Font Test

Moresco · Sun 12/04/2009 10:57:38

Quote from: redspark on Sun 12/04/2009 00:05:08
Which one do you think that you could stand staring at for hours on end? Any of them? BTW... If I go with a different font, I will donate the Lady Ice SCI font to the AGS community.

Either Morris Roman or Gaelic as the best choices there, but honestly none of them are very nice to look at.

redspark · Sun 12/04/2009 14:19:05

Well, may be I'm barking up the wrong tree. I just poked around the bitmap fonts section on Dafont and found some interesting ones there. They are crisp and clean at their appropriate size. They are a little old school but perhaps that's what is needed. The two I like are Lunchtime and Venice Classic. However, I think, Mister Pixel is the easiest to read.

Tell me what you think:

Moresco · Sun 12/04/2009 15:07:01

Quote from: redspark on Sun 12/04/2009 14:19:05
Well, may be I'm barking up the wrong tree. I just poked around the bitmap fonts section on Dafont and found some interesting ones there. They are crisp and clean at their appropriate size. They are a little old school but perhaps that's what is needed. The two I like are Lunchtime and Venice Classic. However, I think, Mister Pixel is the easiest to read.

From those, I liked first or last...but the last one was a bit cramped vertically from line to line. Otherwise fairly compact and easy to read, dig those two.

redspark · Sun 12/04/2009 15:22:27

It shouldn't be any trouble to fix the line height issue for the last one -- nor any character spacing problems. However, I thought the height of the characters may be too small for a 640x480 game. They are only 12 pixels high. But may be it is good for the character's size. It doesn't seem to overpower the chibi like some of the others do.

Kastchey · Sun 12/04/2009 15:27:36

I suppose that one of the main characteristics of a well-designed and fitting font is that you don't actually notice it while reading. I'd go for Venice Classic out of these seven, because it's the only one that doesn't draw my attention off the actual text. And it's not too narrow either... but yes, PixAntique fits the character size better than Venice Classic.

Ryan Timothy B · Sun 12/04/2009 17:52:04

Either Venice Classic or Mister Pixel are good.

Mister Pixel gives it that old school 2d rpg feeling; it's also very easy to read.
And Venice Classic looks more medieval and fitting for the age of the game (castles and kings and what-not).

Game looks great btw.

rbaleksandar · Sun 12/04/2009 21:21:15

I'm for Venice Classic too. Looks cool, it's readable and most important - fits the game style.

redspark · Mon 13/04/2009 11:09:10

Thanks, everyone. I'm in the process of converting Venice Classic to a SCI font. I'll test it out and see how that looks. Thanks again.

Dualnames · Wed 15/04/2009 20:25:37

I say the last one in the pic is the best...

redspark · Sat 18/04/2009 23:50:01

Here is the final look with Speech Bubbles implemented (Thanks to SSH).

Dualnames · Sun 19/04/2009 20:36:39

I like it!!!(Worthless of posts)

redspark · Sun 19/04/2009 22:20:17

Thanks! At least I feel like I'm on the right track.

Kastchey · Mon 20/04/2009 18:58:00

I like it too. However, do you have an option to anti-alias the font? Might be worth trying.
I was also wondering if the bubbles would look better with white background instead of NES-ish dark blue. I made a sample using the screenshot you provided, I'm not sure if it really works better though.
Screenshot here

redspark · Mon 20/04/2009 19:11:01

Thank you and thanks for the sample adjustment. I didn't try an alternate Bubble outline color. Maybe if the bubble outline was dark purple instead of light purple it would be better. But I originally had it as Black and White and the contrast got to me after awhile. I didn't like it because the font looked even harsher. The purple shades for the bubble is in keeping with the colors used in my Inventory HUD and I felt it was easier on my eyes. Maybe it's just my imagination.

The font is an SCI font. I converted it by hand from the TTF version for better performance. I don't think it can be anti-aliased because of that. But I'm not familiar enough with AGS to know for sure.

Snarky · Tue 21/04/2009 08:53:25

Looks pretty good, but you should adjust the borders on the speech bubble so that the top and bottom margins match.

redspark · Tue 21/04/2009 11:35:00

The Top and Bottom margins do match. The font height has some extra space at the bottom to add space between lines. However, it throws the vertical alignment of the text off within the Bubble. But I think I figured a way to fix it in the code. I offset the text Y placement by the same number of pixels and it centered no problem. Thanks for pointing it out.

Sorry that the room graphics have changed a bit from the first post. I've been playing around with the room lighting and textures.