I made an attempt to make the font more readable... here are my results!

Not one is more readable than the other. I can read them both perfectly fine.

 

Oh god! Pixelated fonts make my eyes bleed!

 

I agree with most other people here, your one is better and more readable but the other one is also fine imo.

 

Obviously I missed something over the weekend..

Quite possibly I'm missing the joke?

 

I made this pixel font long ago. It was the first font I made (in later 2011 maybe? early 2012). I made it for funsies somewhat quickly. But yeah, it's got readability issues. I think it's just because it's so low res. We could break the pixel ratio (we already have in other areas) and just put a new font in. It's something I've thought about. Readability is probably better than having the style match.

 

I prefer the original.

 

Indeed, planet backgrounds (I mean the actual planets/suns in the background sky, not the background planet surface) are already higher-res than rest of the game.

IMO, fonts should not be stylized as much as the rest of the game. The font style is only noticeable early on, and shortly thereafter it stops being "novel and thematic" and just becomes "choppy and hard to read".

I suggest breaking fonts into two categories - title fonts and regular fonts:

• Title fonts would retain their current thematic styling, and be used for short important labels such as:
  • Planet names
  • Item names
  • Quest names
  • Character names
• Regular fonts would use a common font (or a style similar to, and as readable as, a common non-monospaceand non-ALL-CAPS font), and be used for everything else, such as:
  • Item descriptions
  • Quest details
  • Codex entries
  • NPC chat

Let's compare this on practice of other games famous for their stylized fonts, specifically the Diablo series. Below is an item description screenshot from Diablo II:



As you can see, the entire item description is using the Diablo stylized fonts. While looking "thematic" at first, by the time you got your 1000th item, this font just becomes annoying, especially when trying to compare stats on different items.

On the other hand, Diablo III learned from this mistake, and its items look like this:



As you can see, there is still room for the styled fonts in the dialog title (saying "EQUIPPED") as well as the item title (saying SCOUTING BOOTS OF THORNS), both in the famous Diablo series fonts. But the rest of the item description is using regular, easy-to-read font. This is a good balance between keeping the game's theme and style, and avoiding excessively long texts made hard to read by too much styling.

tl;dr summary: use two font sets, a STYLIZED ONE for headers/titles, and a regular one for everything else.

 

This is a great idea, very well explained. I hope the devs implement this.

 

Yes. This, great idea. Maybe have different text options for headers, sub headers, descriptions, ETC?

 

I'll have to agree in that the modified text is easier to read. It also feels that the stronger colors add to the effect. So yeah, it would be nice to have the better text, seeing as it only improves the original style rather than diverts from it

 

I can read both fine, but i'll admit yours is easier on the eyes in comparison.

 

I kind of hope there is a "big text" option. I tend to play on my TV from my couch, and small font's are a little hard to read with my bad eyes.

 

I don't see much difference, but I can read the second one easier.

 

I think the 'h' is a massive improvement (no longer is it practically an 'n',) but I'm not quite sure what's up with the new 'k'. Looks kind of strange like that.

Also, why does the original green text seem so blurry? Looks almost anti-aliased.

 

I don't get why the first one is a problem, I can read it easily. I don't really see a difference between the original and your version anyway.

 

As far as normal fonts go, here is a link to a comparison between the existing font and a font I found most fitting out of those installed on my machine (Microsoft Yahei UI):

http://i.imgur.com/n836qmR.png

(I didn't embed the image in the post because the forum scales image sizes and it screws up the font).

IMO the bottom font is a lot quicker and easier to read, despite taking a comparable amount of space on screen.

Chucklefish probably can't use the Microsoft font because it's copyrighted, but there should be many free fonts out of there that also look good. Don't just pick the first font you find -- I tried setting the same text in Arial/Verdana/Tahoma/etc, and they all looked much worse.

 

Way too smooth. Needs to be at least somewhat pixelated to be thematic. Something like the System font might be a better choice.

 

According to a large body of surveys done by several advertising companies, Helvetica is the most readable font. They would have common easy-to-read fonts shown in random order on a list and ask people to vote for which one they thought was easiest to read. Helvetica was specifically designed for the purpose of use on signs, so the font was deliberately designed to be easy to read even at small sizes. Most road signs in the entire world use Helvetica, occasionally modified for their language. Apple's iOS almost exclusively uses this font as well. Helvetica is widely used by governments for various forms, and it is the font used by NASA on the Space Shuttle orbiter. On top of that, the computer interface in Star Trek uses a form of Helvetica.

The default font for these forums is Tahoma.
To show the difference between the forum default and Helvetica, I will type this sentence twice. (Tahoma)
To show the difference between the forum default and Helvetica, I will type this sentence twice. (Helvetica)

Personally, I've always prefered Verdana, but cest la vie.

 

The myth goes that "sans-serif fonts are better for computer text, and serif fonts are better for printed text".

The thing is, stating a font is "better" than another is way too broad a statement. We need to stop thinking in black and white terms, and understand that every context has different requirements and preferences, including thematic style, technology quality, lighting level, etc. There is no such thing as a "best" font for everything.

As well, these studies were conducted at an age of low-resolution computer screens. If you take a modern cell phone/tablet with much higher per-inch resolution than desktops, you'll notice that every developer (for example, both Microsoft and Apple) develop a separate set of fonts just optimized for that device.

 

I just rattled off some facts about Helvetica, compared it to Tahoma, then mentioned that I prefer Verdana.

I never said anything was "better". I'm fairly certain that most ebooks on the Kindle Paperwhite use Times New Roman, and there are probably reasons for that, but it's more complicated than I care to get into. I think most people who put real time and effort into typefaces think way more about this than I ever will, and I'll always defer to their judgement. I just thought I'd infodump some stuff for people to think about.

In particular, I thought it was rather thematic (though obscure) that Helvetica is used a great deal by NASA, and was even shown on the computer interface in Star Trek.