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Can somebody suggest me a free font for a fantasy RPG? I tried Tolkien Regular, but Im not sure about license and for small sizes readability suffers a bit. Tried to solve the last issue adding AA, but didnt helped too much and I have also to consider that perhaps user decides to disable AA for perfomance reasons.
Honestly, for small sizes it might be better to stick to a standard, simple font for the sake of readability: I think that I've found that once a font becomes small enough, one tends to end up sacrificing on either readability or prettiness.
That doesn't mean that you necessarily need give up on having a pretty font at all, depending on the requirements and resources with which you're working: you could always have a pretty font for larger text, and a simple font for smaller text.
As to specific fonts, the choice may depend on your specific game; have you tried looking for free fonts at Font Squirrel, dafont, 1001 Free Fonts, or SimplytheBest Fonts?
For what its worth, I've always hated the use of overly-stylized fonts for UI and such (which is why I assume you have an issue with small sizes) -- For titles, headings, and judicious use of lettering in the game world itself, go wild, but it seems like a poor trade-off to me to hurt the usability of the UI for the sake of a stylized font. Any time there's a lot of text on the screen, readability/usability should be your first concern.
It would help if you provided an example screen or UI frame where the font should go.
I've had a lot of fun with Alegreya and Alegreya Sans lately, maybe those will work?
Free for commercial use! :)
Tolkien Regular looks pretty much like a cross-breed between a classic uncial font and a classic Antiqua (as if the author couldn't decide which one to choose). Incidentially there's Uncial Antiqua (which, despite its name, looks much more like a real uncial) freely available both at Fontsquirrel and Google Fonts.
Uncial Antiqua looks pretty good for me down to a size of 11px, and you most likely don't want to make it any smaller anyway -- anything but a straight sans-serif font looks crap at tiny sizes, and having users read pages of uncial text will not award you a lot of love. So you'll only want to use these for headings/titles, and those are (normally) larger than that.
Thanbks for the suggestions! Im currently testing Alegreya, but will look to Uncial Antiqua too.
You have to be careful with freeware fonts, especially if you're going to be using them for body text or at small sizes. A LOT of work goes into making a good font. Not just the design of the actual glyphs, but the hand-kerning of thousands of individual pairs, autohinting, ligatures, and other exotic things like that. Some freeware font authors do a sloppy or non-existent job in those areas. Though of course there are high quality freeware fonts as well. You just have to be careful, and be prepared for some trial and error, that's all.
If you have even just a modest budget, you can consider looking into paid fonts, that you know will be guaranteed to look good in all situations. Some fonts cost many hundreds of dollars, but not all. For example, Futura Medium Condensed, which is the font that Skyrim uses, can be had for about $30.
