Fontemon is the answer to a question that absolutely no one asked: what if Pokémon was a playable font? Oh, and let’s put it in Minnesota too. Because why the hell not.
The font-rotated-Pokémonparody was noticed by software engineer Daniel Feldman this week and made by developer Michael MuletPlaying it is as easy as typing whether you are in the game’s webpage or your own word processor, image editor or code editor via a downloadable version of the font.
In traditional Pokémon mode, fight your way through a series of eight gym leaders in turn-based battles that pitted your font-monster hybrids against theirs. Of course, they all have names with different fonts as their theme. Oh, and these little guys capitalize instead of evolving. Honestly, this whole thing is just a giant pun and I’m for it.
Each time you tap a key, the story continues. At certain points, specific keys are linked to in-game choices, such as your starting monster or their attacks in battle. So, for the most part, you type fine gibberish, as long as you pay close attention and type the correct letter once in battle. But if you mess up, there’s always the trusty backspace bar to undo your action.
As I mentioned before, Fontemon is set in Minnesota and comes full of shout-outs to the region, such as twin gym leaders for its ‘Twin Cities’ nickname and lots of ‘Minnesota Nice’ chatter and hot dishes. It all comes together for a healthy dose of nostalgia mixed with some seriousness Undertale feeling. Mulet also managed to many Easter eggs and alternate endings in the game.
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He explains the technical details behind his process in a GitHub post hereBut they can make your head spin (or at least they did for me). Essentially, Fontemon applies a method similar to how PDFs produce text and images to create game elements from glyphs, i.e. the graphical representation of characters in a font, such as what appears on the screen when you type letters or symbols, such as’ B ”,“ $ ”, etc.
Fontemon is built with OpenType, a cross-platform scalable font format developed by Adobe and Microsoft. OpenType supports complex typographic behaviors, so instead of using a glyph that looks just like the letter “A”, a glyph can be used for example construct vector graphics by assigning coordinates on a plane, running sequences of code, or saving and loading data, among other functions.
In addition to glyphs, there are also things called ligatures, which means combining two or more characters in a font into a single glyph (like those weird æ or œ letter mashups you may have seen before). By linking ligatures together Mulet creates the illusion of animation in Fontemon.
“In film, we simulate movement through the use of a series of frames,” Mulet continued GitHub“In font games, every keystroke creates a new frame. Rather than drawing an A or B, our glyphs use subroutines to format a full screen. “
Altogether, Fontemon consists of nearly 4,700 separate frames, 314 sprites, and 43 different choices. You can play the game on Mulet’s site Code Relay here