Feeling inspired after reading Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type by Toshi Omagari, I set out to make my own 8x8 pixel font. I worked with a similar approach to the one I used in the larger grid font offstruct rgb.
First started in Adobe Illustrator, each character consists of three iterations of the same 6x6 pixel letter: in RGB Red, Green and Blue. These were layered, offset by one pixel diagonally, filling the 8x8 box. To achieve additive blending, I applied the "Lighten" transparancy setting. Combinations of overlaying these three primary RGB colours result in the secondary RGB coloured pixels Yellow, Cyan and Magenta. In the additive mixing of coloured lights, the equal blending of all three primary colours results in White. All pixels were then entered manually into the fontstructor and black pixels were added for display purposes.
Game font from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters for NES. Recreated font from ENG ROM.
Cyrillic is Custom made.
UPD (25-dec-2023):
Added all "More Latin" symbols (Customs)
Added more "Cyrillic" symbols (Customs)
Some fixes in "Basic latin" from Custom to Original
A simple remake of my original Brixel, but made to be monospace and 8x8
(-Currently being extended-)
Experimental mosaic... or maybe a new mineral species?
This one started as a doodle. I began placing circles to see what kinds of complex shapes I could make, and this was the result.
It achieves a new visual effect at almost every size up to the original. Also try slowly moving the zoom slider for some interesting animations!
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This font is now nearly 1MB in size! I guess it has to do with the intrinsic complexity of circles.
Third font in a series of three colour pixel experiments, made after reading Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type by Toshi Omagari. This one has a double shadow, which gives an extruded 3D effect at a smaller scale.
This tileset was developed specifically for use with GBStudio, where graphics are stored in the system as 8x8 tiles. By using these tiles, one can incorporate a greater variety of tiles into a map without running into the 192-tile limit which Game Boy hardware has.
Well, before making this I already found ways to break that limit (and to use larger tiles), and the resulting games compile fine and even work on real hardware. I made this anyway for those who wish to never exceed 192 tiles, thus keeping their games small in filesize and reducing the likelihood of compiling problems.
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Original size: 6pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)
Yet another polygonal font, this time a diamond. :^)
This one was also designed to combine symmetry and asymmetry. Some letters have central lines and some have offset lines. In this way a greater variety of designs was made possible.
Another experimental font for texturing work. This one uses only an 8x8 grid, but since it isn't pixel art, a much greater variety of patterns is possible. Every glyph in the font repeats as a seamless texture in both directions.
See also:Gremlin Skins (pixel version)
Official font of AMFA (formerly ATMA), the main rival of MARENGI Omnisystems in Endless Sea Of Stars. Appears throughout my games (especially those using the ESOS and ESOS-Lite engines) and is used as the main font of ESOS Terminal A (the one doing the super-long survey).
Between 2012 and 2014, ESOS Journey-Depth AI entities collaborated to produce this specific arrangement of pixels as the most legible form of 1px wide, monochrome 8x8 Latin for electro-optical systems (Marinan Interpretability Value 9.29).
This font is useful if you want to write some really efficient text recognition software for a robot with a camera, or if you want a pixel font which elicits a high degree of reading accuracy. Some would argue that the uppercase makes it less readable, but you'll be hard pressed to find another font that is THIS readable in uppercase only!
This is a cloneFor this font I decided to do several things I almost never do with other pixel fonts.
First is the use of an 8*8 grid. I consider this size tough to work with so I tend to stay away from it, preferring X*7 or X*9.
Second is the rounding or softening of all 90° angles. 3- and 4- way intersections are exempt from this rule. However, some other acute angles were rounded as well.
Third is kerning, which helps ease this font back into microfont territory a bit by reducing excess space. I usually design pixel fonts so they don't need this, but not this time!
Fourth is the embrace of asymmetry throughout most letterforms, which is almost a natural consequence of making a font on the 8*8 grid.
Fifth is extending MmWw. I usually try to truncate these letters to fit my grid. Sometimes I make a symmetrical design for them, but this time I just let 'em sprawl.
Despite all these differences in methodology, I think this font looks rather like a hybrid of "Marengi" and "AMFA". Very pleased with the result!
8x8 pixel art generator. It can be used to draw at any size once you understand how it works. Feel free to write your own scripts/code to automatically draw with this!
