Pentiment Interview on Fonts
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With Josh Sawyer's historical narrative RPG Pentiment scheduled to go live on November 15, 2022, you might be interested in this recent Polygon interview with some Obsidian developers and third-party craftsmen behind the game's rather unique fonts that will be doing a lot of heavy lifting to sell Pentiment's medieval aesthetic.
A quick excerpt:
To implement the fonts in Pentiment, Obsidian received what Cran described as a “toolkit” from Lettermatic. These fonts are not like the ones you and I type with every day. After all, this text is supposed to mimic writing, which isn’t as consistent as most digital fonts. It includes considerations for how a person writing two E’s back to back won’t write each of them in the same exact way. There are other “spontaneous” details, too, Cran said — like little flourishes or swishes. “That’s one quality is that authentic feeling of spontaneous writing that’s not provided by a digital asset, and how to figure out how to make a digital asset that realistically captures a very analog type of typography.”
These are the sort of details that a player may not notice, and Pentiment has been designed that way. But if the details weren’t right, the game would probably feel different in some way — albeit on a minor scale. A detail as small as a font on the screen is as important as any other asset; they’re all little pieces of a big, big world.
