Recreation of the pixel font from Nintendo's "Super Mario Land" (1989) on the Game Boy. The same font was reused in other games like "Tetris" (1989), "Dr. Mario" (1990) and "Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3" (1994). Only the characters present in the game ROM have been included.
Update: removed a stray extra pixel in the "9".
Font based on the font in Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal.
Existing characters are the same as in the game while I tried to fill in for some common characters that are missing.
Some notes:
Pk, Mn, and :L replace ¼, ½, and ¾, respectively.
Korean font's punctuation/Arabic numerals are contained within Fullwidth forms.
Also, I guess Fontstruct doesn't support precomposed Hangul characters, so I'm out of luck there. The full-size individual Hangul letters are in Hangul Jamo, while the smaller ones (like on the name entry screen) are in halfwidth forms.
Halfwidth katakana is the same as fullwidth, but fullwidth Latin is different.
Halfwidth versions of the won/yen symbols are the currency symbol, while the fullwidth version is the language's character for it.
Unown letters are contained within the letters in circled capital letters section of Enclosed Alphanumerics.
Some ligatures ('s, d', etc.) are found within the lowercase parentheses and circled letters of Enclosed Alphanumerics.
A font which appears in "Defender/Joust" (1995) on Game Boy. This font is incomplete within the ROM, so many letters and symbols were added for accessibility.
This font is used for Joust, although the numbers which actually appear ingame have their own look which is very different to these.
A font which appears in "Defender/Joust" (1995) on Game Boy. This font is complete within the ROM, so only the original characters are included.
This font is used for Defender's menus and gameplay.
The placement of glyphs within the individual 8x8 tiles suggests that this font is meant to be monospaced. I've squinted at this one long enough... it looks right to me! :D
8x8 pixel art generator. It can be used to draw at any size once you understand how it works. Feel free to write your own scripts/code to automatically draw with this!
Glyphs are mapped to pixels as follows:
456789,.
wxyz0123
opqrstuv
ghijklmn
YZabcdef
QRSTUVWX
IJKLMNOP
ABCDEFGH
ABCDEFGH will make a horizontal line at the bottom edge, HPXfnv3. would make a vertical line on the right edge, and so on.
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- INSTRUCTIONS -
Type to draw! See the sample for an example of how I do it.
1 space = 1px of spacing. Use 8 spaces to start a new block and 16 spaces to start a second block which is 8px away from the first. This fine space exists to allow any sort of pixel art to be drawn within an infinitely large "canvas".
- COMING SOON -
A guide to preparing any text for PixelGen 8x8 (I'm figuring this out now!)
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If you draw something with this font, feel free to show it off in a comment. This is an unusual way to draw, but it has many unforeseen potential uses!
One form of beauty in this type of art is that your code IS the art. And, the code and art are yours to recreate and modify endlessly as you desire, all without ever having to draw, save/load files, or even touch an image editor.
Have fun!
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- PREDRAWN ART -
(To see them, copy them, scroll up and use View -> "User Input" -> Ctrl+V)
1. 8x8 Black Square: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,.
2. 16x16 Black Square: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,.
3. 8x8 Circle: CDEFJOQXYfgnovx26789
4. 8x8 Square Border: ABCDEFGHIPQXYfgnovw3456789,.
5. 8x8 Chessboard: ACEGJLNPQSUWZbdfgikmprtvwy02579.
6. 8x8 Sword: ABEIJKLMRSTZacghjlsu13,.
7. 8x8 Smiley Face: CDEFJOQSTUXYdfgiknoqsvx26789
8. 8x8 Rosary: DLSTUbehiklnovw356789,
9. 8x8 Cartoon Bomb: BCDEFGIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnpqrstuz089,
10. 8x8 Microscope: ABCDEFGHLMRSTUVWYZaghkostwz015678
11. 8x8 Bomberman: BCFGKNQSTUVXZabcdegilnoqtvw356789,
12. 8x8 Slime: BCDEFGIJKLMNOPQRWXYZabcdefghjkmnprsuyz0178
13. 8x8 Double Stars: EGMNOTUVWXdhjpqrwxyz06
14. 8x8 Brick Wall: ABCDEFGHIMQRSTUVWXaeghijklmnoswxyz01236,
15. 8x8 Floppy Disk: BCDEFGIKLMNPQSTUVXYfgijknoqsvwy0256789
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Recreation of the pixel font from Nintendo's "The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening" (1993) on the Game Boy.
