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Font for Visual Novels

A topic by Megami Studios created Jan 25, 2019 Views: 4,245 Replies: 5

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Megami Studios5 years ago (3 edits) (+1)

Hello, I'm a type designer (aka a font maker). I'm currently designing a font (OTF/TTF) made with visual novels in mind and wondering what some of you VN creators out there would like to see in one? Some of the ideas are the typical ones (extended character sets, etc.), but I'm also thinking of some other things that will help the design (e.g. a subset of characters replacing Os with hearts, etc.)

Some of my work can be found here and here. You can probably also download some of my fonts at free font sites around the net.

EDIT: In the long run I'll probably hit up a couple of VN creators to actually test this as well.

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cutegamesclub5 years ago

I have made a visual novel and I included a couple of typefaces players can choose from for legibility (I include some Dyslexic-friendly ones).

It would be kind of interesting to create a set of fonts from the same legible typeface that denotes some kind of emotion? This for me was the biggest challenge as a VN writer, because we're trying to squeeze as much life from words as we can. So for example, I'd add screenshake when a character was shouting, or add a sound effect when a character was sighing.

It would be cool to have the letters themselves add more character to the text, though. Like if an NPC is sad, the characters sag a little bit, or if a they're angry, the font's serifs all get pointy and jagged. It was something I thought about while making the game, but ultimately didn't have the resources to execute. I hope that's a helpful pitch!

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Megami Studios5 years ago(+1)

Thanks. That would actually require different typefaces (e.g. Times Roman for standard text, with something like Baskerville for a warmer feel.) I have created a ton of variants for one particular font before, but that generally tends to get pricey for VNs, especially indie creators who I completely understand want to keep things as low-cost as possible. Plus, the more extended character sets you add to a particular single font, the longer it takes to read (unfortunately, font files aren't as small as bitmaps, though they do a lot more work.)

I'll see what I can do about particular subsets, though; I do want to make this as accessible for folks as possible. Thanks again for the input!

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Yal5 years ago

One thing that irks me a ton with fonts I otherwise like is when characters/sequences like "~". ":3" and "<3" don't look good in text... I might not be a VN creator, but I still write a lot of dialogue in my games, and being robbed of an easy way to put emotes is a pretty nasty surprise. Having special heart characters, symmetrical 3s that look great in smileys, long curly tildes, perhaps even the small omega or a curlier w for OwO and its ilk... you get my drift, providing nice characters that can be used for smileys and verticons would be a big plus in my book~

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Megami Studios5 years ago

Sounds like a case what you would want dedicated emoticon/emoji dingbats. Premade ones don't require you to have to construct them (though you would have to use your computer's character map function); most word processors have that built in as well. Am I guessing correctly?

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Yal5 years ago

That sounds cool too! I guess with individual glyphs you have more freedom to try out unique combinations the font maker might not have thought of (that's how the traditional smiley was born, after all :P) but there's probably a bigger potential to make professional-looking symbols if they're handmade because you can make sure they look good. Decisions, decisions... actually, you could always include the radicals used to build the dingbats as separate characters to bump up the character count without additional effort :P (Assuming you make stuff like "=w=" which makes sense to break up like that, of course)

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