A typeface for hoop
The game got a typeface with its own geometry, UI marks, and a little bit of attitude.
Had a great vacation, hardly thought about work. Thought quite a bit about hoop though, and you know what bugged me? The system-default font. Ugh.
So I got to fidgeting on my phone and man, did I learn a lot about fonts this August! I even learned it's not even called a font, it's called a typeface. Oooooh.
The typeface is called Hoopline. It is now part of the game interface and this site, so the name of the game can feel like it comes from the same place as the arena.
Built from scratch. By yours truly. Vibe-coded - as if I could develop a whole typeface by myself on my phone in the middle of... well, somewhere else!
But man, was it a lot of work. Every design rule, every uppercase glyph checked by hand. Did you know letters have actual parts to their glyphs (shapes), like bowls and extenders? I didn't. I do now. And then there was lowercase. Numbers. Symbols. Extended ASCII-characters (you know, like in "Old MacDonald had a farm, é-ï-æ-í-ø"). I stopped there, fearing I would end up designing Thai and Chinese characters for years to come.
And then came spacing; how far are letters actually apart? And then came kerning. Did you know about kerning? I didn't. I do now. It's where a Bj for instance, are closer together than a Bk. As an exception - because a letter with a left-hooked descender (j) naturally 'creeps in' with its leftmost neighbour more than other letters do. Like a comma, it sits neatly beside its preceding letter's visible spot, yes? Well how about a capital P? It sure doesn't creep to the left underneath the bowl (yes, that's the bowl) of the P - it take a bit more distance.
Rules and exceptions, shaping and carving. Blood, sweat and tears.
But fun. I've learned a lot (that I will never ever need to use ever again)!
Anyway, it's deliberately more structural than decorative: broad letters, sharp decisions, and enough character to make a score screen feel like a game screen.