This recreation includes the special/accented characters from the french and german releases of the game. In game, the characters with a diaeresis use an additional tile above them - in this recreation, the characters have been combined properly (and as a result, the height of the font overall is greater than 8px).
As an aside, this font was also used for the fan translation of "For frog the bell tolls" (aka "カエルの為に鐘は鳴る" / "Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru", 1992/2011).
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Updated 9 July 2022 to include additional accented uppercase characters, and the star icon.
The main text font used for the laptop variant of the Mega Duck game console, a device that usually came in a form very reminescent of a Game Boy. I discovered this device and font through Ashens' YouTube video on the Mega Duck.
I like the font's vaguely Art Deco stylings, so I'm preserving it here.
Note that since I don't own a Mega Duck myself, I am unable to see every glyph. I had to come up with a few myself. They're consistent to the style but may not reflect the look of the actual hardware. The system does seem to have excellent language support so I hope a Mega Duck owner sees this...
Also inconsistent to the actual font is the spacing. The original looks like Monospaced 8px, but the width of "0" makes this impractical.
Finally, bear in mind that each "pixel" on the Mega Duck had lines of separation between itself and its neighbors. I've changed the brick size to 0.8 in an attempt to simulate this. It takes an immense size to accurately reproduce the grid, so I consider this design to be in the High Resolution Pixel category.
Recreation of the primary pixel font from Konami's "Kid Dracula" (aka "Akumajō Supesharu: Boku Dorakyura-kun", 1993) on the Nintendo Game Boy. Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the primary pixel font from Nintendo's "Metroid II: Return of Samus" (1991) on the Nintendo Game Boy.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font from the japanese release of Nintendo's "Zelda no Densetsu: Yume o Miru Shima" (aka "The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening", 1993) on the Game Boy.
This font includes a full set of hiragana and katakana characters. In the game's tileset, the dakuten and handakuten are separate tiles, positioned in the line above the character they relate to. In this recreation, these characters are pre-combined into a single glyph.
Note that in the original, the "?" and "!" feature very subtle antialiasing. This has been "flattened" for this recreation.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of an unused (?) pixel font found in the ROM for Konami's "Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance" (2002) and "Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow" (2003) on the Nintendo Game Boy Advance.
This font includes a full set of katakana characters. In the tile set, the dakuten and handakuten are separate tiles, likely positioned after the character they relate to. In this recreation, these characters are pre-combined into a single (16px wide) glyph.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
A simple 16x16 terrain tileset. This is designed to work in color AND in monochrome.
In making this, I condensed all known biomes (terrestrial, aquatic, air, space, manmade, transitional) into 26 tiles. This allows a given tile to define multiple different types of areas/terrain, and it allows you to come up with your own meanings for these tiles, rather than having to memorize a legend. Some of the tiles are obvious and some are not; this is by design.
A-Z, a-z = terrain
0-9, 0-9+SHIFT = map borders/frame
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Original size: 12pt
Map Template:
.0123456789
!,,,,,,,,,,
@,,,,,,,,,,
#,,,,,,,,,,
$,,,,,,,,,,
%,,,,,,,,,,
^,,,,,,,,,,
&,,,,,,,,,,
*,,,,,,,,,,
(,,,,,,,,,,
),,,,,,,,,,
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See also:Donjon 16, Gremlin Skins
This tileset was developed specifically for use with GBStudio, where graphics are stored in the system as 8x8 tiles. By using these tiles, one can incorporate a greater variety of tiles into a map without running into the 192-tile limit which Game Boy hardware has.
Well, before making this I already found ways to break that limit (and to use larger tiles), and the resulting games compile fine and even work on real hardware. I made this anyway for those who wish to never exceed 192 tiles, thus keeping their games small in filesize and reducing the likelihood of compiling problems.
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Original size: 6pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)