Font Fiend preview image

[lennard]

I decided that last week was the cutoff - I had to start doing some preview work for Font Fiend. To that end I worked only on "pixel quality" features and show stopper bugs. Yesterday afternoon I spent a few hours building different fonts - see the attached sampler sheet. Very fun time, my budding game designer came in the room (our 12 year old) and helped with the title and effects for "Dragon Fire". If I never sell a copy of this program I know at this point that I'm going to be very happy to have it in my personal arsenal of game dev. tools.


Permanent link:

http://rustyaxe.com/images/ff/fontFiendSampler.png


So what is Font Fiend? It is a ttf ripper that builds sprite files with hotspot information that can be easily editted in a GUI. It is also a general purpose sprite file editor, you can import images readily, giving them default hotspots and then use the GUI to do fine tuning. It will create font files from the standard ASCII set or you can point it to a unicode file containing all of the text for your game and it will build an extended set (plus a remapping file) so that you can rapidly pre-build fonts for foreign language versions. There is a built-in effects package that I used to create all of the font samples. Lastly you can use the tool to build text buttons, as can be seen in the sampler image - those images came straight from Font Fiend and I then cut and pasted them together in PhotoShop but did no additional touch up (in fact I degraded the images every so slightly by a little bit of clumsy cut and paste work - check it out w/zoom).

Anyhow, comments are now welcome. I'm hoping to get 1.0 out later this month but people finding render quality nit-picks would be most helpful. Also, pricing suggestions would be appreciated - I've been thinking $19.99 because that's what I price things at and I feel this is a bargain compared to other web design tools that it might also be competing with.

[Nikster]

<ignore my post>

[Huge]

Hi,
That look pretty good. I have stuffed about with fonts and it quite a pain without the right tools. $19.95 only has to save you an hour of your life to make it worthwhile. Indie developers (those who are time poor, but reasonably well off) should be thinking like this. One thing with the buttons - do you have a selection of borders/styles etc? This could cross you over into the web-dev world. Also, animated effects might be cool too - or at least roll-over/depressed/focus states.

Huge.

[lennard]

Thanks for that - debugging some cursor nonsense tonight, was nice to see your post.

I've thought about animations and button stuff but neither are likely to make it into 1.0. That said, if Font Fiend has even moderate success then I think I'm likely to expand the feature set to make it even more of the tool that I want it to be over time. Animations, buttons and possibly particles are all on my wish list. One of my design goals has been to set the thing up so that it's easy for other people to drop in different button and icon sets for other people to use/buy.

My next preview will include roll-overs and tutorials that show how each was made. Also, the render effects can now be saved separately from font sets so it's easy to share neat render effects and also to apply render effects to multiple fonts and, soon, to icon sets as well.

[Pyabo]

Looks like a very useful tool. Hopefully easier to use than Photoshop text tools, which is currently how I do this sort of thing. Certainly cheaper! :)