Square

Square is a TTF font intended for roguelike games.

Roguelike games consist entirely of text in grid cells, but the problem is that most monospaced fonts are a lot higher than they are wide, which means roguelikes either have non-square cells, or they have square cells and the characters don’t take up the entire box, neither of which looks very aesthetically pleasing.

Square has been designed to make characters fill a square space as evenly and uniformly as possible. It is inspired upon the way Japanese characters always evenly fit a box, no matter their design. It foregoes the typical ascenders/descenders in lowercase characters, and instead makes lowercase characters look like a lighter version of uppercase characters.

Example of the font in point sizes 8, 14 and 26:

And here is what it looks like in the game Brogue:

Now that looks a bit odd because the game was designed for a non-square font, but at least it gives an idea. The original looked like this:

An additional benefit is that it looks more readable at smaller sizes than a normal font taking up the same amount of pixels, so potentially useful for games with little space to use on text.

Download the actual font here

It’s under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Used in the Alien Assault Random Map Generator.