This is really cool, I've had so much fun putting together critters this morning!
I threw together a little page on my site that has a textarea where you can try out the font, if you want to experiment without having to download it yourself.
I'd like to toss together a little table of the symbols too, and I also thought it would be cool to use html2canvas to let people download a picture of their creation. Maybe I'll get around to that after work tonight.
california-og 3 days ago [-]
The author of the font made it also Glyph Drawing Club "compatible", which is a modular shape builder I've built that works with font files. You can just drag and drop an otf or ttf file on the app window and it'll load the glyphs as svg shapes to draw with. The neat thing is that it works in two dimensions, and you can also rotate (with r hotkey) or invert (with i hotkey) the glyphs, and output the drawing as SVG or PNG.
This is pretty neat, and cool as a design style for doing "tilesque" types of drawing. Would there happen to be a way to add your own tileset, font, or tile atlas? Would then allow for rather quick tilemap creation (GB, NES, SNES style; a lot of cell phone games, many Steam releases, ect...). Lots of market. 500 games released last week on Steam. https://steamdb.info/upcoming/?lastweek Out of the 28 so far today, 6 appear to be tile based.
If not, may borrow at least some of the design features for a project, as with a bit of simplification in a few areas, and changes for cell phones, it would actually make a nice way for users to interact with tile based games. Place an object, move an object, flip an object.
The tab based design and layout also works nicely desktop to phone for the most part, which is a nice plus for adaptation.
Anyways, neat tool, and especially design flow and layout. Also, the 15 pages of font use on https://velvetyne.fr/in-use/ is pretty crazy to look at.
EDIT: Also, to the author of Teranoptia, the licensing layout is actually rather nice and really clear about uses immediately. Lot of the web has vague license names, yet the direct use listing is beneficial.
epiccoleman 3 days ago [-]
Wow, that is really cool. I'll definitely be playing with this later, thanks for the tip!
breadwinner 3 days ago [-]
The creatures at the bottom of the page are editable already.
epiccoleman 3 days ago [-]
D'oh! Of course they are haha. It didn't even occur to me to try.
Edit: I guess one neat thing about my page is that you get a readout of the characters in your critter. Obviously you could just copy-paste from that field at the bottom of the Tunera page into any other text field and find out that way, but I did find it helpful when I was trying to experiment.
devin 3 days ago [-]
Thanks, I didn't realize this.
BugsJustFindMe 3 days ago [-]
Your /assets/me.jpg is a 1.3MB image, but is only displayed at very small thumbnail size on your page.
epiccoleman 3 days ago [-]
Great feedback, I'll look into reducing the size of that image, especially for the post headers. Thanks for checking out the site!
epiccoleman 2 days ago [-]
Quick imagemagick command got it down to 22kb, and a slightly larger one for the frontpage is now only 80kb. The frontpage load feels a lot snappier now, thanks again for the tip!
forgotpwd16 3 days ago [-]
Thanks. Kinda expected (or at least I do, being accustomed to Google Fonts) nowadays a font-hosting site to have something like that.
edit: Just saw sibling comment that placeholder text is editable. Hadn't noticed it.
feoren 3 days ago [-]
I love some of the interpretation of symbol characters. Check these out: - * ($) [$$] {$$$} ,
I particularly like the asterisk being a starfish -- quite in character for the font.
I found myself wishing that the capital letters went in the same order as the lowercase. To reverse 'a' you have to type 'Z', and to reverse 'b' you have to type 'Y', which gets confusing toward the middle of the alphabet.
pimlottc 3 days ago [-]
Ah, I didn’t realize there was a preview text field at the bottom of the page! Looked like another page decoration
tetris11 16 hours ago [-]
try also (German Keyboard):
* AltGr-X or Y (two way pipe)
* AltGr-E (vertical bar)
* AltGr-J (adds dots vertically below last character)
Their `Shift' variants also invert the placement
Edit: Oh I just realised the "J" one is a German Keyboard symbol stacker and nothing to do with the font.˙
nevir 3 days ago [-]
Could ligatures be used to make the heads/tails automatic? (e.g. first letter of any word is rendered as a head, last letter always a tail)
semireg 3 days ago [-]
Me and the 6 year old have been making Pokémon cards and generating AI character images based on chimeras. This morning on the way to school we dreamt up a knight+scorpion with tons of armor. Basic: knightstrike, stage 1: knightbite, stage 2: knightflight.
Totally installing this font on the kid’s rasp pi. This will be a fun way to explore the keyboard. Love it.
2 days ago [-]
febed 2 days ago [-]
How do you go about doing this? Would like it to try it out too
semireg 2 days ago [-]
I use ChatGPT mobile app and brainstorm. I only show the child the results. Here’s a prompt: “Grim reaper wolf pet in style of Pokémon character. Make the body just out of skull and bones.”
