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Saturday 25 February 2012

The Exploring Type

Please excuse my crappy pun.

When making screen mockups for this blog, I found I needed a font to use for message log entries. After a half-hearted search on line, I decided it would be more fun to make my own - this being the result.
When designing the font I wanted it to work on the same scale as the tiles, having a maximum height of 8 pixels. I also wanted it to be as compact as possible horizontally and legible at small sizes.

I've had a rough draft in photoshop for a while that I would tediously cut and paste into sentences, but this week I took the plunge and tried my had and creating a proper ttf font. This meant coming up with the additional punctuation and symbols needed to make up the standard Latin glyph set, and then redrawing the whole lot as vectors in font creation software. I've still a bit of work to do to get it rendering crisply at all the point sizes, but it should be ready to include in the next download. If anyone knows anything about font creation and 'Hinting' gimmie a shout, I could use the help.
It's amazing how many Pangrams [a sentance that contains every letter in a language] there are, whats even better is how many of them fit a roguelike theme. Here are a few of my favourites:

Jumpy halfling dwarves pick quartz box.

A wizard's job is to vex chumps quickly in fog.

Painful zombies quickly watch a jinxed graveyard.

6 comments:

  1. You are amazing! One of the things that annoys a lot of game developers is finding great art, but there isn't enough to make a game. For example, finding a cool character, but no terrain. You are making everything I can think of that might be included in a roguelike! Characters, monsters, bosses, and now even a custom font! This is all so great! Keep up the good work!

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    1. Thanks Ryland, I have a somewhat patchy record finishing projects so your encouragement makes a big difference. It might take me another year, but if I keep going I think I'll be able to make this tileset into something pretty epic.

      just gotta stay pumped :¬)

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  2. And of course, from google webfonts (http://www.google.com/webfonts):
    "Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil Queen and Jack."

    I guess 'wizard' in general is a great word for pangrams.

    Love the font!

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  3. I'm going to try to get this up in a quick FontStruct font (see http://fontstruct.com/ , it's free and wonderful for creating pixel fonts); it should be very easy since you did all the hard work! I will release it under the most permissive license FontStruct allows.

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    1. Well, that was fast. http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/619766 has a slightly modified version of your font! You can use it at size 6 or 8 to get it pixel-perfect (it depends on your rendering engine; for example, most Windows native applications use size 6, while Adobe products and Java Swing applications use size 8). The page lists the modified letters, but the important thing is that the max width is now 5 (before, the @ was 6 pixels across). Enjoy!

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