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this is a good thread but I canāt find pics of the square font so many PSX games used for technical HUDs and now Iām going crazy, especially since I know Iāve found a facsimile to use myself. It just looks great rendering numbers and with an additive, 70% opacity blend.
Iām partial to the Quintet font and have used it but I had to fix a few things: some letterforms are just bonkers (the capital āRā with its curly tail is just nuts) and the monospace kerning looks awful.
edit: I shouldnāt have gone looking
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full disclosure i made this thread because iām working on designing menus for my Secret Project and want more typography references since iām noticeably out of practice:
yeah
I like the clean, cute lowercase t. That e doesnāt want to behave, does it?
Linkās Awakening has an interesting italicized font. Itās obnoxious and too stylized for body text at first but, strangely, becomes very pleasant and conversational after a while. Itās good for internal monologues and things like a character reading to themselves.
and goofy Nintendo jokes
Were there any successful text shadows on old pixel fonts? Enix did that gradient thing which I wouldnāt really call successful.
?
Yeah, those look like shadow pixels on the letters, but if they always put them on black whatās the point?
I guess Iām wondering if a) itās possible to pull it off (it looks good on those MegaMan letters), and b) if anyone used it to put text outside big boxes.
I remember floating letters to introduce areas in Terranigma; now that I think about it, Super Mario Worldās hud was floating, which means:
Yep. And the SNES didnāt really have higher resolution than the NES, so this could have been achieved earlier, yeah?
i think it was in a few cases (none coming to mind at the moment, my research of the NES library is failing me) but it was rare mostly due to the fact that characters were tiles, not sprites, and therefore were almost never drawn on top of anything else, so there wasnāt a lot of need (plus color palette restrictions make it less desirable)
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anyway iām sure we can all agree this is the nes game that would have looked best with a shadow font
hmm, that mint green looks like a transparent HUD color
by the way I was playing NES Batman again last night and those color palettes are so damn good I had to run around the room a few times
oh, of course Gimmick did drop shadow text, because Gimmick did fucking everything
Gimmick actually had multiple fonts which is kind of insane for an NES title
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in English, no less
I guess by 1992 ROM prices allowed for splurging
Gimmick cartridges were ridiculously expensive to produce, to be fair
ah, so it was just dumb. Well, thatās fair in service of ART! (rendered in cute mascot platformer mode)
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I remember using Dina back when I was still writing code. It also looks good in roguelikes, google image search says.
today i finally figured out that the mother 3 font looks so good because it cheats and isnāt actually monospace. so i guess that explains why my attempts to imitate it have been so unsuccessful
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you know what, I dug through my PSX games I like the HUD on (Ace Combat, Space Griffon, Armored Core) and realized I was misremembering them all using the Metal Gear Solid HUD font. Itās the treatment that I really like; they tend to go for rounded letter-shapes like actual fighter cockpits.
Still, the Metal Gear font is lovely.
Once they move into HD they add rounded edges but also give it a glow/transparency treatment. Iād prefer it squared + alpha additive, but they keep the overall proportions similar enough.
another issue was that adding a drop shadow to really low-res text could make it look blurry or difficult to read on a CRTāsomething not noticeable in emulators
(yes i am still thinking about this)
edit: hereās a comparison with an FF NES romhack that added dropshadow to text. it is not an improvement imo
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the āSgt. Helmet Training Dayā font is kind of an artistic achievement upon closer inspection. amazed itās legible at all at that resolution, with the combination of extreme thematic stylization, anti-aliasing, and 1px drop shadow
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yessss