I thought somehow the animation was playing "by itself," but I guess it was accomplished by holding down the '.' key? The font code swaps a run of N dots with the glyph corresponding to the Nth frame of animation.
Fontemon [0] makes this a bit more obvious by including a web page with the font embedded, so we can control the animation by typing, rather than watching someone else type. However, mmulet embeds some sort of Blender project [1], rather than a wasm binary to accomplish the font shaping.
So, the blender project was just used to create the game (set up each decision tree, and the position of all images), from there I compile everything into complex ligatures in the GSUB table. The wasm binary feature wasn’t around when I made fontemon, but it looks like it would have made development a lot easier!
As someone completely ignorant of the inner working of fonts, how is this different from ligatures? Those also produce special glyphs based on combinations.
Yes this is exactly ligature, I just became aware that it was possible to use wasm for them in HarfBuzz, if you want to see some wasm examples that is not possible with ligatures have a look at https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples
Fontemon [0] makes this a bit more obvious by including a web page with the font embedded, so we can control the animation by typing, rather than watching someone else type. However, mmulet embeds some sort of Blender project [1], rather than a wasm binary to accomplish the font shaping.
[0] https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
[1] https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/Tuto...
So, the blender project was just used to create the game (set up each decision tree, and the position of all images), from there I compile everything into complex ligatures in the GSUB table. The wasm binary feature wasn’t around when I made fontemon, but it looks like it would have made development a lot easier!
Yeah in retrospect I really should have added something like a overlay so it was possible to see what keys I pressed.
As someone completely ignorant of the inner working of fonts, how is this different from ligatures? Those also produce special glyphs based on combinations.
It's exactly ligatures. I presume the author avoided that term so you didn't confuse it with the ligatures that are included in Unicode.
Yes this is exactly ligature, I just became aware that it was possible to use wasm for them in HarfBuzz, if you want to see some wasm examples that is not possible with ligatures have a look at https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples