Here are a bunch of examples of NES style fonts. Good to study for a library of ideas on making glyphs readable and also full of character.
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For fun, going to make a mock NES cart image.
Found a decent scan, cleaned it up, masked it, darkened it as I think a darker cart would have looked cooler. After I do some character and monster illustrations (I plan to make some water color / copic marker characters / monster art in the style of DQ Akira Toriyama) Iāll add them to the cover art on the cart and then try to make it look more authentic with scuffs and fadingā¦ Will do proper illustration style cover art too. For the NES games, it seems they rarely if ever used the pixel art style logos for their printed cover art.
Some inspiration for eventual lookā¦
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Progress on new font. Itās heavily inspired by those other ones however! Iāll still improve it over time and add some fun characters to it.
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Hi @Pkeod!
I tried to get the editor to crash by running the āBuild HTML and Launchā multiple times while itās still building. However, it didnāt crash for me, but rather output error messages, and a dialog like this. (Iāve added a backlog item to fix these errors: DEF-1745).
Is this similar to what you got, or did your editor shut down?
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I thought it closed completely with an error but I may have been mistaken. I tried to reproduce now and I got the same thing as you, which seems familiar.
Does the html build communicate with the editor in a way that could cause a crash potentially? I think it was around the same time that my Chrome browser was failing to also create a WebGL context. Sorry, I didnāt screenshot or attempt to reproduce before.
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Ok, at least thatās somewhat better than crashing. But perhaps it is like you said, that there is an edge case somewhere that could be triggered occasionally. Hopefully, it should be resolved by fixing this issue anyways, since we donāt really want to build/launch multiple instances at once 
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Iām releasing the font I made today as free to use! If anyone happens upon it, or needs a nice pixel font. Iāll be updating it over time. I want to add a few more glyphs so it can support as many languages as possible, but can only do a few at a time. Iāll just post here when there is an update. Itās not the best but still wanted to share!
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Iāve now also investigated the console error you experienced after your browser stopped serving you more webgl contexts. Iāve added a task to improve the error handling in such cases, to make the error more clear/user friendly (DEF-1749)
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Based on observing and experimenting, I assume it has to do with the editor wanting to be efficient and generating / using lower resolution textures even when it doesnāt really need to with already small textures. Maybe an option for editor to turn off the optimization for textures under a certain size would be enough or to completely disable the optimization? This project is so tiny it doesnāt need it at all.
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Have not updated in a while but I have been busy learning and getting small things to work!
These are almost ready to go or are ready
- Screens
- Tile maps + moving around
- Scripted events
- Dialog + battle text (rpg style one char at a time)
- General UI
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Creator of the east Asian font I wanted to use for Japanese & Chinese made some changes to the font that appear to be making it work now.
Does Defold support multiple paged fonts? I have all_chars set to true, but Iām not sure if itās actually all chars in the font. There are 21998 chars in the font, and it does not look like all are in. Of course in real release Iāll filter the ones I need only, but there may be cases where more than currently fit are needed.
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If you check the all_chars option we include all the glyphs we find are addressable by unicode code points.
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Been really busy with normal work and doing as much general Defold studying / tests to prepare for doing major projects with the tool.
Small change is I have decided to go widescreen instead of the normal NES ratio resolution. Also going to use a newer custom rendering script which should be interesting and hopefully it works well with what I want to doā¦
Old res: 256 x 240
New res: 400 x 240
With new render script, if playing on a 4:3 screen it will fit to width, and then if it goes right draw extra tiles above and below the normal res area, although gameplay and UI will still be constrained within the original res window. Same with super widescreen displays - draw extra tiles beyond the edge so there are no black bars.
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Concept sketches of creatures / mobs to fight in StarOde. Iām doing pixel art versions and later will do copic marker style illustrations of ones which make the cut later for promotion style use.
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Testing some more cartoon stylized leaning designs without getting too silly and still within scifi like reality.
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Due to some changes with other projects (waiting on team members to finish workā¦), Iāve decided to invest more time and energy into this for the next few months, and to make it a fully commercial project and not free. It will be released as a full priced commercial game once itās complete. Anyone who would like can pre-purchase StarOde here for $15 : https://subsoap.itch.io/starode
All who pre-purchase will get thanked in the credits!
Last few days Iāve been working heavily in Famitracker trying to make good tunes. Learning more, getting better. I have a playable build now but missing content and features. Will show gameplay video soon. The more I work on this project the more I appreciate older games and what their devs did with limited game dev knowledge.
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Ooooo, pretty UI
Yeah, Star Ode looks nice. @Pkeod are you working on the game or is your focus more towards your book?
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Only working on the book + book related work right now. I will work on this game again after! And with some changes Iāve been thinking about.
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