Ste's Bitmap Fonts

Deathwake / Max Headroom

Spectrum / Amstrad - 1985 / 1986

I was still at school when my brother John asked me to draw a font for the game he was working on in his new job as game programmer. I think the one the proper artist had done wasn't very good or something. I came up with this fairly stylish, trim little font, and I think John wanted to show off becuase we made each character 6 pixels wide instead of the 8 pixels (1 byte on the Spectrum) which was the norm. The result looks really neat because of the tighter spacing.

This font (and the 6 pixel wide rendering code) ended up being used at least twice more, in the Max Headroom game, and in the Lightfarce / Zarjaz game we made in a day, probably because it had punctuation and lower case, which people didn't usually bother with in those days.

Glider Rider

Spectrum / Amstrad / C64 - 1986

Wanting to show off again, John decided to go for an extravagent 16x16 pixels per character for the font on his next game. This was quite unusual at the time and so I got a chance to draw something with a bit more character than was possible in the usual 8x8 pixels. This large font looked absolutely massive on the screen, even on the little 14 inch TVs we used, but it was a little too large for the game itself, so it was only used on the title page.

Zub

Spectrum / Amstrad / C64 - 1986

John was trying to do something different again on his next game, so we went from a massive font, to the smallest one possible, to try to simulate what we imagined 'proper' computers with 'multi-tasking windows' looked like (we'd never seen one in action). There's not really much you can do with a font 4 pixels wide (one of which is left blank as a space between characters), but it's still a challenge to get distinguishable M / N / Ws.

Towards the end of development we got the chance to do a 128K version of the game (the original is 48k), so suddenly, instead of desperately trying to squeeze the game into the tiny memory space allowed we suddenly had loads of kilobytes to fill, so I got to draw a large (but slightly wonky) serif font just for the intro.

Feud

Spectrum / Amstrad - 1987

An early 8x8 pixel font. We were always trying to get some style or character into our fonts, but in 8x8 pixels (including the spaces between characters) there is very little room to manoeuvre, so a font with serifs or flourishes or odd shaped characters, yet still readable, was the holy grail of font designers back then.

Amourote

Spectrum / Amstrad - 1987

This was probably the 2nd or 3rd font I designed after starting at Binary Design. I was quite pleased with it, but the boss, Andy Hieke, went mad for it. He was raving about it, and said we should submit it to Letraset to get the design included in their catalogue (this was in the days before True Type fonts, when when Letraset transfer fonts were the format of choice for graphic designers). One of Andy's typically enthusiastic flights-of-fancy which came to nothing (and the font is unreadable and ugly, and not developed enough for use outside of a game), but I was very flattered at the time.

This font is fixed spaced, and a (luxurious at the time) 16x16 pixels per character. No lower case, sorry.

Ironsword / Wizards & Warriors 3

NES - 1988 / 1990

The first two of this set of fonts is from our first NES game, Ironsword. I love the 8x8 pixel one, which is very readable but fairly stylish too - a slightly improved version of the Feud font. The 16x16 pixel one isn't very good - I think I just expanded the small font and smoothed the edges, but was hardly used in the game at all (pretty much just in the end credits).

The 8x16 pixel font is a much nicer large version of the small font, and this was drawn for Ironsword's sequel: Wizards and Warriors 3 (called Silversword in development), which also used the small font.

Fleapit

Coin Op - 1990

This font was for the unreleased coin-op which became the prototype for SNES Plok! The coin-op hardware we were writing for (The Razz Board) used a strange data format for graphics which completely freed us from any constraints based on character, tile, or sprite sizes (its hard to explain, instead of storing square bitmaps, each pixel stored the direction [u / d / l / r] for the next pixel in the sequence). Consequently I designed a font which was free to break out of the restrictive 8x8 or 16x16 pixel grids I was used to, although for practical reasons I limited the maxium size of each character to a completely arbitrary 22 x 29 pixels.

I based the font on the hand drawn lettering style I was using for all my concept sketches at the time, and the idea was that each character's horizontal and vertical position would be randomised slightly, as in the sample.

Solar Jetman

NES - 1990

This is a plain but functional 8x8 pixel font. Like most NES fonts, there were no lower case characters, and punctuation was kept to an absolute minimum as we generally had to fit all characters for the front end (all menus, title and non-game screens) into a set of 256 characters. We treated ourselves to a duplicate set of 8x16 pixel numbers though.

This font was cheekily re-used on the 8-bit home computer game Gazza 2.

Equinox

SNES - 1990

This is a nice small, readable 8x8 pixel font, with a neat drop shadow. The step up from NES to SNES allowed multiple layers or characters to be displayed over the top of each other, so text could now be displayed floating over the top of the game graphics, rather than boxed off in a seperate panel at one side of the screen, and hence we needed little tricks like drop shadows to ensure that the letters stood out from the background.

I also drew a set of Japanese characters for Equinox, included in the full font file, although I'm not sure how much use these are to anyone else, as they may well be in a strange order.

Plok!

SNES - 1992

These wonderfully tidy fonts for SNES Plok! were actually drawn by Lyndon Brooke, the game's artist, based on the original Fleatpit font but neatly fitted into 16x16 and 8x8 pixel grids.

The second two fonts were used for a section set in the past, in black and white starring Grandpappy Plok, where the game's text was displayed on silent movie style caption cards.

Somebody liked this font so much they created a True Type vector version of it!

Tom & Jerry

SNES - 1992

This was a font for titles, designed to be displayed in sprites with proportional character widths and hopefully each sprite bobbing up and down individually. Each character fits within a 16x16 pixel sprite, using a 16 colour palette (4 bits). The palette is designed so that the inner outline and antialiasing can be removed by making colours 1-3 the same inner colour, and 4-5 the same outline colour (as shown in sample).