Then I take this image to any of the number of online card creators. None are perfect. Most are half broken. You can use ChatGPT to make names. For example, we made a card for my wife who’s an attorney. We asked for character names based on her profession (law) unique last name with a fire theme. Then we asked for attack descriptions. I used these, heavily edited, to create a full card with her “likeness.”
Flaming justice hammer, anyone?!
For printing I use a laser printer w duplex. I have a trial/error workflow for lining up 4-up cards. I use a heavy poly cardstock from Terraslate. I think the 10 mil. It’s pretty close look/feel and they will last a long time.
These are purely for our own enjoyment, but we have also done play dates where we make custom cards for friends that visit.
The only downside is every kid wants their character to have 300+ HP. Ha!
tiptup300 2 days ago [-]
also curious
Biganon 2 days ago [-]
Thank you for doing that with you kid
turtleyacht 3 days ago [-]
Interesting. For directions and mapping, a font that showed turns, highway markers, and road signs could help a person "think" in terms of direction or orientation.
Since they are recognizable glyphs, we shortcut having to learn grammar and vocabulary; meaning is already "natively encoded" in the existing language.
metalliqaz 3 days ago [-]
⬆⬇↗↖↔↩
turtleyacht 2 days ago [-]
Yes, like those. I guess a whole LSP that revolves around destinations and memory. To compile it is to reach some satisfactory state where the model--and this differs from person to person--reflects reality: total minutes spent or miles travelled.
I guess games already enable the forward, forward, turning, and such. But wayfinding is tacit: one person gets lost; another notes the top of the tower, descends into a dark thicket, flanks a camp of orcs, and somehow heads in more or less the way.
Of course, some of that is just going with the flow. Not so in traffic, in an unknown place, jostled by rail tracks and wondering whether to U-turn or not. (Unfamiliar roads, and was it east or west?)
A friend said they note landmarks. Or maybe one should have heuristics, like three lefts is parallel to one right. One thing for certain: without GPS, it is hopeless.
bee_rider 3 days ago [-]
Stratagem too complex, controller is broken.
bschwindHN 3 days ago [-]
Hang on, since when did HN allow emoji?
dang 3 days ago [-]
We filter out ranges of Unicode characters that have been used for junk posts in the past, but there are many other ranges that have occasional legit use and are allowed.
3 days ago [-]
3 days ago [-]
3 days ago [-]
blikstiender 3 days ago [-]
This is really fun!
What would be really satisfying would be to be able to make “creatures” out of real words. Currently a lot of the common vowels represent “end” segments (either heads or tails).
pimlottc 3 days ago [-]
The regex for this (for left-facing creatures) is ^[aeimpvy][bcfgjknqtw]*[dhloruxz]$
Unfortunately, as you point out, all the vowels are in the end segments, so there's no creatures with a midbody longer than 2 letters. Here's what you get [0]:
ad ago ah and ankh awl ax ego eh end er etch ex id inch into itch
However, you can also include words that form multiple creatures [1]. Some favorites:
aggrandizer
alexander
equalizer
inlander
mumbler
phalanx
poacher
prelingual
voided
It actually gets a tiny bit better for upper case letters, as the midbody character set includes both U and Y. So the winner for longest single-creature word is: ADJUDGE
That game data is text, and that you reverse the game by hitting backspace are interesting ideas. I'm curious if there is any utility beyond novelty though. It's certainly very creative, I'll be thinking about it.
My kids will love it.
I am supporting the author right now :-)
incidentist 3 days ago [-]
Well this is utterly wonderful.
janetmissed 3 days ago [-]
This is adorable, I had so much fun seeing what creatures I could make.
wayvey 3 days ago [-]
Does this use ligatures to join up parts of these creatures together?
happytoexplain 3 days ago [-]
It appears to use the good old-fashioned technique of making the edges of each character have the same profile, so any two characters abut seamlessly. You can put your cursor on them to see this.
Edit: Sorry, I answered your question as though you had asked about joiner characters. Still, it appears not to use ligatures, as the characters appear not to change at all if you separate them.
noman-land 3 days ago [-]
Wow, this is so incredibly cool.
birracerveza 2 days ago [-]
This is great!
syngrog66 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
widowlark 3 days ago [-]
What is worthy of HN is determined by user interest. You are not the gatekeeper of HN.
I for one love this project. Amazing work, Ariel!
syngrog66 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 08:14:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I threw together a little page on my site that has a textarea where you can try out the font, if you want to experiment without having to download it yourself.
https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2024-05-02-teranoptia-playgrou...
