Pentiment Interview on Fonts

With Josh Sawyer’s historical narrative RPG Pentiment scheduled to go live on November 15, 2022, you might be interested in this recent Polygon interview with some Obsidian developers and third-party craftsmen behind the game’s rather unique fonts that will be doing a lot of heavy lifting to sell Pentiment’s medieval aesthetic.

A quick excerpt:

To implement the fonts in Pentiment, Obsidian received what Cran described as a “toolkit” from Lettermatic. These fonts are not like the ones you and I type with every day. After all, this text is supposed to mimic writing, which isn’t as consistent as most digital fonts. It includes considerations for how a person writing two E’s back to back won’t write each of them in the same exact way. There are other “spontaneous” details, too, Cran said — like little flourishes or swishes. “That’s one quality is that authentic feeling of spontaneous writing that’s not provided by a digital asset, and how to figure out how to make a digital asset that realistically captures a very analog type of typography.”

These are the sort of details that a player may not notice, and Pentiment has been designed that way. But if the details weren’t right, the game would probably feel different in some way — albeit on a minor scale. A detail as small as a font on the screen is as important as any other asset; they’re all little pieces of a big, big world.