(No, Comic Sans is not featured..)

Recently I spent some time looking for a nice font with that classic hand-texted, comic book lettering feel for the texts in the game. Originally I was going to just use the Felt Marker font, which is pre-installed on the iPhone (it’s the one used in the Notes app), but I never really liked it, and finally just got sick of the look of it.

So I put some extra effort into coding – fortunately, just a little bit, as Cocos2D has built-in support for TrueType fonts in the more recent versions, and some more into trying to find a decent-looking font in my price range. I was prepared to fork out somewhere between 100 – 200 dollars, but sadly for a hobbyist developer like me, the licensing fees for embedded use in an application are a fair bit steeper.

Generally, the prices are not outrageous – there are good options available for about 2-3 times the price I thought I’d pay, with the more expensive ones ranging all the way up to $1000-2000 for embedded use – but at this point I’m not sure my game will ever even make it to the app store, let alone sell any copies, so I couldn’t justify the cost. At this stage, time is the only investment I’m willing to make. For a second, I considered creating a typeface of my own, but with font tools not being exactly free either, I decided the amount of time needed to learn a tool and create a working font is better spent on working on the game itself, so I ended up looking into free font alternatives.

And I was very happy to find a few good ones. Comparing to the commercial fonts, there are some minor kerning issues here and there, and some leading choices seem a bit exotic. These would be very easy to fix in Photoshop, but in this case I’m relying solely on the font settings when drawing text on screen, so I have to discard some otherwise excellent font options.

Samples of free comic book fonts

WBXKomik if freeware, Komika family is charity-ware (from the readme: “If you do use them in commercial projects in which you make some profit, please take the time to give a small fraction of that to your favourite charity.”), Laffayette Pro and VTC Letterer (“DistroWare! Spread like the Plague!”) at least seem to be free for any use, although I wasn’t able to find any definite information on these, so it’s better to check it out just to be safe. Besides, you’re on your own anyway, I take no responsibility of any of this being accurate.

I don’t have the download links at hand, but leave a comment and I’ll dig ’em, if Google doesn’t know the font names.

Blambot has great fonts, many of which are free for personal use and Comicraft has many wonderful commercial fonts.