Fontemon is the answer to a question that no one asked: what if Pokémon was it a playable font? Oh, and we’re going to define that in Minnesota as well. Because the hell not.
The fountain turnedPokémon-parody was located by software engineer Daniel Feldman this week and created by the developer Michael Mulet. Playing it is as simple as typing, whether in the game page or your own word processor, image editor, or code editor via a downloadable version of the font.
In the traditional Pokémon fashion, you fight to make your way through a series of eight gym leaders in turn-based battles that pit your source monster hybrids against theirs. Of course, they all have names with themes from various sources, of course. Oh, and these guys capitalize instead of evolving. Honestly, this is all just a giant pun and I’m here for that.
The story advances each time you press a key. At certain points, specific keys are linked to game choices, such as your starting monster or your attacks in battle. So, most of the time, you’re typing nonsense, as long as you pay attention and type the correct letter once in the battle. But if you get it wrong, there is always the reliable backslash to undo your action.
As I said before, Fontemon is set in Minnesota and comes full of praise for the region, like twin gym leaders for their nickname “Twin Cities” and lots of fun and hot dishes from “Minnesota Nice”. It all comes together for a healthy dose of nostalgia mixed with some Undertale vibrations. Mulet also managed to pack a bunch of Easter eggs and alternate endings in the game.
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He describes the technical details behind his process in a GitHub post on here. But they can make your head spin (or at least, they did for me). Basically, Fontemon employs a method similar to the way PDFs produce text and images to create game elements from glyphs, that is, the graphic representation of characters in a font, as well as what appears on the screen when you type letters or symbols like “B”, “$”, Etc.
Fontemon was built using OpenType, a cross-platform format for scalable fonts developed by Adobe and Microsoft. OpenType supports complex typographical behaviors, so instead of a glyph similar to the letter “A”, an glyph can be used to, say, build vector graphics by mapping coordinates in a plane, execute code strings or store and load data, among other functions.
In addition to glyphs, there are these things called ligatures, which occur when two or more characters in a font are combined into a single glyph (such as those strange æ or œ letter mashups you may have seen before). Chaining bandages, Mulet creates the illusion of animation in Fontemon.
“In the film, we simulate movement through the use of a series of frames,” wrote Mulet in GitHub. “In font games, each key press creates a new frame. Instead of drawing an A or a B, our glyphs use subroutines to lay out an entire screen. “
Altogether, Fontemon is composed of almost 4,700 individual frames, 314 sprites and 43 different options. You can play on Mulet’s Code Relay website on here.