It was fun and educational for me, as someone with elementary Chinese penmanship, to sit down and try to analyze and articulate why some of the glyphs looked like “a kid wrote it.” It was also a fun exercise for me to give Claire, our art director, some direction notes for a change! I’ve never had to think about Chinese characters as a design, but as someone who can read the language, I knew it didn’t “feel” very finished. Claire, who doesn’t read Chinese, made a pretty great first attempt, seen in the lower right above. Luckily, we are only attempting to create 3 relatively simple glyphs, all three of which are the same in both simplified and traditional Chinese, so we decided to try to do it ourselves rather than outsourcing it.įor reference, Jake, Claire, and I picked out three existing Chinese fonts that we thought were closest to the feel of Verlag, our English font. We began to play around with the idea of having a properly thought-out Chinese logo to go with the localized title.Ĭhinese typography presents fascinating and challenging problems here’s a great article about the breadth and complexity of the art form. When we began working with Tencent on a localized Chinese voiceover, it was natural for us to suggest as the official localized title. This was long before we had ever decided Firewatch would have a simplified Chinese localization, but the name stuck with me. I grew up in Hong Kong reading Chinese, and I thought the localized name was well chosen-because while it mostly suggests “fire lookout” (which doesn’t specifically imply “firefighting”), it also allows a more ominous interpretation of “person watching the fire burn.” I first considered a Chinese localized name for Firewatch when I gave a talk at GDC China 2015, and they had translated the session title as (word for word, this is “Watch Fire Man”).
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