them. Use /shout and you got the shouty one. Use an emote and you got the caption or thought bubbles. Others you had to know the trick. /sing got you the musical notes. 🙂
I loved the SWG chat bubbles. No need to look at that fast scrolling chat box, the bubble would tell you what that char in front of you said – and how he meant it. And there were the auto-emotes that reacted to certain keywords. I loved to use the /sing command. Since that one was only for entertainers, nothing showed up on screen or in the chat box when I used it, but the auto-animations still fired.
/sing 🙂
I too liked the SWG chat bubbles. We identify with them much better. To me, current chat bubbles, or complete lack of, is an immersion breaker.
I don’t recall the chat bubbles much, but I know that if they’re there, I get used to them, if they’re not, I get used to not seeing them. Changing from one to the other breaks immersion for a little while, then I acclimate.
But I’d like to add, I *loved* the ability to set your mood in SWG, and have essentially an auto “say” replace, where if I’m grumpy my chat is presented as “Player groused, ‘Damn, not again.'” rather than “Player said…” I wonder if this same effect could be achieved in chat bubbles by doing an auto-swap of font, border style and color?
This would kinda tie in to the whole Status/Twitter discussion, since it immediately conveys an important element of a person’s status instantly and intuitively, in a way that’s set-and-forget (and thus doesn’t need to be repeated every time someone new enters the conversation, meaning none of the continual interruptions to explain to the new name that you might be a little snappy with folks today).