This game reinvents Pokémon as a playable font

Fontemon is the answer to a question that no one has asked: What if Pokemon was a playable font? Oh, and let’s put it in Minnesota too. Because why not.

The police becomePokémon-parody was spotted by software engineer Daniel Feldman this week and created by the developer Michael Mulet. Playing it is as easy as typing, either the game’s web page or your own word processor, image editor or code editor via a downloadable version of the font.

In traditional Pokemon Mode, you fight your way through a series of eight gym leaders in turn-based battles that pit your make-monster hybrids against theirs. Of course, they all have themed names of different fonts, naturally. Oh, and these little guys capitalize instead of evolving. Honestly, this is all just a giant pun and I’m here for it.

The story progresses each time you press a key. At times, specific keys are tied to in-game choices, such as your starting monster or their attacks in combat. So most of the time you’re typing gibberish, as long as you make sure you’re paying attention and typing the correct letter when in combat. But, if you get it wrong, there is always the reliable rollback bar to undo your action.

Like I said before, Fontemon is located in Minnesota and comes with screams to the area, such as twin gym chefs for its ‘Twin Cities’ nickname and lots of ‘Minnesota Nice’ jokes and hot food. . Everything comes together for a good dose of nostalgia mixed with seriousness Subtitle vibrations. Mulet also managed to pack a crowd of Easter eggs and alternate endings in the game.

He lays out the technical details of his process in a GitHub post here. But they might make your head spin (or at least they did for me). Basically, Fontemon uses a method similar to how PDFs produce text and images in order to create game elements from glyphs i.e. the graphical representation of characters in a font, like what appears on the screen when you type letters or symbols such as “B”, “$”, etc.

Fontemon was built using OpenType, a cross-platform format for scalable fonts developed by Adobe and Microsoft. OpenType supports complex typographic behaviors, so instead of a glyph looking like the letter “A”, a glyph could be used for, for example, build vector graphics by mapping coordinates on a plane, execute strings of code, or store and load data, among other functions.

In addition to glyphs, there are these things called ligatures, which is when two or more characters from a font are combined into a single glyph (like those weird mashups of letters æ or œ that you might have. be seen before). By chaining the ligatures together, Mulet creates the illusion of animation in Fontemon.

“In cinema, we simulate movement using a series of images,” Mulet wrote on GitHub. “In font sets, each press of a key creates a new frame. Rather than drawing an A or a B, our glyphs use subroutines to layout an entire screen. “

In total, Fontemon is made up of almost 4,700 individual images, 314 sprites, and 43 distinct choices. You can play the game on the Mulet Code Relay website here.