In Game Design and Development, you often need fonts that match very specific criteria. For example, you might need a 9 pixel high font with monospaced cyphers to display numbers in tables at a high resolution. In linear media, you can get away with using a standard font and just tweaking everything by hand. In games, fonts need to work dynamically and tweaking kerning is not an option (or at least difficult). Designing you own fonts used to be expensive, difficult. Game designers often had to rely on their own custom-made font systems. Recently, I found this:

Introduction to FontStruct from fontstruct on Vimeo.

It is basically Flickr for Pixelfonts with an online-editor. And then they went even a step further by allowing not only to use square pixels but also different elements to construct letters from. I think the video shows it quite well. It is awesome! And highly addictive too! The Editor is simple, slick and very fast to use. Because of the pixel-based approach, creating custom fonts takes just a few seconds per letter. I spontaneously made a Arial 9pt (Size=”1″) clone

Also, I realized this is the first serious Web Application I used and I enjoy it very much. Having a specialized Pixelfont editor on my Hard Drive seems not a smart thing to do if I would use it only a few times. This way, I save resources, sharing is easier and the Fonts will remain saved even if my computer system is re-installed. It made me re-consider that working this really might be what computer software will evolve into. More about this idea in a recent TED Talk.

New talk from Jonathan Blow. This time, he was on Game Focus Germany. This conference kinda COMPLETELY slipped under my radar. Too bad, I would have loved to meet Jonathan in person. Note: Visit Game Focus Germany next year.

As for the talk. He raises a question we already discussed before: why doing games if you can do so much other things. I like his observation of the different qualities of programming, production and design. Programming is very hard to get into but when you got over that initial hurdle, it is easy to improve. Design is exactly the other way around: it is easy to have SOMETHING but to improve upon that something is very difficult. That’s because – to quote from the move Solaris – “There are no answers, only choices”. Seems like I did study the right thing after all.

However I totally disagree with his strategy of making games. Spending 3 years on a game really seems like a lot of time and the thing with Molly Rocket is even worse. I have seen this a lot during my studies: designers sometimes can’t stop designing because they think they don’t have “enough”. Meanwhile, they passed the point of coprehension months ago. You can’t improve in Design if you make no experiences. Gaining experience means releasing games. Of course, just spamming the world with pointless games is not a strategy everybody should follow (I’m looking at you, newgrounds.com) but I think to some extent, it is healthy to let go of some of that Perfectionism, keep things simple and risk shooting below your expectations. “Everything in life is just for now” anyway. If you spend 3 years on a project, chances are your expectations are way too high anyway. It is also a sign that you might not have enough experience in releasing games to be able to judge the impact of your product.

I’ve just stumbled over the following excellent user-generated content game experiment over at Pocketwatch games. I love it, I just spend half an hour expanding the dialogue tree.
http://pocketwatchgames.com/conversation

Basically, it is very simple. It is a multiple choice dialogue between two persons with up to 5 choices. Players can play as either of the two characters. If there are less then 5 answers, players can type an answer by themselves and it will be stored in the database and used in future conversation. It is so simple, yet so effective and mysteriously engaging.

*PING* I’m still there. I took a three month break to get some thing done, I read a bunch of books, played some games. I will do my best to more frequently soon. Here are some exciting things that happened meanwhile:

Metroid Prime: Corruption
Great game, I completed it three times – once on every difficulty setting. It is a masterpiece and a benchmark for shooter controls for the Wii. Also, it is very easy and short but 10 hours in heaven is better then 9 hours in heaven… it might be also better then 20 hours in heaven, you can get sick of anything…

Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Another benchmark for controls from Nintendo. This one even more impressive then Metroid. Again, awesome game, much better then Zelda: Twilight Princess. Did a short girlfriend test and it worked great for her. If she wasn’t away in England we would be probably playing it together right now. We still might in future.

Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
Because the game is heavily cut in Germany, I had to import it from England and could play it just recently. Great game. Controls are a bit of a let-down after Metroid but they are alright. I think the most impressive are the really amazing graphics and the shitload of content. I especially love the “separate ways” bonus missions, where you replay the story from the perspective of another character.

Lost in Blue 2
I wrote a lot about the first part so I HAD to play the sequel. My first impression were very good. They addressed a lot of things which I had criticized. Unfortunately, the game gets a bit messed-up towards the end. I haven’t finished it yet but I will soon and I will comment on it.

Animal Crossing
Just picked it up recently. I was inspired by Beedle’s ship in Zelda which has new goods every day. I got into a habit of checking every day for new ship parts which is basically how Animal Crossing works so I got curious to try it. I like it so far. Will write about it.

Endless Ocean
Hold on tight: I bought this instead of Mario Galaxy. It’s crazy, I know. I will play Mario Galaxy some time but with that many games on my shelf I wanted something which doesn’t require so much attention and work. Also, I was a bit curious how that works because the game idea sounds so unbelievably crazy. I love it! It has it’s flaws and I will talk in great lengths about them but I think it is a great title and inspires me a lot!

Excit
We posted an old, very simple casual flash game we did in three forums. We were completely blown away by the attention it received, especially since it wasn’t the first time we tried to make the game public. Right now, we had 300,000 views, we are running ads on it and it is doing well on Kongregate. We are collecting tons of experience about game distribution. It is really exciting and I will post about it soon!

Anno 1701 DS
Played it some time ago and I liked it very much. It is also a great game for the DS with some outstanding controls. I might post about it soon. The fun thing is that we have good connections to the developers of that game so we even might get some insight into the development of the game.

Another Talk by Jonathan Blow
This came in just today. Great speech, will post comments soon.

I found this link with a formal analysis of Metal Gear Solid 2. I have not yet read it completely but please take a look and tell me if you like it:

Driving Off the Map (located at Delta Head Translation Group)