A collection of font packs have been released today.

Each comprehensive pack contains more than 30 fonts for App Game Kit, saving you weeks of work that could be better spent writing your games! Say goodbye to ugly, fixed width font images, and welcome this collection of high quality, professional and easy to read alternatives.



For more details please visit http://www.thegamecreators.com/?m=view_product&id=2303

Very cool!

Ordered!

I'm still a bit confused about the point of this product. There are loads of free fonts around that you can use without licensing issues, which means the value must be in the font viewer.

From watching the video, there doesn't seem to be a proper colour picker, there is no ability to specify the size of the font, nor the resolution of the window, and you can't have it copy/paste the code into AGK.

So it looks like the value of the font viewer is pretty minimal too.

If the fonts are only supplied as graphics, then their use is limited as resizing them will cause artifacts and aliasing.

But maybe I've just missed the point?

If the fonts are only supplied as graphics, then their use is limited as resizing them will cause artifacts and aliasing.

That's the way anything you write with AppGameKit works, so that it can be used on multiple devices. You set a default resolution and then everything gets scaled for the device in use.

You can only use graphical fonts in AppGameKit (except for input boxes), you have no idea what is available on the devices that could be used.

Have a play with fonts in AppGameKit, you'll see the results are very good.

Nice

I'll have to save up...

On the plus side none of my games are close enough to completion to use any of these yet

Is that really a plus?

Anyway, nice work TGC!

All text operations are handled by AGKs own command set. If you specify colour in the editor then you'd have to load a dozen different images to cover a dozen different colours. These font packs can be coloured, and resized with commands such as, settextcolor and settextsize. This saves a lot of device memory.

The additional shadow maps means you can setup additional effects. For example if you have a virtual light moving across the screen (easily acived by an overlaid sprite with an alpha channel) you can move the shadows with that light giving an illusionary 3D style effect. Or you can just side and place text shadows as you desire.

Next there's the legal issue behind fonts, many free font sites are only free for personal usage, if you plan to sell or make money from a game (this includes advertising) then you often need to contact the authors who'll then be able to set a price. If your game hits big time, and one of these font authors notices their font in your game you can even become the victim of legal action. I have noticed a lot of users don't read the site fine print or included read me files, they leave themselves wide open.

AGK font packs are royalty free, and completely legal to use. I won't come chasing after you demanding cash should you make your first million on the app store.

Next I have seen some of the fonts outputted from the free font editors, they are okish but the spacing is often wrong, fixed and doesn't compare when placed next to agkfp's, this is because I've expended alot of time manually creating and editing these images. If you intend to make your own fonts, up to the same standard you will have to expend the same amount of time doing it as I have.

Next I plan a few free extra upgrades for packs 1 to 3 next month, certainly before Christmas. I want to let these packs run for a month first to see what happens if all goes well I'll add some additional font maps styles.

I agree that spacing is a time consuming business. Fixed font widths never look as good.

The price seems pretty reasonable to me. Soon as I have the cash you have another customer Dan!

Thank you!

You can only use graphical fonts in AppGameKit

I appreciate that. What I meant was that if the fonts are supplied as graphics equivalent to (for example) a 20 point font, then scaling that graphic is going to give quite different results to using a 40 point or 10 point based font to start with.

These font packs can be coloured, and resized with commands such as, settextcolor and settextsize

Exactly. If the font is supplied as white, then you can use settextcolor on it. So why not have a colour picker in the font viewer app so you can see how it will look in reality. The same with adjusting the size.

It probably sounds like I'm down on the whole thing, and I don't want to be. I was just pointing out what I thought were missed features.

What I meant was that if the fonts are supplied as graphics equivalent to (for example) a 20 point font, then scaling that graphic is going to give quite different results to using a 40 point or 10 point based font to start with.

I think you get different sized versions of each font am I right? So you can use it large or small and use the smaller image if that's all you need.

If the font is supplied as white, then you can use settextcolor on it. So why not have a colour picker in the font viewer app so you can see how it will look in reality. The same with adjusting the size.

I thought there was a colour picker in the video, or does it just use presets? A size slider would be nice though.

It probably sounds like I'm down on the whole thing, and I don't want to be. I was just pointing out what I thought were missed features.

These are good feature suggestions too. Personally I'd probably be happy with just the font images and subimage text files for a slightly lower price but I like to experiment

If you have any comments or feature requests please e-mail them direct to the author at support@darkprinciples.co.uk I will read and consider all requests and comments there.

Should that be support@darkprinciples.com?

If you want REALLY nice custom fonts, then you have to take the time to make them in Photoshop, or some other graphics program.

These font packs are a step up from the bitmap font creators available, and will save me a BUNCH of time instead of doing it all by hand in photoshop.

As far as the legal issue, I hadn't been worried about it, since the AppGameKit fonts *are* bitmap graphics. But it's good to know the font packs are totally royalty free and legal to use.

@baxslash
If you had waited 8 seconds it would have been lol. Forgive me I am typing on my iPad.

P.s. It's co.uk not com

If you had waited 8 seconds it would have been lol. Forgive me I am typing on my iPad.

8 whole seconds? I can't waste 8 seconds waiting, I'm trying to make games here!!!

Lol

How do I exit the font viewer? ESC doesn't work, and I'm resorting to task manager and stopping the program. Is there some trick to ending the program?

Standard Windows keys work with AppGameKit programs. To close a window, it's Alt + F4 escape is really only a darkbasic thing, most programs don't use that.

Silly me, I didn't think to try ALT F4. Thanks Daniel.

Thanks Daniel, your an . *need font... CHECK* now I need music...

I was wondering where to get some good fonts for my WIP game.

baxslash, next time, try Sleep(8000) , it should work.