Fontemon is the answer to a question absolutely asked by anyone: what if? Pokémon was it a reproducible font? Oh, and let’s set it up in Minnesota too. Because heck no.
The converted fontPokémon-parody was seen by software engineer Daniel Feldman this week and created by the developer Michael Mulet. Playing it is as simple as writing, either inside the game’s website or your own word processor, image editor, or code editor using a downloadable version of the font.
In traditional Pokémon Trendy, make your way through a series of eight gym leaders in turn-based battles that pit your letter monster hybrids against theirs. Of course, they all have themed names from various sources, of course. Oh, and these little boys capitalize instead of evolving. Honestly, all of this is just a giant pun and I’m here to get it.
The story progresses each time you tap a key. At certain points, specific keys are tied to game options, such as the initial monster or its attacks in battle. So you’re good at writing nonsense for the most part, as long as you make sure you pay attention and write the correct letter once in battle. But if it gets damaged, there is always the reliable backspace bar to undo your action.
As I said before, Fontemon is based in Minnesota and comes loaded with screams in the region, such as twin gym leaders for his nickname “Twin Cities” and lots of jokes and hot dishes from “Minnesota Nice.” Everything is combined to get a healthy dose of nostalgia mixed with something serious Undertale vibrations. Mulet also managed to pack a group of Easter eggs and alternative endings to the game.
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He sets out the technical details of his process in a GitHub post here. But they might make you turn your head (or at least they did it for me). Basically, Fontemon uses a method similar to the way PDF files produce text and images in order to create game elements from glyphs, that is, the graphical representation of characters in a font, such as what appears on the screen. when typing letters or symbols such as “B”, “$”, Etc.
Fontemon was created with OpenType, a cross-platform format for scalable fonts developed by Adobe and Microsoft. OpenType supports complex typographic behaviors, so instead of a glyph that only resembles the letter “A”, the glyph could be used for, for example, builds vector graphics by mapping coordinates in a plane, executes code strings or stores and loads data, among other functions.
In addition to glyphs, there are these things called ligatures, which is when two or more characters of a font are combined into a single glyph (like those weird æ or œ mashups of letters you may have seen before). By chaining ties, Mulet creates the illusion of animation in Fontemon.
“In cinema, we simulate movement by using a series of frames,” Mulet wrote GitHub. “In letter games, each keyboard key creates a new frame. Instead of drawing an A or a B, our glyphs use subroutines to design an entire screen. “
All in all, Fontemon consists of about 4,700 individual frames, 314 sprites and 43 different options. You can play the game Code Relay on the site of Mulet here.