Fontemon is the answer to a question no one asks: What if Pokémon was a playable font? Oh, and let’s set it up in Minnesota, too. Because why the hell not.
The font turned-Pokémon-parody was noticed by software engineer Daniel Feldman this week and created by developer Michael Mulet. Playing it is as simple as typing, or typing it in the site of the game or your own word processor, image processor or code processor via a downloadable version of the font.
In traditional Pokémon fashion, you fight through a series of eight gym leaders in turn fights that address your font monster hybrids against theirs. Of course, everyone has different fonts, of course. Oh, and these little guys capitalize instead of evolving. Honestly, this whole thing is just one giant pun and I’m for it.
The story progresses every time you tap a key. At certain points, specific keys are linked to choices in the game, such as your starter sample or their attacks in battle. So it is good that you usually type gibberish, as long as you just pay attention and type the correct letter once in the fight. But if you get confused, there is always the reliable rear bar to undo your action.
Like I said before, Fontemon is located in Minnesota, and it’s loaded with calls to the region, like twin gym leaders for its ‘Twin Cities’ moniker and lots of ‘Minnesota Nice’ jokes and hotdishes. It all comes together for a healthy dose of nostalgia, mixed with serious Undertale vibes. Mulet also managed to pack a bunch of packs easter eggs and alternating endings in the game.
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He explains the technical details behind his process in a GitHub post here. But they can make your head spin (or at least, it did for me). Basically, Fontemon uses a method similar to how PDFs produce text and images to create game elements from letters, ie the graphical representation of characters in a font, as they appear on the screen when you type letters or symbols such as “B” . “,” $ “, Ens.
Fontemon was built using OpenType, a scalable font platform developed by Adobe and Microsoft. OpenType supports complex typographic behavior, so instead of a slider that looks just like the letter “A”, a glyph can be used to, say, construct vector graphs by mapping coordinates on a level, executing string code, or, among other things, storing and loading data.
Except for letters, there are these things called ligatures, that is, when two or more characters in a font are merged into a single letter (like the weird æ- or œ-letter mashups you saw before). By connecting ligatures to each other, Mulet creates the illusion of animation in Fontemon.
“In the film, we simulate movement using a series of frames,” Mulet wrote GitHub. “In font games, each press of the test creates a new framework. Instead of drawing an A or a B, we use glyphs subroutines to set up an entire screen. ‘
All in all, Fontemon consists of almost 4700 individual frames, 314 sprites and 43 different choices. You can play the game on Mulet’s site Code Relay here.