Finding a Font for Space Invaliens

Every game needs a Font for it too look good, consistent and stand out. Hopefully the Title of your game can match the font in some way and make the screen look like a whole nicely coherent and designed layout.

I have been guilty in my XNA XBLIG games of using several fonts per screen. Something at least one of my Peers pointed out to me. Not in an insulting way, but notifying me that he found it pretty horrific I could mix 3 fonts on a page. the thing is I mostly liked what I created.. and yes, as you well know I am no artist (yet I do hold qualifications in art believe it or not!). I liked what I created cos it stood out, in a way that magazines can separate parts of their page by using different types and such, only on a single computer game screen this is simply not acceptable. If I had been more talented with layout, I believe my screens would have worked really well, instead that got the point Mostly across, but for sure it is no way perfect.

So here I am fooling around with my current game Space Invaliens, cos I am brain dead. The events of the last few weeks have left my mind unable to code. When I try the projected code I want to write seems to fade away from my brain and leaves me vacuous. So instead of coding I am fiddling with various aspects that I am able to do. In this case working with the font. I think it HIGH time that Ariel was removed from the game. Also working on this reminds me how to get fonts into Marmalade, which I need for a font replacement in Hoop Fighter.

So I went to one of the places I love to search for such things. www.dafonts.com . A site that has so many fonts it would take weeks to look through them all. However because of the sheer number of them, it is also so difficult to find what you want. That is the second reason I like this web site. Their search options are great. I find some fonts I like but they are all for personal use.. gah! So then I realize I can search by completely free fonts. as a category. After this I make great headway and end up with several fonts I like. Then I whittle them down to two styles (I am learning, now 2 fonts per game :), but I have four fonts. 2 match each type I want. One interesting thing here is one of the fonts is called Chintzy.. and I found out from my daughter who could tell, that this font was used in my Xblig game A Shooter. Wow. cool font! Or I am stuck in the same old place haha.

Still I got my font and have put it into the game, in bright neon green of course.

Good luck in finding the font for your game. I have no other advice here as I do not have a clue how to find the 'right' font for a game. That is a job for an artist.

Laters
Da Voodoochief