Grimvellum - Gothic Blackletter Pixel Font

Grimvellum is a gothic blackletter pixel font for dark-fantasy and vampire game titles, castle, cathedral and cult names, "Chapter III" cards, medieval RPG menus and tarot-style cards. The lowercase is real Textura, with a diamond head and foot on every stem, pointed arches and broken bowls. The capitals add the thin inner hairline of classic blackletter but keep modern shapes, so players can still read A, M, N, S and W at a glance. 16 gothic ornaments (cross, skull, candle, raven, chalice and more) can be typed right into your text.

What you get

• 455 glyphs: ASCII (capitals, Textura lowercase, tabular digits with a dotted 0, punctuation), Latin-1 and Latin Extended-A (Western, Central and Eastern European languages, Turkish, Romanian with Ș ș Ț ț), blackletter Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian with Ґ ґ, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian) and №, quotes, dashes, … • € ₩
• 16 ornaments: cross, dagger, skull, crown, candle, rose, bat, crescent moon, heart, star, key, sword, raven, chalice, fleuron and a section divider, on Private Use code points U+E000-U+E00F. Cross, dagger, crescent moon, heart, star and fleuron are also on ✝ † ☽ ♥ ★ ❧. A cheat sheet PNG and mapping.json list every code point.
• TTF and WOFF
• BMFont atlases: PNG + .fnt + .xml at 1x, 2x and 4x
• Engine files for Godot 4 (.tres), GameMaker (sprite strips + GML) and Construct 3 (Sprite Font sheets + spacing data), plus a JSON atlas for custom engines (untested in engines)
• Grid PNG sheets per Unicode block at 1x, 2x and 4x, and glyphs.json with every glyph as pixel rows
• Specimen, README with metrics and engine notes, LICENSE

Specs

• 18 px line: capitals 11 px tall with 2 px stems and 1 px hairlines, x-height 7 px, 3 px descenders, accents in the top 2 px
• Pixel-perfect at multiples of 18 px (18, 36, 54, 72 ...). The TTF was rendered with FreeType 2.13 glyph by glyph at 18, 36 and 72 px with hinting off, default and forced auto-hint, and compared pixel by pixel with the source bitmaps: 4,095 checks, 0 mismatched pixels. Windows DirectWrite and macOS CoreText were not tested.
• The engine files were read back from disk and re-rendered (each glyph alone plus sample text) and matched the font data pixel for pixel
• Digits are tabular (all the same width), so scores and timers do not jitter
• One weight. No kerning pairs.

Not included / limits

• No Greek, CJK (Korean, Japanese, Chinese), Arabic, Hebrew or emoji
• No historical alternates or ligatures (no long-s substitution; the ſ character itself is included)
• Capitals are wide (8-12 px), so all-caps titles take more room than in a plain pixel font
• Every glyph fits inside its 18 px line; at exactly 18 px line height a comma below (Ș ț ļ ...) can touch an accent on the next line, so give stacked accented text a little extra spacing
• The ornaments are one colour. Some engines may show ♥ and ✝ as colour emoji when U+FE0F follows them; the Private Use code points never are
• Not tested inside specific engines; the README has general setup pointers for Godot, Unity, GameMaker, LOVE, Phaser and CSS

Free sample

The free sample has a TTF with capitals A-Z, digits 0-9, ! ? . , - ' and three ornaments (cross, skull, crescent moon), so you can test the capitals and the pixel-perfect sizes in your engine first. The Textura lowercase is in the full font only.

License

Use it in commercial and non-commercial games, apps, videos, printed matter, logos, merch and anything else, modify it, no credit required. Do not resell or redistribute the font files, on their own or inside another asset pack, font or library. Full text in LICENSE.txt.

How it was made

Each glyph and ornament is a pixel bitmap, checked at 1x to 4x for legibility, and the TTF, BMFont atlases, engine files and sheets are built from those same bitmaps, so all formats match. The page images were drawn with the font itself; the title screen, chapter card and sign are simple mockups, not a real game.

Also by me: Hexdrip (dripping horror pixel font), Bannerstone (heavy pixel title font) and the pixel font bundle.