still yellow.
Lorenzo Pilia
Creator of
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User bistyOracle wrote a small font guide on the Bitsy Discord, it's from a month ago so a bit hard to find now, below a rough copy paste, hope it helps...
A Font Guide in 2 parts:
Okay, so in a .bitsyfont file there is: - the first line, where you name your font/how it will appear in the little dropdown menu FONT <font_name_here>
; using more-than-one-word names doesn't seem to break anything in editor, but idk if it breaks anything anywhere else - the second line, where you determine how big each individual character is in pixels SIZE <width> <height>
- the rest of the fontdata, which are character definitions similar to how a tile/sprite is defined, with a name definition CHAR <#>
at the top and then an array of 0s and 1s signifying empty/filled pixels
CHAR 81 000000 001100 010010 010010 011010 010110 001100 000010 000000
The number that a character is defined as matters!!!! It corresponds to that character's unicode value in decimal
e.g., CHAR 80
is always gonna be a P
If it helps anybody, this site exists: https://unicodelookup.com/
So, now the interesting bit:
Unless you're using the Old Bitsy Font (called "ASCII Small" on the dropdown), what using a font does is just tack on aaall the fontdata to the end of the gamedata (after VAR
definitions)
The default Bitsy fonts in the dropdown contain..........a LOT of different characters. So many.
Which means......gamedata be big fam
BUT, from what I can tell, Bitsy still works perfectly fine if you decide to delete the CHAR
definitions you don't want from the gamedata. Just make sure you're not deleting a character that you end up using because things'll get......weird
Also I'm not sure what the purpose of CHAR 0
is, but if experience has taught me anything, uhhh don't delete it(edited)
Unicode Lookup: convert special characters
Unicode Lookup is an online reference tool to lookup Unicode and HTML special characters, by name and number, and convert between their decimal, hexadecimal, and octal bases.
Tips about writing your own fonts: - DO NOT ADD ANY UNECESSARY LINE BREAKS IN YOUR .BITSYFONT FILE OR WHILE WORKING WITH FONTDATA IN THE GAMEDATA WINDOW because Bitsy DOES NOT LIKE that and possibly will delete large chunks of your fontdata - The custom font-upload-y-thingy in the editor seems to be a bit moody, so if you're planning on making tweaks to your fonts as you're developing, I suggest doing it directly in the gamedata instead of trying to upload a new .bitsyfont every time
- You can change the character size to anything you want. I don't know what the max limit is, but the letters in that Randy G. gif above are 30x30px and doing just that was.......tedious. The text box seems to adjust with the height of the letters, leaving enough space for two lines of dialogue to fit. (if there's a way to hack that, so maybe like, it only gets as tall as one line, I'd like to know, because that sounds like it'd be cool). Also, the number of characters that fit on a line depends on how wide the characters are
- also be careful that you 1-and-0 your letters correctly bc if it doesn't match the SIZE
you defined, it won't display your letter
Bitsy doesn't have that feature, but you could use this tool to create an executable: https://gritfish.itch.io/htmle
I've been invited to test a pre-alpha preview of a game which has currently been set as hidden by the developer (doesn't show up on the list of projects when viewing their profile). In order to access it, I had to link the game to my account. The game is now showing up in the public "Supported by" list on my profile https://lorenzo.itch.io – it's the first title "All Walls Must Fall". If you click on it you get a 404 message, but I think it would be best not to show hidden projects on the list at all, in case they're super secret / still unannounced.