As part of the ongoing Xentu game engine project, I am creating several tools to push the project over the line. One of those tools is a SPA (single page application) for creating sprite fonts.
To my surprise when I initially looked for modern day solutions, I didn’t find much that would do the job. It seems there are some desktop apps that offer most of what you’d want. However those tools tend to only give you a single image file without any mappings or kerning info. They also usually force a very basic character set. Which is a bit useless if you want to make a game for more than just English.
A link to the Sprite Font Generator can be found on the left-hand sidebar of the site. However you can click here to visit it too.
The application is completely free to use, and has many methods of customization. The key features are:
– It’s hosted as a web-page, so you can use it anywhere.
– It outputs both an image, and JSON information, which can be really useful.
– Has a vertical coordinate flip mode.
– Did I mention it’s free? 🙂
It also has an experimental feature that allows you to load desktop fonts. To use this feature, you should toggle the ‘font-access’ flag in chrome://flags. Once the flag passes validation, I expect support will become available to FireFox and Edge.
Other News
In other news I have updated a few sections of the site to reflect my current focus. So Label Tracker has been shelved for now until I find a better way to link to music from the database I have access too. And I have some exciting news to announce about Xentu at the end of the week (those who keep up-to date will notice there has been a lot of activity over on the Xentu GitHub profile recently).
On a big positive note, since January I have been working on my general health. Going to the gym regularly, and working hard to cut down my calories has seen me loose over 60lbs of weight. The best part, is that it’s having a positive effect on my ability to concentrate, meaning I can do a lot more in my spare time.
It’s funny how doing more can allow you to do more!
Koda