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Tips: Choosing a special font

A topic by Adventuron created Dec 08, 2020 Views: 299 Replies: 16
Viewing posts 1 to 4
Host(+1)

Hi all,

Just a reminder that a good font makes a difference.

Browser some really cool fonts here (by Damien Guard). Try to be sure that your fonts are easy to read.

https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/


To import the font, see this section of the documentation:

https://adventuron.io/documentation/#Fonts

I recently updated the documentation to demonstrate how to space out your text, if using an 8x8 pixel art style font:

https://adventuron.io/documentation/#squashedfonts

Chris

Submitted

I really like the ZX fonts but have found a lot of them to be just a bit too blocky or otherwise weirdly spaced.  I went to the creator's website and found his Fontstruct page where he had this:

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1395997/pointandclick

It's Bamburgh-esque but a little less rounded.  The quotation marks weren't quite right, so I fixed that and a few other small things for a very slightly modified version which I think works pretty well.  It's here:

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1857233/pointandclick-1

Host

Nice. It'll be good to see the font in a screenshot of you have time.

Submitted

Sure.  Here's how it's looking so far.

Host

Looks good.  

Recommendation (try any or none of them).

  1. Digitised graphics at low resolution often looks a bit messy so maybe consider doubling the resolution?
  2. Try out the beta version of Adventuron, it'll make it so that the image aligns to the left and right of the status bad. (adventuron.io/beta). Back up your game in a local text file on your computer  before hand in case there are issues.
  3. Set the text colour to not quite black ( #333) is good.
  4. Set the background colour to grey (#ddd).
  5. Add scanlines (shader = "scanlines" in the theme_settings {} section inside your theme).
  6. Set the header pen colour to #fff.

Anyway, love it that there are 12!! gifts, sounds like a sizeable adventure, and 

Chris

Submitted(+1)

Cool.  Thanks for the suggestions!  I'll test them out and see what looks best.

Host

To thine own self be true.

Submitted

I wanted to try a custom font this time around, and it would really have enhanced some of my abandoned ideas. But for my final concept, I've settled on making my game look like it's running in EGA hi-res mode, so I'm using a standard EGA font that I downloaded from this site. It really looks perfect in Adventuron!

Host

Sounds wonderful. Love the EGA style.

I've been kicking around adding an old school PC font to Adventuron for a while now, and it's only the byte overhead that has dissuaded me. Adventuron is already carrying 5 baked in fonts, and the PC font is a bit larger than average as it has more glyphs than the average 8-bit font.

Submitted

I like EGA fonts too! I really should do that for my game, since the graphics are more VGA ... 

Submitted

The fonts from Damien Guard look great (at least if you like the retro look, which is not my case :p), but they don’t seem to have characters with diacritics.

There’s a diaeresis in my name, so I can’t use them. (Of course it’s out of question to just write my name without the diaeresis. I mean, would you accept your name to be misspellt?)

I don’t really want to lose time looking for a font, so I’ll juste use Clairsys, I think.

Host

I spoke with Damien and he said he may be able to add the additional characters to a font if you choose one.

Submitted

Thanks, that’s really nice of him!

But I think it’ll be OK, I’ll just keep Clairsys, which I quite like.

(Also, there are plenty of retro fonts on the web which have the diacritics, so he shouldn’t bother anyway. Even if having diacritics is always great, of course.)

Submitted

I have, in the past, have added new characters to fonts I've liked, btw, Although I guess you need to check the licensing on that.

Submitted

Well, thanks for all the suggestions, but let’s say I want to take the path of least effort right now! ^^

There’s only 2 days left, and I want to move on to other important projects.

Submitted

Other important projects? Like playing and rating the games. :-)

Submitted

ha! I hear you. I put my projects on hold for a bit to enter the Jam! But now I'm woefully behind.