Need an idea how to display lots of text in space

Hey guys!

I'm looking for a creative and fun way to display achievements in my game.

My game is a cartoon style space-themed puzzler - think planets, stars, comets, asteroids, spaceships etc.

There will be 3 pages with different information -

1. Statistics like "Total planets saved".

2. Actual achievements like "Best combo".

3. List of recovered artifacts.

That's quite a lot of text. So how do I display it?

I don't want a boring list with scrolling. Or 3 boring buttons that open 3 boring pages or text.

I want something fun and space-related, say like opening credits in Star Wars. (But, obviously I can't use them for many different reasons)

Or maybe some kind of futuristic holographic display.

Or 3 piles of floating space debris, when you click one it arranges itself into text. (probably will be difficult to make)

Could you think of any other ideas?

Stars.

Sorry, could you elaborate?

Letters as stars.

Arranges itself into text...

Nice idea, but I have no clue how to do this...

Making hundreds of floating stars, somehow transforming them into letters and arranging into words seems like a very difficult task. Maybe use blend mode to reveal letters on a big text object?

Nah, you make letters out of frames, and place instances, shrunk down, all over like they were stars in random positions.

Give them three variables, target x, and y, and a bool for movement. Lerp works fine.

You could also lerp their size back to normal, or just do it when they reach destination.

Nice place for a fibonacci.

Letters as sprites? I'm planning to release the game with at least 3 languages, among which is Japanese. This means hundreds of frames and many hours of work... So no, I can't do this.

Besides, the text is not static. How do I calculate the exact positions of each letter? I guess this can be done with a sprite font, but again this will be not be an easy task.

You could do a star field with the achievement text zooming in. Frustratingly enough setting the size of the text object changes the text area and not the visual scale. I could change the font size dynamically but that probably is inefficient methinks. So I just used a bit of javascript to generate an image with the text and load that into a sprite.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xaubosnch3ls6 ... .capx?dl=0

Another idea is to have the text scale as if the lines were being scaled on a cylinder.

The star wars marquee should be doable with a shader i think. It's just a perspective transform. You could also scale them like that as well.

Thanks R0J0hound ! This is a really nice demo!

Is it possible to use custom web font? (I don't know JS...)

I mentioned Star Wars opening text as an example of "a creative and fun idea", but it will not fit the purpose - reading lots of achievements like this will be very annoying for the player.

I don't necessarily need very cool visual effects, just something more interesting than 3 buttons with 3 text areas.

dop2000

You can specify the font, i don't know if web fonts have any special handling besides that.