Recreation of the pixel font from Activision's "Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure" (1994) on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and the SNES.
The font is the same between the two platforms, with the exception of punctuation characters - this recreation combines the best characters of both version.
Beyond that, only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cscuCIzItZQ
AYOUVEVVBNYNYBOCaZbbXI
The alphabet writing system is based on some principles as follows:
1. Because a single line that is too long can make it difficult to recognize its length, each symbol will include a vertical line and there will not be a single vertical line occupying 3-grid distance without horizontal cutting.
2. A symbol must contain a vertical or horizontal stroke in the bottom block to avoid the appearance of two letters with the same appearance but different heights.
3. Due to the vertical line being read first to distinguish different letters before reading the horizontal line, the horizontal line in a letter always starts to the right of the vertical line.
4. In lowercase letters, voiced consonants are always one vertical line higher than clear consonants.
5. The size of vowels is always smaller than that of consonants.
6. Generally, the more commonly used the consonants are, the simpler they are.
7. Letters with more similar pronunciations usually are more similar, such as corresponding voiced and clear consonants, h and f, w and u, y and i, m and n.
8. Letters and numbers can be distinguished by the bottom two strokes.
9. Add a horizontal stroke above the corresponding lowercase letter for uppercase letters.
My version of Jan Tschichold’s “Schmale Grotesk - Leicht und schnell konstruierbare Schrift” (narrow grotesque - font that is easy and quick to construct), from 1930.
Turns out it isn’t always “quick and easy” to translate a pen and straightedge approach to constructed letters into Fontstruct’s prefabricated bricks setting.
In expanding the glyph coverage, I tried to remain true to the spirit of the original self imposed limitations, both in terms of grid (e.g. the cramped space for the uppercase diacritics), and of tools (see the solution for superscripts et similia).
The font covers all of Google Fonts Basic set and, given the c-caron present in the source, all of Czech orthography. I may try to add other Eastern European languages in the future.
For different takes on the same source, you can look at Serious, here on Fontstruct, or at Iwan Reschniev, for an extensive expansion in weights and typographic features.
As always, comments and suggestions are welcome :-)
The font I'm making will gradually have more and more characters, even PUA's for unencoded ones!
Plans for future updates:
- Expanding the font to include more Latin characters
- Adding some non-Latin alphabets like Greek and Cyrillic
- Adding sitelen pona and Shidinn