Fontemon is the answer to a question no one asked him: What if Pokemon was it a playable font? Oh, and let’s set it up in Minnesota, too. Because why the hell not.
The font has becomePokémon-parody was seen by software engineer Daniel Feldman in this week and created by the developer Michael Mulet. His gameplay is as simple as typing in either game web page or your own word processor, image editor, or code editor through a downloadable version of the font.
In the traditional Pokemon Fashion, you fight your way through a series of eight gymnastic leaders in one-on-one battles, putting your monster-font hybrids against them. Of course, they all have thematic names for different fonts, naturally. Oh, and these guys harness instead of evolving. Honestly, this whole thing is just a huge pun and I’m here for it.
The story progresses each time you touch a key. At certain points, specific keys are related to the options in the game, such as your starting monster or their attacks in battle. So you’re good at typing panties for the most part, as long as you make sure you pay attention and type the correct letter once in a fight. But if you mind, there is always the trusted backspace bar to undo your action.
As I said earlier, Fontemon is based in Minnesota and comes loaded with shouts in the region, such as the Gymnastics Gemini leaders for the name “Twin Cities” and a lot of “Minnesota Nice” beatings and food. It all comes together for a healthy dose of nostalgia mixed with some serious ones Undertale vibrations. Mulet also managed to pack a bunch of Easter eggs and alternate endings in the game.
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He sets out the technical details behind his process in a GitHub post Here. But it might make your head spin (or at least, they did it for me). Basically, Fontemon uses a method similar to how PDFs produce text and images to create game elements from glyphs, that is, the graphical representation of characters in a font, just 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 that only looks like the letter “A”, the glyph could be used for, say, build vector graphics by mapping coordinates to a plane, execute code strings, or store and upload data, among other functions.
In addition to glyphs, there are these things called ligatures, which are when two or more characters in a font are combined into a single glyph (such as those weird æ or œ letter mashups that you you have seen before). By linking them together, Mulet creates the illusion of animation in Fontemon.
“In the film, we simulate movement by using a series of frames,” Mulet wrote GitHub. “In font games, each keystroke creates a new frame. Instead of drawing an A or a B, our glyphs use subroutines to arrange an entire screen. ”
Overall, Fontemon consists of almost 4,700 individual frames, 314 sprites and 43 distinct options. You can play the game on the Mulet Code Relay website Here.