#pixel fonts

[carrd-and-blog-resource]

Assets from Itch.io that may be useful for indie webmasters

Itch.io is intended first and foremost as an indie game market, including a lot of assets people can buy or download for free for their games. However, there's also a lot of more general resources on there now, especially ones under licenses like CC0 that allow you to use for anything, so here's a mini masterlist of stuff I found while browsing!

Cursors:

Cursors pack 03

Mouse Cursor Pack

Fonts:

Crayon Libre Font - CC0

16+ Free Pixel Fonts

Pixuf - Tiny Pixel Font (CC0)

Quaver

Collection of 20 Public Domain Pixel Fonts

Graphics:

Splat Pack: "Different types of splats for use as textures, stickers and more."

Really, just check out Kenney's entire profile. They create tons of awesome assets (some of these packs are over 1000 images!), and they're under CC0, expressly noting you can use these for any project.

16x16 Bronze Age Icons (70 in total)

8x8 Universal Icon Pack

300 Organized Frames For Any Project - See their profile, too, they've got TONS of stuff (textures, tiling backgrounds, 3D isometric assets etc)

64 Free Emojis

32 Animated Tiny Emotes

1400 16x16 RPG Pixel Icons

Windows Pop-Up Maker 2.0 - This tool makes it easy to make fake Windows pop-ups!

1 Bit Fantasy Creatures

101 stylized fantasy items (border and no border)

Rachel's CC0 Assets

Hexany's Roguelike Tiles (CC0)

Free Pixel Art Flower Pack

72 16x16 RPG Items

Simple Dungeon Crawler 16x16 Pack

Free 16x16 Weapon Icons - More similar sets on their profile!

Mini FX, Items & UI

Bit Bonanza: "a 10x10 asset pack with various fantasy items and entities. This pack contains everything from food and weapons, to snakes and floating eyeballs."

Other:

Aesprite: A pixel art making app. It's popular, and for a good reason. Tons of cool features. Some of the blinkie and pixel makers I follow use this! ($29.99)

Index & Art Simple Gallery Template for Neocities

It honestly really frustrates me that most "free pixels"/"free favicons" people post are just stolen artwork from someone's DeviantArt or something, so my suggestion is: Why not use assets from these packs instead? Most of them are under CC0/Public Domain, and it's easy to recolor them to whatever you need.

Tumblr only allows 30 images per post, so this will continue in a Part 2!

[strangelove-aeronautics]

A collection of my favorite Pixel and Pixel imitation fonts, since, in my experience, these are the hardest fonts to find and pin down. All free, in one way or another. A printable version of this poster is below.

Both images are yours to do with as you wish.

OH FUCK, I FORGOT TO INCLUDE UNIFONT MONO EX. It's one of the most useful pixel fonts. Shit ton of glyphs both for language support and general iconography. Go download it.

[oldinterneticons]

Hey! One of the common pixel fonts is called silkscreen, and it is (shockingly to me) by kottke.

It’s still available for free!

For anyone interested!

[andbloom]

More visual language exploration. I like the idea of sprites being a part of that system.

[snarp]

Full index of the world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles

This person is being so mean to the fonts...

[morlequariat]

Let me just preface this by saying: I really like making fonts. There’s something fascinating about taking a symbol that has a universally-agreed-upon meaning and figuring out how to transform it in a way that keeps its basic structure recognizably intact while still giving it a unique personal touch and ensuring that it aesthetically fits into the greater context of whatever it’s being used for.

So, to that end: This is the default font used in Morlequariat. It’s used for most in-game UI elements, all narration, and almost all dialogue. All of the text in the game is stored on disk as ASCII, and so this font page corresponds to the printable range of ASCII (codepoints 0x20 to 0x7F). However, many of the punctuation symbols included in ASCII were not useful to me, so I replaced them with things that—at least to me—made some sense. The substitutions I made are as follows:

The hash sign (#) is replaced with the Sign of the Light. Any good Gothic fantasy setting needs to have one of two things: either superfluous crosses everywhere, or superfluous instances of whatever the equivalent holy symbol in the setting’s fictional religion is. I chose the latter.

The dollar sign ($) is still a currency symbol, but in this case the currency is gold coins and, in lieu of coming up with a symbol for them, I just drew a gold coin. I’m not entirely satisfied with how it looks (and especially with it being the only colored symbol on this font page), and once I have a better sense of how currency systems are going to be handled in the finished game I will probably replace this with something more appropriate.

The equal sign (=) is replaced with an ellipsis, mostly because a game that has more dialogue than it does mathematical equations is going to have a lot of ellipses and not many equal signs.

Similarly, the greater than (<) and less than (>) signs are replaced with arrows, mostly for use on road signs. Once I had these replaced, it was obvious to replace the caret (^) with an upwards arrow, and the underscore (_) being replaced with a downwards arrow was chosen because of its proximity on the codepage to the upwards arrow and because it’s the only symbol that has any connection to the idea of “below”.

The at sign (@) is replaced with a smiley face. Since I’ve never seen that symbol used for anything but email addresses, and email has not been invented yet in the setting of Morlequariat, it was effectively a blank space that I could put anything in; and this is a symbol I’ve seen frequently enough in the fonts of the old games for Nintendo handhelds that were such a major influence on the game’s aesthetic. I think the main reason I chose the replacement I did is because of the tendency of old-fashioned ASCII-graphics roguelikes to represent the player character with an at sign, and the tendency of upgraded versions of those same roguelikes that used the IBM 437 font to use the smiley face character instead.

The curly braces ( { } ) and the vertical pipe ( | ) are replaced with glyphs that can be combined to make variable-width dashes. This is because I have a tendency to use perhaps more em dashes (—) in casual writing than is strictly warranted, and the hyphen (-) is too short for that.

There are at least two other fonts of the same style that are going to be in the game. One is a Gothic Blackletter font, which is going to be used for inscriptions on ancient statues, dialogue spoken by historical figures, and the like. (This fontpage currently also contains a number of color-coded symbols for game concepts such as damage types and health meters, although these may end up getting moved to their own page at some point in the future.) The other is based on my own handwriting and will probably be used primarily for handwritten texts. As an unrelated personal side project (read: “way to procrastinate working on Morlequariat”), I have also expanded the primary font to cover the entire Greek alphabet and have gotten much further than necessary on replicating the entirety of the IBM 437 and Windows 1252 codepages.

[itchio]

itch.io Recommends: Literate Pixel Teens - itch.io

When writing these posts every week I like to imagine myself as Christian Bale in Newsies. A plucky youngster who has to deliver the news to the people at all costs. Also there’s singing and dancing

Games, get your games! This week we’ve got a beautiful pixel adventure, a comedy take on one of 2016′s most interesting cyberpunk worlds, and some fonts that would look great in your next game or project. Check out this week’s recommendations here.

[pixelatedpolymerclay]

. . .. :Font Experiment42: . .. . .-MET4MORPH