Glyphs are mapped to pixels as follows:
456789,.
wxyz0123
opqrstuv
ghijklmn
YZabcdef
QRSTUVWX
IJKLMNOP
ABCDEFGH
ABCDEFGH will make a horizontal line at the bottom edge, HPXfnv3. would make a vertical line on the right edge, and so on.
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- INSTRUCTIONS -
Type to draw! See the sample for an example of how I do it.
1 space = 1px of spacing. Use 8 spaces to start a new block and 16 spaces to start a second block which is 8px away from the first. This fine space exists to allow any sort of pixel art to be drawn within an infinitely large "canvas".
- COMING SOON -
A guide to preparing any text for PixelGen 8x8 (I'm figuring this out now!)
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If you draw something with this font, feel free to show it off in a comment. This is an unusual way to draw, but it has many unforeseen potential uses!
One form of beauty in this type of art is that your code IS the art. And, the code and art are yours to recreate and modify endlessly as you desire, all without ever having to draw, save/load files, or even touch an image editor.
Have fun!
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- PREDRAWN ART -
(To see them, copy them, scroll up and use View -> "User Input" -> Ctrl+V)
1. 8x8 Black Square: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,.
2. 16x16 Black Square: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789,.
3. 8x8 Circle: CDEFJOQXYfgnovx26789
4. 8x8 Square Border: ABCDEFGHIPQXYfgnovw3456789,.
5. 8x8 Chessboard: ACEGJLNPQSUWZbdfgikmprtvwy02579.
6. 8x8 Sword: ABEIJKLMRSTZacghjlsu13,.
7. 8x8 Smiley Face: CDEFJOQSTUXYdfgiknoqsvx26789
8. 8x8 Rosary: DLSTUbehiklnovw356789,
9. 8x8 Cartoon Bomb: BCDEFGIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnpqrstuz089,
10. 8x8 Microscope: ABCDEFGHLMRSTUVWYZaghkostwz015678
11. 8x8 Bomberman: BCFGKNQSTUVXZabcdegilnoqtvw356789,
12. 8x8 Slime: BCDEFGIJKLMNOPQRWXYZabcdefghjkmnprsuyz0178
13. 8x8 Double Stars: EGMNOTUVWXdhjpqrwxyz06
14. 8x8 Brick Wall: ABCDEFGHIMQRSTUVWXaeghijklmnoswxyz01236,
15. 8x8 Floppy Disk: BCDEFGIKLMNPQSTUVXYfgijknoqsvwy0256789
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A written court language used by Ashrians on Bysonce Island, Planet Ashr in my video game Endless Sea of Stars. This one is used for public court documents, and its brother language Calystiphos Hand is used for private documents and old government records.
These glyphs could be considered a form of shorthand unto themselves, since each court stenographer has its own way of writing these down and its own way of abbreviating or embellishing them. Through knowledge of these glyphs, and their accompanying interpretation, one can surmise all of the important proceedings and notes.
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Common methods for stenographers to alter these glyphs involve:
- Adding/removing quadrants
- Crossing out one or more elements in colored ink
- Drawing connecting lines between points within one or more quadrants
- Inscribing shorthand or marginalia within negative spaces
- Marking or coloring within the central circle
- Shading via different means (scribbling, crosshatching, or with colors)
- Rotating a quadrant upon its own axis
It's important to note that stenographers also often write (either in Royal Bysoncian, Sea Bysoncian or Voktlandish) in accompaniment with these symbols. The idea is for each stenographer to come up with a system of encoding that works for it. Eudastiphos Hand could thus be considered an amalgamate, interlingual cipher built from other Ashrian languages.
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In terms of communication systems which exist on Earth, this is most readily compared to Nsibidi.
Font taken from here => Romhacking.net
Latin block is traced from Linux stock VGA8 font. Designed to fit 8x8 grid including spacing, so most symbols are 7x7 =WARNING= Line spacing is stuck and cannot be edited within FontStruct, you can edit it manually, see http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/Line_Spacing.html for example.
Alternate take on Nirvanite, this time with bullseyes rather than solid circles as the large segments.
This one is a lot more organic than its predecessor, but also a lot more confusing. Looks like clusters of alien tadpole eggs to me!
This is a clone of Nirvanite