Fontemon: Video Game in a Font | Hacker News Reader

Fontemon: Video Game in a Font

coderelay.io

128 pointssusam8 comments

If anyone is interested about how this was made, I wrote a blog post about how I made fontemon and which type features I used: https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...

I love not just how hacky this is, but also all of the hilarious little Minnesota jokes throughout it. (Though I don't know if the map is meant to look like the state is packing, if you know what I mean.) Really enjoyed this!

Having made some wacky ligature fonts before and knowing how wild fonts are, I cannot imagine how tedious this was and how much of a lunatic (I say this in the most endearing way possible) the author must be. It's very firmly in the realm of mad science.

This is mindbogglingly incredible work. I love it.

Well that's just damn creative!! I love it. There is a technical blog post [0] detailing the mechanics if anyone's interested.

[0]: https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...

Thanks for your kind words and for sharing this link, you beat me by a couple minutes!

This is really delightful. I lost it when my Fontemon started to Capitalize.

See, you don't need Turing completeness to make interesting stuff.

While apparently Fontemon is pre-computed (https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...), font files are Turing complete (https://gwern.net/turing-complete#fn4). The grandfather of computer fonts, PostScript (as implied in the name) is a computer programming language in itself (but optimized for drawing stuff to be printed in paper), and TTF, OTF (both font formats) and PDF (document format) are also Turing-complete.

Fun (or scary, depending on how you look at it) fact: the TrueType hinting language (which is not based on PostScript) is in of itself another Turing-complete language, so in TTF files there are two separate Turing-complete languages (the PostScript-based one and the hinting language). This is the reason why Microsoft in the '90s begs you to not install fonts willy-nilly.

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