Design director Josh Sawyer tells us no feature took as much time as the text rendering
It’s probably not a huge surprise to say thatPentiment, Obsidian Entertainment’s visually intriguing mystery set in 16th century Bavaria, required a lot of historical research during development. What may surprise you, however, is how deep these historical details run throughout Pentinment’s DNA, right down the game’s text fonts. Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer told me all about how the team revived long-dead historical fonts, to give them a new life in a modern format.
Pentiment puts you in the shoes of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working in an abbey in Tassing, Bavaria. His work as an artist is quickly waylaid when Maler finds himself tasked with finding the killer behind a shocking murder that rocks the town, and, like any good would-be detective, the player finds themselves interviewing the locals to get to the bottom of the mystery. Almost everyone, it turns out, has a secret. In the absence of voice acting, Pentiment instead relies on its fonts to help the player to get an understanding of both who its cast of characters are, and how they feel about the world around them.
The development team, in partnership with typeface expertsLettermatic, created six different fonts, which they allocated to characters depending on their social status and level of education. From the start Sawyer knew he wanted Pentiment’s fonts to be as historically accurate as possible, and while other games certainly pay attention to their font choices, few dedicate as many resources to them as Obsidian did with Pentiment. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that no feature set took as much time from all departments as the text rendering,” Sawyer notes. “They’re all custom fonts, many of which were created by handwriting them out, using pens that were physically like the pens that would have been used at the time.”
The earliest days of the game’s development were informed by his desire to have fonts that recreated the physical act of writing, though he hadn’t quite planned on the sheer number of custom fonts in the game. That number was forced to expand alongside the game’s cast of characters. In its earliest prototypes, the game’s world was largely confined to the Abbey, populated by the monks and nuns, for whom the gothic textura font seemed like a natural fit.
That use of font choices to communicate information about a character goes beyond simple class distinctions. A character’s font will change as the player learns more information about them, reflecting Andreas’ changing opinion of that person. It was a feature that, as Sawyer himself admits, initially confused players during the testing stage, when a character would suddenly shift from one front to another.
Choosing the right fonts was just one hurdle to clear, however. Another challenge for the team at Obsidian were the text animations. The dialogue in Pentiment appears as if it’s being written before the player’s eyes, complete with spelling mistakes and ink splatters. It’s an effective technique in action, slowly drawing the player’s focus onto each and every line. When married with the custom fonts, however, it also turned out to be a huge amount of work.
The team spent a “solid month and a half” in conversations with Lettermatic’s Riley Cran, trying to determine if they should automate the process of creating the stroke masks - which determines how the individual strokes and letters come in during the game. “I was sceptical,” Sawyer adds, “and the more we talked about it the more complicated it seemed. We already knew from prototyping that we could do it by hand, so that’s what we decided to do. So for every single glyph that you see in the game, a human being created a stroke mask for every single stroke in that character. It was a huge amount of labour.”
“When you look at it written out, you have that sense of the writer running out of ink. We even have the splatter effects to show when a character is getting angry,” says Sawyer. “We really wanted to create the sense of physicality, creating the sense of a human being actually doing this and the labour that’s involved in it.”
Both in the fonts and in the wider game itself, the development team went to great efforts to keep Pentiment as historically accurate as possible. Still, that’s not to say that they weren’t forced to make a few compromises. While the game has an accessibility mode that further simplifies the fonts, even the unaltered version of the game has made some alterations to the more fiddly ones. Some fonts required more work than others, with Sawyer paying particular attention to the print typeface Druckeryn, based on the work of French engraver Nicholas Jensen: “What I think is really striking is that you can go back to his original letter forms, and they’re totally readable. It’s unbelievable how clear it is, and that it survived for hundreds of years and is still totally fine”
Those compromises certainly seem to have paid off. While much of Pentiment’s story is set against the backdrop of the advent of the printing press marking an end to the artistic lettering work seen in Kiersau Abbey. Technological advances may have left behind the work of people like Andreas, but I like to think he’d be happy to see it revived by them again - Albeit in an unexpected fashion.
