Happy New Year, everyone! This is a "small" update on the project.
The great news is that I finally found a way to properly use the font encoder/decoder program and manipulate the font in the game to squeeze more letters and words per line into the dialogue boxes. It's been a big struggle trying to figure out how to do so since the beginning of this translation project. It involved looking at source code for the programs that decoded/encoded the font, asking for help in other websites, and a lot of trial and error.
Before, this was how it looked (with the regular font file installed):
This is how it looks after (modified font file):
If you noticed, the space between words have been reduced; some letters such as "r", "h", and "m" have had unnecessary, empty space removed; and certain punctuations marks, like the regular and Japanese quotation marks, have also had unnecessary, empty space removed.
The more exciting aspect of all of this is the ability to add more special characters to the font. I've added all the characters found on a Spanish keyboard. Below is a test screen that displays all of them.
The first line just shows how the accented "A" interacts with other punctuation marks.
The second line shows all the accented letters. They're not perfect (everything's "hand drawn" with letter and numbers), but it's a start.
The third line shows punctuation marks, with the two gradient blocks demonstrating how a 16 by 16 array is used to make the letters/characters. The array (below) is 16 by 16 and serves as the canvas for which characters are made. The Unicode number for " (quotation marks) is 0022. If it has a Unicode number, it can be shown in the game (even emojis might work!). The numbers range from 0-9, then A-F. 0 is blank space, while F is the darkest shade of black. The array below doesn't "look" like a quotation mark because it's not... I only substituted the lines with numbers and letters to show how each letter can add different levels of darkness to the characters.
The fourth line shows that more than the safe 34 characters can fit in a single line (thanks to the modifications made). It's possible that up to 41-44 characters could fit in that line (not just 39), and it is also possible that a
fourth row could be utilized for adding dialogue. I haven't figured out how to remove unneeded space above and below the letters but I will find out if it's possible in the first place.
To wrap things up, I would like to say that this game can be translated into languages other than English. While I do have the Spanish characters added for the time being, I can add characters from other languages (Russian, Portuguese, etc.) as well. If there's someone out there that's interested in wanting to translate the game to other languages, please send me a message and I can give you all the tools you need to get started, while I can also help with adding the proper alphabets to the font file.
...But maybe not Chinese.. that's too many characters to add by hand... Seriously.