01
As a game title
A haunted-manor title screen: the name set large, the chapter subtitle in lilac, and the menu in the same face at a small size, still easy to read.
A gothic horror typeface with living thorns · v1.000
Hollowthorn
Hollowthorn is a gothic horror typeface for dark games, haunted stories and Halloween designs. Tall, narrow letters with sharp spear points and curved thorns that grow out of the strokes, and unlike most blackletter, it stays easy to read.
Type tester
Try it with your own words
Type a repeated letter, like HHH or ooo: every copy grows different thorns. Switch them off for the clean set.
20 px
The candles went out at midnight
32 px
The candles went out at midnight
48 px
The candles went out at midnight
72 px
The candles went out at midnight
This preview covers Basic Latin and the icons. The full font adds every accented letter, the arrows and the fractions.
Features
Made for game interfaces
A readable gothic horror typeface for dark games and haunted stories, whose thorns change as you type, with 20 matching spooky icons.
01
Living thorns
Every letter has three thorn designs, and Contextual Alternates switch between them as you type, so repeated letters never look copy-pasted.
02
A no-thorn set
Stylistic Set 1 gives every letter a clean, thornless version for small sizes and longer passages.
03
Readable blackletter
Tall, narrow letters with spear points that stay easy to read, so the same face works for the logo, the menus, the journal and the inventory.
04
20 spooky icons
Skulls, bats, ghosts, pumpkins, candles, spiders, coffins, ravens, cauldrons, potions, lanterns and more, typed right next to the text.
05
Two kinds of numbers
Proportional figures by default for text, and tabular figures for timers, counters and anything that must not jump.
06
395 characters
Upper and lowercase with the accented letters Western and Central European languages need, plus 6,845 kerning class pairs that take the thorns into account.
Built-in icons
Twenty icons you can type
Each icon is a character in the font. Click one to copy it, then paste it into anything set in Hollowthorn.
Creatures & spirits
Haunted things
Case study
How Hollowthorn was designed
Why I made it
Horror games want gothic type, and gothic type usually means blackletter: gorgeous on a title card, unreadable by the third line of a journal entry. So the logo gets the blackletter, everything else falls back to a plain font, and the dread drains out of the interface.
With Hollowthorn I kept the gothic shape, the tall narrow letters and sharp spear points, but built it on a readable skeleton, so one typeface can run the title screen, the menus, the journal and the inventory.
Thorns that grow
The thorns are what make it feel alive, and a font that repeats the same thorn on every H looks stamped. So I gave each letter three thorn designs, and the font switches between them on its own as you type, using OpenType Contextual Alternates. Type HHH and you get three different letters.
Each thorn grows from a fixed height on its side of the letter, so the thorns line up across a word and never cross into the next letter. For small sizes or long passages, there's a thornless version of every letter in Stylistic Set 1, so the journal can stay calm while the title stays sharp.
Every mark a spear
I carried the spear motif into the small things too: a pointed A and V, chamfered corners, and diamond-shaped dots, accents and punctuation. Even < and > are single pointed strokes, so they match the rest and stay clear of the numbers beside them.
The 20 icons are solid silhouettes built from straight lines and true circular arcs, drawn at one optical size and centred on the cap height. I made the spider web out of thick threads with open gaps so it stays clear at small sizes, and every icon lives on a Private Use code that never turns into a colour emoji.
How I tested it
The font files pass the OpenType Sanitizer that Chrome and Firefox use, and Font Bakery reports no failures. I checked 133,621 glyph pairs with kerning, including every combination of thorn variants. Each letter is measured by the outline of all its variants together, so the result holds whichever thorns meet, and letters never touch.
Kerning runs to 6,845 class pairs, checked in HarfBuzz and with FreeType's classic kerning call. I tested the living thorns, the thornless set, both kinds of numbers and all 20 icons in a browser, and went through every glyph and all three thorn variants at large size.
In use
02
In the interface
A journal entry, an inventory and a light and sanity panel. Long passages stay readable, and the key, candles, elixir and knife are icons typed from the font.
03
The details
Thorns that change on repeated letters, the thornless set for smaller text, Western and Central European languages, and proportional figures with tabular ones on demand.
04
20 spooky icons
Every icon with its Private Use code, from the skull and bat to the broken heart and the moon.
05
Character set
Upper and lowercase, numbers, punctuation, currency and the accented letters of Latin-1 and Latin Extended-A.
What you get
Everything in the download
- Desktop fontsOTF for design apps, TTF for game engines and Windows.
- Web fontWOFF2.
- Game engine packBMFont bitmap fonts (.fnt, .xml and .png atlas) at 32, 64 and 128 px, for Godot, Unity, GameMaker, LibGDX, Phaser, MonoGame and Love2D.
- Photoshop templateAn editable hero layout with live type layers, layer effects and textures.
- READMEEvery icon code, how to type icons in Unity, Godot, CSS and design apps, and how to use the living thorns and the no-thorn set.
- LicenseThe full license in plain language.
- Specimen imageAn overview of the font.
License
Included with every purchase
- Games and apps, embedded for unlimited copies sold
- Logos, merch, videos, streams and print, with no limit on sales
- Installed on unlimited computers: yours, your team's and your company's
- Websites, with unlimited page views and traffic
Ask me first
- Products where customers type their own text in the font
- Resale in asset packs, templates or font collections
Please don't share or resell the font files. For anything the license doesn't cover, email me. idris.hadjoudj@gmail.com
FAQ
Before you buy
How do the living thorns work?
They use Contextual Alternates (calt), which is on by default in most apps, browsers and engines, so there is nothing to set up. Turn on Stylistic Set 1 (ss01) for the thornless letters.
Will the thorns change in my game engine?
In engines that apply OpenType features they will. Engines that can't switch features on, such as Unity's TextMeshPro, show the default thorns on every letter and proportional numbers; everything else works normally.
How do I type the icons?
Every icon has a Private Use code from U+E101 to U+E114, which always shows the Hollowthorn drawing; the README lists them all, with examples for Unity, Godot and CSS. You can also copy any icon from the grid on this page.
Can I use it in a game I sell, or for its logo?
Yes. Games and apps are included with unlimited copies sold, as long as the font files are packaged inside the game rather than handed to players as installable fonts. Logos and brand identities are included with no extra fee.
Which languages does it support?
Western and Central European languages written in the Latin alphabet, from French, German and Spanish to Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian and Turkish.
Give your game a voice in Hollowthorn.
Related reading
The thinking behind this
Longer write-ups on the craft this font draws on.
Typography for game UI: the part players read under pressure
Interface type is read in half a second, at speed, over moving artwork, by somebody who did not come to your game to read. Almost every rule that applies to a book works against you here, and the fixes are specific.
Read the article
Icon design for games: sets that still work at 32 pixels
An icon has about a fifth of a second and a few hundred pixels to say what a thing is. Most game icon sets fail not because the drawings are bad, but because they were drawn large, one at a time, by different rules.
Read the articleMore fonts
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