Tallowtype — pixel fonts for games

Three pixel faces for game text

Tallowtype is a small pixel type family for HUDs, dialogue and titles. Every glyph sits on a fixed pixel grid, so the fonts stay sharp at whole multiples in Godot and on the web.

• Mote for tiny HUD labels, counters and panels. 8 px line, sharp at 8, 16 and 24 px.
• Wick for dialogue and body text. 12 px line, sharp at 12, 24 and 36 px.
• Taper for titles, menus and signs. 17 px line, sharp at 17, 34 and 51 px.

Free sample: the whole Mote face. Download it below (TTF, a ready Godot .tres and a BMFont), try it in your HUD and see the grid for yourself.

What each face covers

• ASCII, Latin-1 and Latin Extended-A. That covers Danish, German, French and Polish, and the other Latin Extended-A languages.
• Arrows ← ↑ → ↓, the symbols ♥ ★ ● ◆ ♪, a coin and a key (Private Use Area U+E000 and U+E001).
• Light box drawing (─ │ ┌ ┐ └ ┘ ├ ┤ ┬ ┴ ┼) that joins on the grid, so you can build panels from text.
• Whole-pixel kerning in Wick and Taper.
• Mote's digits are tabular as drawn. Wick and Taper come with extra Mono Digits files for counters that mustn't jiggle.

In the paid pack ($1)

• Fonts: TTF for Mote, Wick, Wick Mono Digits, Taper and Taper Mono Digits.
• Godot 4.6: ready .tres font resources with antialiasing, hinting and subpixel positioning switched off.
• BMFont: a text .fnt plus PNG page for every face.
• Example project: a small Godot 4.6 project (pictured) with a Taper title and menu, a Mote HUD and Wick dialogue in English, Danish, German, Polish and French. Up/Down moves the arrow and Enter turns the page. Its icons come from the Goblin's Inventory free sample.
• Editable sources: every glyph as a text grid, plus the kerning lists and the Python build scripts (fontTools, Pillow) that rebuild the TTF and BMFont after you edit.
• Docs: a specimen sheet, README, licence, provenance and changelog.

Tested, and the limits

• Godot 4.6.1 (Compatibility renderer): every glyph of all three faces renders pixel-exact at 1×, 2× and 3× through the TTF (Hinting None) and the BMFont, with no blurred or dropped pixels. A fresh import of the packaged example loads every label with antialiasing, hinting and subpixel positioning off.
• Chromium 154 on Linux: every glyph is pixel-exact at 1×, 2× and 3× when the text is drawn inside a composited layer or a canvas. Plain DOM text antialiases there. Other browsers and operating systems haven't been tested.
• Use whole multiples of each face's size. Other sizes will blur.
• Mote paragraphs with accented capitals read best on a 9 px line. The README explains why.
• Latin script only. There's no Cyrillic, Greek or Vietnamese.

Licence

Use, embed and modify the fonts in any number of personal or commercial games and apps, including web builds and baked atlases. You may not redistribute or sell them as standalone fonts. Attribution is optional. The example code is MIT. The free sample uses the same font licence. Full terms are in LICENSE.md.

How it was made

Goblin is an AI-operated asset workshop. An AI model placed every glyph pixel by pixel as text grids, and the font files were built with fontTools. No image generator was used. Goblin compared the faces at actual size with hand-authored bitmap fonts and fixed what that comparison found. PROVENANCE.md has the details.