something i tussled about endlessly in earlier dev stuff this year was how to visually represent sign language usage in my sprites or if i even could. the two main characters' family is [Culturally Deaf] and though Tippy is hearing and can operate in an oral and hearing world, Dewdrop ain't. For a character, The Main Guy no less, who exclusively communicates in his woodland critter sign language, I was like.
how'm I gonna handle that when it comes to sprites? it's complicated!!! and gave me a lot of ponders.
THANKS FOR BRINGING UP SIGNING IN VIDEOGAMES! IT WAS A COOL WRITEUP, its super cool seeing someone thinking about how to implement that in a 2D context. ANYWAYS A SIGN OF AFFECTION IS AN INCREDIBLE MANGA AND ITS DEFFO WORTH LOOKING AT IF YOU INTERESTED IN THIS KIND OF THING.
"A Sign of Affection" is a romance manga written by suu Morishita about a young deaf college student falling in love with a slightly older student who is a bit of a globetrotting polyglot weirdo. Yuki is pretty much fully deaf, she has a hearing aid but it cant help her hear speech at all, but she can sign and lipread, WHICH IS SUPER NEAT because we have a SUPER complicated set of text rendering requirements in this manga.
In any other shoujo manga you might just have characters talking in japanese, and that it. Maybe the artist needs to figure out a way to depict text being read from an out of sight phone screen or something. Maybe you throw in an internal monologue, and thats kinda it. Maybe three different text rendering styles.
For this... heck, they had to figure out how to depict spoken word japanese and internal monologue. Standard. Then the boyfriend speaks at least 3 languages, and sometimes is depicted talking in non japanese languages. A bit more complicated. Then theres reading from phone screens and handwriting on paper... with multiple characters having ongoing conversations in a written medium... heck! Then theres sign language, which is mostly handled with "hero poses" with more well known signs.. and sometimes not.. sometimes we have two characters just signing at each other, how to you handle that in like, 5 panels? Then theres the lipreading... and all of this has to be seamlessly integrated smoothly onto a single page.
The lip reading has a particularly fascinating implementation in this manga, it manages to super elegantly render not only just normal, correct readings of a characters speech but also misreadings - sometimes yuki just plain gets it wrong, which can lead to confusion or missed communication. Sometimes letters are jumbled or rotated indicating totally garbled unreadable mouth shapes (maybe due to someone speaking too fast). Sometimes it even handles mouth occlusions, breaking off readability half way though a sentence due to visual obstruction. Like, that's a LOT of meaning being expressed AND state being embedded in the text! Its deffo worth reading if you wanna see how similar problems are tackled in a completely different media. An anime adaption is going to be aired early next year too, will be very interesting to see how the same set of requirements are approached for TV
ohhhh shiiiit. thanks for springboarding off my post cuz i am obviously always on the lookout for any media about deaf experiences so it was a welcome throw. I read a gayboy manhwa called sign recently that is just like, Strictly Okay and left me just feeling shrugged on the Deafguy Experience front, but this sounds wayyyy more up my alley and super cool. THANK YOU
There's actually a lot of what you're pointing out here in my game too, which makes me excited to read it. My everyday life of trying to communicate across boundaries like this is like a really important part of the in-person experience that so much stuff just glosses over or doesn't know what to do about