I'd like to toss together a little table of the symbols too, and I also thought it would be cool to use html2canvas to let people download a picture of their creation. Maybe I'll get around to that after work tonight.
https://glyphdrawing.club
If not, may borrow at least some of the design features for a project, as with a bit of simplification in a few areas, and changes for cell phones, it would actually make a nice way for users to interact with tile based games. Place an object, move an object, flip an object.
The tab based design and layout also works nicely desktop to phone for the most part, which is a nice plus for adaptation.
Anyways, neat tool, and especially design flow and layout. Also, the 15 pages of font use on https://velvetyne.fr/in-use/ is pretty crazy to look at.
EDIT: Also, to the author of Teranoptia, the licensing layout is actually rather nice and really clear about uses immediately. Lot of the web has vague license names, yet the direct use listing is beneficial.
Edit: I guess one neat thing about my page is that you get a readout of the characters in your critter. Obviously you could just copy-paste from that field at the bottom of the Tunera page into any other text field and find out that way, but I did find it helpful when I was trying to experiment.
edit: Just saw sibling comment that placeholder text is editable. Hadn't noticed it.
I particularly like the asterisk being a starfish -- quite in character for the font.
I found myself wishing that the capital letters went in the same order as the lowercase. To reverse 'a' you have to type 'Z', and to reverse 'b' you have to type 'Y', which gets confusing toward the middle of the alphabet.
Edit: Oh I just realised the "J" one is a German Keyboard symbol stacker and nothing to do with the font.˙
Totally installing this font on the kid’s rasp pi. This will be a fun way to explore the keyboard. Love it.
Then I take this image to any of the number of online card creators. None are perfect. Most are half broken. You can use ChatGPT to make names. For example, we made a card for my wife who’s an attorney. We asked for character names based on her profession (law) unique last name with a fire theme. Then we asked for attack descriptions. I used these, heavily edited, to create a full card with her “likeness.”
Flaming justice hammer, anyone?!
For printing I use a laser printer w duplex. I have a trial/error workflow for lining up 4-up cards. I use a heavy poly cardstock from Terraslate. I think the 10 mil. It’s pretty close look/feel and they will last a long time.
These are purely for our own enjoyment, but we have also done play dates where we make custom cards for friends that visit.
The only downside is every kid wants their character to have 300+ HP. Ha!
Since they are recognizable glyphs, we shortcut having to learn grammar and vocabulary; meaning is already "natively encoded" in the existing language.
I guess games already enable the forward, forward, turning, and such. But wayfinding is tacit: one person gets lost; another notes the top of the tower, descends into a dark thicket, flanks a camp of orcs, and somehow heads in more or less the way.
Of course, some of that is just going with the flow. Not so in traffic, in an unknown place, jostled by rail tracks and wondering whether to U-turn or not. (Unfamiliar roads, and was it east or west?)
A friend said they note landmarks. Or maybe one should have heuristics, like three lefts is parallel to one right. One thing for certain: without GPS, it is hopeless.
What would be really satisfying would be to be able to make “creatures” out of real words. Currently a lot of the common vowels represent “end” segments (either heads or tails).
Unfortunately, as you point out, all the vowels are in the end segments, so there's no creatures with a midbody longer than 2 letters. Here's what you get [0]:
ad ago ah and ankh awl ax ego eh end er etch ex id inch into itch
However, you can also include words that form multiple creatures [1]. Some favorites:
aggrandizer alexander equalizer inlander mumbler phalanx poacher prelingual voided
0: https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E%5Baeimpvy%5D%5Bbcfgj...
1: https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E(%5Baeimpvy%5D%5Bbcfg...*
Other good ones [0]:
AUTUMN IMPUGN OUTGUN SMUDGE AUGUR FUDGE FUGUE LYMPH
0: https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E%5Bacfilosw%5D%5Bdgjm...
Surprised it doesn't come with instructions about which letters map onto left/right start/middle/end.
Also, the choice of those mappings is not very intuitive. A simple idea might have been a-g starts, h-t middles, u-z ends, for instance.
https://imgur.com/a/pMKdX3i
for the purpose of generating random chimeras :)
https://twitter.com/dchest/status/1786033028034125984
Here's a list for the left-to-right ones:
I have never seen fonts used like this.
Any other examples?
https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
> The font that replaces every buzzword by a Comic Sans-styled censorship bar
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.:;, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 1234567890 @ &!?#%
Also, when I want to know what some string is actually composed of, I like to copy-paste it into https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html
Edit: Sorry, I answered your question as though you had asked about joiner characters. Still, it appears not to use ligatures, as the characters appear not to change at all if you separate them.
I for one love this project. Amazing work, Ariel!