Lorewick

Why I made it

Fantasy games ask two opposite things of a pixel font, and as a UI designer I run into that on every RPG screen. The title wants character, something that feels hand-lettered and a little storybook. The dialogue box wants the opposite: paragraph after paragraph that a player can read quickly at a tiny size without ever thinking about the type.

Most pixel fonts pick one side. The clean ones read well but feel like a computer terminal, and the ornate ones look great right up until there are three lines of quest text in them. I wanted one family that could carry the whole interface, from the title screen down to the gold counter, so that's what I set out to make.

Seven pixels, with serifs

I settled on capitals seven pixels tall and a lowercase of five. Every stroke is one pixel wide, so the insides of the letters stay open even at the smallest size, and the serifs are single pixels too. That's just enough to give the letters a storybook voice without clogging them up.

Bold wasn't just Regular made thicker. I gave it its own details: dots and accents are 2 × 2 pixels, and I redrew the small marks that clog first, like superscripts and the asterisk, so names and headings stand out without the letters closing up into blocks.

Every point sits on the pixel grid, and that's what makes it pixel-perfect at 10, 20, 30 and 40 px. At 10 px one font pixel is exactly one screen pixel, and every multiple of 10 simply scales it by a whole number.

Built for the HUD, not just the page

Game text changes while the player is looking at it, which you learn quickly when you design HUDs. So all ten digits share one width, six pixels in Regular and seven in Bold, and a score ticking up or a timer counting down never nudges the numbers next to it.

The icons are the part I'd point to first. They're characters in the font rather than a separate sprite sheet, so a line like “3 hearts, 120 coins, press A” is just text: it wraps, aligns and gets translated along with everything around it. Hearts and stars also work with the standard ♥ ♡ ★ ☆ symbols.

How I tested it

A font ends up inside other people's games, in places I'll never see, so I tested it the way I'd test code. Both styles pass the OpenType Sanitizer that Chrome and Firefox use, and Font Bakery reports no failures.

I also set every pair of letters and punctuation, 83,521 per style, and checked them for collisions, including the accented letters, which got over 1,350 kerning pairs of their own. None of them touch. Kerning ships twice, as modern OpenType kerning and as a classic kern table for older engines, and I validated the bitmap fonts and rendered them in a test engine before release.