304 - She’s Different

This comic brought to you by the letter “A.”

There is a very good reason this strip is late, and it’s all because of 1 letter. Well, not quite. We were over on the forums talking about all of the hidden stuff in BMW when Tah mentioned a particular joke. Problem was, the joke was not how we intended. Not because Tah didn’t get the joke, but because he mistook an “o” for an “a.”

As you may know, the font we use to do BMW is a pixel-font that I created. Problem is, it was made using an online font maker. It worked well enough, but since it was a generic generator, the font had some issues. We have tried to clean up the font problems over the years using different programs, but some problems still remained. After Tah’s misunderstanding, we realized there were probably a lot of others who had the same problem with the “a” and it was a major enough problem we needed to fix it now. So, I undertook the arduous task of changing the design of the “a” to something more easily recognizable. Unfortunately, this meant remastering the main font set. Since I was in there anyway, we decided to fix the other problems too. This turned into a major endeavor since I needed to re-create nearly the whole font set. Since I was not familiar with the program I used, it probably took a lot longer than it should have as I had to re-do stuff because I didn’t do it right the first time.

Nevertheless…

It took 7 hours later, but the font is done. Re-named Bitmap World Standard, it’s a very clean pixel-font. So clean that our normal kerning job on today’s strip took about 2 minutes–opposed to the 20+ minutes it typically took in the past. Truly a case where we needed to spend time to save time! Both Jim and I are SOOOO geeked to think that our fonting job for the comic will be much easier herein-out.

I intend to remaster the original Bitmap World font, which, as I mentioned in comments for strip 302, is supposed to be a physically smaller font. Once they are both done, I am half considering distributing the font…for free of course. If I did, would anyone be interested? Comment if you would.

That said, this ties up the “Creepy Doll” storyline. I promised I would reveal the inspiratation for the story-arch. If you still want to know, I defer you to THIS THREAD in our forum.