Trog Font is a base 5x5 font which features upper and lowercase (Puny Mode) glyphs as well as all of the default Pico-8 Japanese characters with adjusted widths. From a 1-pixel wide “i” to a 7-pixel wide “M” the viariable width property allows the glyphs to exist in their most natural forms (for a 5 px high font, that is).
Trog Bold has heavier versions of all western characters and symbols (and also contains the same default Japanese characters as Trog Font).
Trog Caps uses all of the base Trog Font characters but replaces the lowercase Puny Mode characters with all caps Trog Bold characters - perfect for emphasizing important words.
Slightly taller versions of the primary fonts with less compressed lower case letters.
Just un-comment out the font of your choice and use \14 in front of your text. That’s it.
Special thanks to @zep for Pico-8 in general and for enabling variable width fonts, to @SmellyFishstiks for his most excellent variable-width font editor used to create these fonts, and to the lovely and talented people of the LazyDevs Discord for their encouragement. ^_^
Credit me if you’d like, or use the name “Trog Font” in your code comments, or tag me in your cart post - I’d love to see the fonts in use! Enjoy!
NEW - TROG TALL & TALL BOLD FONTS:
However, a 7x7 sized font seemed too large to use with Pico’s 128x128 resolution. A 5x5 font seemed to be the smallest size which offered the fewest overall compromises in letter form. I developed a fixed width version of Trog Font aiming for larger open forms wherever possible. The intent was never to recreate arcade fonts themselves at this scale, but to create a new font that worked best within the 5x5 space restrictions - legibility was more important than replication. It should be easy to read and as style-neutral as possible.
I expanded on the idea by making lowercase versions as well. These ran into a little more difficulty as the 4-pixel “x-height” of the letter required more compromises in form. I settled on a 1-pixel ascender, 4-pixel x-height, and a 1-pixel descender to keep the leading to a minimum. Overall it worked out to my liking.
After finishing all of the western glyphs I had the idea of making a bold version as the large open center areas would allow for a wider stroke. The bold version came together rather quickly and I was pleased with the result.
With the creation of a tool which allowed one to adjust pixel widths I readjusted glyphs which had been either stretched or squished earlier to work within a fixed width. Finally, I added in the default Japanese glyphs and adjusted their widths as well.
In short, I stewed over these generic fonts in order that they remain as consistent as possible and convey little, if, anything, to a game’s feel or tone. I feel that, for the constraints of the size, they are the best that they can be in this regard. And, like those early arcade game fonts, these utilitarian fonts needn’t be confined to just a few select games or genres - they were solely meant for the clear conveyance of speech. And speech, after all, was meant to be free.