A Game Design Font

I've just finished creating a font for Bunraku Nights.

It depicts the dominoes from a standard set of 28. I'll make it available shortly if anyone's interested.

But the font creation bug has hit.

I'm looking at creating a few new fonts, depicting dice of various types with each possible result.

4 images of a d4
6 images of a d6 (may 12, 1 set depicting numerals, 1 set depicting pips)
8 images of a d8
10 images of a d10
12 images of a d12
20 images of a d20

But with 128 characters possible in a font, that will leave more than half of the potential characters empty. So what do I put in the other potential character slots for my new gaming font?

Comments

Chris Sakkas said…
I recommend public domain versions of the D&D 4E icons - a melee attack (sword), a ranged attack (bow), a burst and a blast.

And perhaps a public domain version of the dungeon symbols - monster (dragon's head), statue (star-in-circle), trap (box with cross), treasure (chest).

(In brackets is the default icon for the concept.)
Thursday, 29 April, 2010
Anonymous said…
A coin showing heads and tails? (That only fill two slots, so not all that helpful.)

Card values Ace-King? With the 4 suits (clubs, diamond, hearts, spades) as additional characters? I suppose you could do Tarot suits as well.

Those seem to be the other major 'random factor' generators.
Friday, 30 April, 2010
Nojh said…
You could also do 10 images of the "10s digit" version of a d10 that is often combined to do a d100.

So thats 10 more.

You might want some side view "blank" dice for someone to use the font to say 'roll a d4 here' as simply putting the symbol of a triangle.

Thats another 6 more.

You might also consider a perspective view rather than a simple orthogonal view of the dice, number-less or with numbers.

That could fill up your character set quick if you did that for ever possible perspective. I would actually only suggest doing it with the max value up.

I will try to think up more ideas.

I would very much be interested in using this kind of font in one of my future commercial products. Are you going to write up a license or offer it for free in some fashion?
Friday, 30 April, 2010
Vulpinoid said…
It actually appears that I'm wrong about the 128 characters...apparently Unicode fonts can have far more, but I want the final product to remain fairly user friendly. Some of the unicode fonts with high numbers of glyphs can get pretty hard to use. Microsoft Word has an option for insert symbol, which allows obscure glyphs from fonts to be added into text, but this can be a real pain to use. I haven't needed to try it with inDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop, but I know that their text handling capabilities can be even more temperamental than Word. I don't know about a lot of the other word processing software on the market.

So I'm going to try to limit my font projects to 100 characters or so...

abcdefghjiklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890-+[]{}()<>,.?!@#$%^&*/;'\|=_~`

...generally just the stuff that easy to access with a single quick keystroke, or a keystroke plus the shift key.
Friday, 30 April, 2010
Andrew Smith said…
Fudge dice, of course!
Friday, 30 April, 2010
Jeff Russell said…
What program(s) are you using for font creation? I loves me some fonts, and was recently thinking I'd like to try my hand at designing some, but haven't found the appropriate software.
Saturday, 01 May, 2010
Vulpinoid said…
MY father-in-law passed away just before Christmas and he was one of those old guys who likes to collect gadgets, tools and general interesting stuff. He had a ham radio set-up with a big shortwave antenna on the roof, a workshop that any steampunk would kill for, and an assortment of computer parts and accessories dating from the 1970's until the mid 2000's when he started to get dementia, and had a few strokes.

I've been given the opportunity to go through his software collection and scavenge anything that could be useful before the rest get sent off to a local charity. Among the discs I've found tens of thousands of fonts, and a couple of font editors.

The editor I'll be using is called "Font Creator Professional Edition" from High-Logic software. It's certainly not the most recent version, I think it dates from about 2007. But it seems to produce True-Type Fonts fully compatible with PDF embedding, so that's a good start. And it lets me turn images into glyphs, so I can scan drawings (or handwriting) then manipulate them through Photoshop, and finally turn them into usable fonts.

Time consuming, but the kind of fiddly detail that I enjoy.
Saturday, 01 May, 2010
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