Ken Griffey Presents Major League Baseball

SNES - 1993

This is a pretty basic, but solid set of versatile fonts for the Ken Griffey baseball game. They are all fixed width (either 8 or 16 pixels wide) and either 8 or 16 pixels high. There are no lower case characters, and very little punctuation, but this is a good selection of readable fonts for mulitple in-game situations.

Maximum Carnage

SNES - 1994

This was a reasonably successful attempt to create a font which looked like comic lettering. There are two versions, one at 16x16 pixels, and one at 8x8 pixels. There are no lower case characters, in keeping with the comic lettering style.

Tin Star

SNES - 1994

This is a nice little wild-west style font. Characters are 16 pixels high, and 16 pixels max (for upper case) or 8 pixels max (for lower case) wide. Each character has its own width though, and they should be positioned horizonally according to their width value.

Its not a good font for reading large chunks of text in. Unfortunately Tin Star had loads of cut scenes, with a long (and very humorous) script, and we made the mistake of expecting players to read it all in this appropriate, but not very readable font.

Misc SNES fonts

SNES - 1992-1994

A couple of small fonts I drew whilst at Software Creations, around the time we were doing lots of SNES games, which may not have ever appeared in games.

The 8x16 pixel headline-style font was for a cartridge called Powerfest which we did for Nintendo of America. This was for a competition where they went around shopping malls in the US inviting players to compete for high scores in a number of games. Ken Griffey Baseball was one of the games (which we had just finished for NOA, and which was why we were asked to make the cart), but a couple of other Nintendo games had to be on the same cartridge (maybe Mario Kart and one other, I can't remember), and there was a little front end to select which game to play and remember your score between the games, which used this font.

Spiral Saga

Playstation - 1995

I did two fonts for this game; a large, pretty, but not very readable big font for titles etc., and a small, neat readable one for menus or large blocks of text. The game was never released, so neither of these fonts have ever been used in a game.

The big font was designed to use a 16 colour palette (a CLUT as they were known on the PSX), with colours 1 to 13 being a range of yellows which can be cycled to give the centre of the characters a fiery glow, and the characters should be proportionally spaced.

The small font is also proprtionally spaced, but despite the couple of sample characters given, I don't think I ever did a full set of Japanese characters in this font.

Combat (Blade and Barrel)

N64 - 1995

This was an attempt to create a very flexible font, one which could have multiple different appearences depending on the palette used, for the unreleased N64 game Blade and Barrel.

The characters use a 16 colour palette, with colour 1 used for the centre of the characters, and colours 2 to 15 used to form a 'glowing' outline if a light to dark spread of colours are used (with colour 15 being closest to the background colour), or a flat coloured outline if the same colour is used for colours 2 to 15.

Wetrix

PC / N64 - 1996 / 1997

The Wetrix font is quite specialised, so probably not much use for other projects, but interesting becuase it includes a pretty comprehensive set of Japanese characters in a matching style to the latin characters. The spacing is rather complicated, and it took a lot of messing around to get every character to line up flush with its neighbour.

The PC font was done in two layers - blue coloured characters and green coloured characters - and the game displayed so many lines of blue, then switched to green, at a differenent point every frame when rendering each character. This produced flowing water look within the characters themselves.

The N64 version used 32 bit colour, with 8 bits of alpha channel. The PNG file includes all the characters used in the game - missing some european accented characters (for cartridge space reasons), but including a complete set of hiragana and katakana Japanese characters, and a smattering of kanji. The font was designed to use lower case only, as a style decision, but Nintendo still insisted we named their precious A button and B button in upper case, hence the 3 or 4 capitals.

The zip file includes Photoshop files of the work files for the N64 font, at double the resolution, with no antialiasing (hence easy to recolour), and the alpha channel as a seperate channel.

Taz Express

N64 - 1998

Taz Express seemed to mark the start of the end of hand-drawn bitmap font creation. The demands of increased colour depths meant that it would take weeks to draw a complete font with all accented characters at a large enough size to reduce to get the smoothed alpha channel edges required, compared to the hours it took to rasterise a True Type font in Photoshop.

I manually created this large font for titles by building each character in 3DS Max (again, from a True Type font starting point) and then texturing and rendering it (again, another way to get the smooth edges required), then adding an alpha channel drop shadow in Photoshop. The PSD file contains the full 32 bit version as a layer, and a seperate alpha channel.

For the main game text I used a True Type font as the basis for all the character glyphs, then postitioned and reszied them all, and added my own alpha channel. I felt dirty doing it - what a cheat! But the result was better than I could have drawn at that resolution, and I got all the punctuation and accented characters for free. I drew the A, B and Z buttons from scratch, at least! The PSD file contains the original hi-res version, without antialiasing, so easier to work with and recolour.

Dragon Tales

PlayStation - 2000

Only the older or lower spec machines - pre alpha channel - could get away with using hand drawn pixel fonts, but we were still doing PlayStation and GameBoy games around this time, so there were still fonts to be drawn.

I had fun drawing this very clear font for a young childrens game, with a full set of upper and lower case, and ASCII punctuation, which is probably still very usable. Each character needs to be spaced proportionally, and the outline can be turned off by changing the palette.

Tetris

Pocket PC - 2003

Perhaps I sounded the death knell for bitmap fonts too soon. I drew these two for a Pocket PC game in 2002. With hardware like this, and mobile phones, and the Nintendo DS etc., perhaps pixel pushers will be in demand for a while yet.

These two are large and small versions of a fairly generic, but clear, proportionally spaced font, with a full set of punctuation and accented characters (for the small font at least). The (finished) game was never released, so these fonts have never been used.