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Name is a pun and a work-in-progress.
This is my first try at a serif-style font.
If you need any character set specifically, message me and I'll add them ASAP.
Contains:
-Basic Latin 100%!
-Latin Supplement 100%!
-Latin Extended A 100%!
-Latin Extended B ~65% (will most likely never be finished)
-Cyrillic (Basic Russian: 75%)
More coming soon!
Feeling inspired after reading Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type by Toshi Omagari, I set out to make my own 8x8 pixel font. I worked with a similar approach to the one I used in the larger grid font offstruct rgb.
First started in Adobe Illustrator, each character consists of three iterations of the same 6x6 pixel letter: in RGB Red, Green and Blue. These were layered, offset by one pixel diagonally, filling the 8x8 box. To achieve additive blending, I applied the "Lighten" transparancy setting. Combinations of overlaying these three primary RGB colours result in the secondary RGB coloured pixels Yellow, Cyan and Magenta. In the additive mixing of coloured lights, the equal blending of all three primary colours results in White. All pixels were then entered manually into the fontstructor and black pixels were added for display purposes.
What began nearly 8 years ago as an experiment in multi-stage, multi-resolution pixel serif type drafting (starting smallish then manually upscaling x4), took on the robust character you see here after countless edits and some tricky lessons learned along the way.
The initial weight was on the light side (cloned privately for posterity), so I took a leap into this bookish weight by fattening each glyph copy-pasted 1 pixel shifted both up and to the right. A rudimentary technique, by no means novel, yet almost wholly effective. I saw fit from here to only make a handful of corrections, keeping the slightly rounded and slanted serif shape that resulted as well as the subtle reenforcing of a pen-nib construction.
More intriguing is the 1-bit “anti-aliasing” scheme I found myself progressively guided toward while finding the lines of these curves developing the initial light weight. Implied diagonals and said curves – as well as refinement of contrast – are substantially more granular and specific than had I taken a black-and-white posterized, or stairstepped approach.
At half-resolution, the resulting smoothness is acceptible. This type of hinting will be useful in developing a substitution rule set consisting of subpixel slanted or curved bricks to produce a “vectorized” version.
Indeed, such a process could be purely automated by a proficient developer or properly trained neural network (this would be a really interesting future feature for fontstruct pro – rather than hinting a font after painstaking vector construction, why not reverse the process by way of en vogue ai-assisted upscaling?).
Basic accented charaters and numerals are being added as I churn through the extended character set...
Recreation of the small pixel font from the european/north american release of Climax Entertainment/Sonic! Software Planning's "Shining Force" (1992) on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.
This font is unusual, as each character not only comprises two tiles (for its height), but also features characters that are wider than the maximum 8px tiles. In the game's tile set, this was achieved by using a custom encoding, where a single tile contains the combined values for two horizontal tiles.
See this short Twitter thread for a little dissection of the tile set.
The width of each character is also variable and encoded in the bottom tile for each character. Unfortunately, I was unable to work out the logic behind the width information bits - so, for characters used in the game, the correct width was matched manually, and for any characters not encountered (yet) in any of the dialog boxes, I took an educated guess...
Due to the complexity of this encoding, I won't tackle the hiragana/katakana large font from the japanese release.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included
yeah this is a thing. this font has more glyphs than any other one i've made and i'm still probably gonna add more lol
Update Apr 4 2019 2:56 PM - Shifted the 1 a single brick to the right; now the digits are monospaced yay.
Update Apr 5 2019 8:50 AM - Added Latin Extended-A, Number Forms, and a couple other things
Color recreation of the pixel font used in Capcom's "Hyper Street Fighter 2 - The Anniversary Edition" (2004) - though it actually made its first appearance in "Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers" (1993).
This recreation uses the special TTF+SVG format, which currently has limited support.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
This is a clone of Hyper Street Fighter 2 Anniversary EditionRecreation of the pixel font from Sega's "Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse" (1990) on the Sega Mega Drive.
This font includes a full set of hiragana and katakana characters. In the tile set, the dakuten and handakuten are separate tiles, positioned after the character they relate to. In this recreation, these characters are pre-combined into a single glyph.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
Recreation of the pixel font from Taito's "Double Axle" (1991).
As this is my 1000th font (with most of them computer/game recreations, collated for The Video Game Font Preservation Society), it's worth noting why I chose this.
The arcade game itself is rather obscure, and not very good. However, the characters are, for the most part, very "classic arcade font" - though this font does have a few notable little quirks that make it unique (the weirdly slanted "0", the "8" with its offset counters, the mix of serif and sans serif). But most of all, what really struck me about the font is the colour treatment in game - a beautiful "desert chrome" rendition that just screams late 80s/early 90s.
This recreation uses the special OpenType SVG (TTF+SVG) format, which currently has limited support.
One minor tweak I made was to the "T", which had a very odd inbalance. Apart from that, only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.