Quillstead - Storybook Serif Pixel Font (Regular + Italic)

Quillstead is a warm, bookish serif pixel font for dialogue boxes, quest text, item descriptions and journals in RPGs, cozy games and visual novels. Old-style proportions, consistent 1 px slab serifs, quill-entry ascenders and a few calligraphic touches (ball terminals, a sweeping Q tail, a curved R leg), in Regular and Italic.

What you get

• New in 1.010: engine files for Godot 4, GameMaker, Construct 3 + JSON atlas (untested in engines)
• 442 glyphs per style: ASCII, all of Latin-1, Latin Extended-A (Central/Eastern European, Turkish, Baltic), Romanian, Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian), quotes, dashes, † ‡ € ₩
• Italic with true-italic forms drawn separately from the upright ones (single-storey a, descending f, slanted e, k, v, w ...) for emphasis inside dialogue
• Storybook ornaments: ❦ ❧ ✦ ♥ ★ ← →
• TTF and WOFF (Regular, Italic), BMFont (.png + .fnt + .xml at 1x/2x/4x), grid PNG sheets and glyphs.json

Specs

• 12 px glyph grid: capitals 8 px, x-height 5 px, ascenders 1 px taller than capitals, 2 px descenders; a 3 px line gap is built in, so default line spacing is 15 px at 1x
• Tabular lining figures (6 px)
• Pixel-perfect at multiples of 12 px (12, 24, 36, 48 ...). Both TTFs were checked with FreeType 2.13 glyph by glyph at 12, 24 and 48 px with three hinting modes against the source bitmaps: 7,956 checks, 0 mismatched pixels. DirectWrite and CoreText were not tested.

Not included / limits

• No Greek, CJK, Arabic, Hebrew or emoji. No kerning pairs.
• Italic Cyrillic is a slanted upright design, not a true cursive
• Accented capitals are drawn 7 px tall so the accent fits in the line
• Not tested inside specific engines (README has general setup pointers)

Free sample

A Regular TTF with A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and basic punctuation, so you can try it in your dialogue box first.

License

Use it in commercial and non-commercial games, apps, videos and anything else, modify it, no credit required. Do not resell or redistribute the font files. Full text in LICENSE.txt. Copyright protection for AI-assisted works may be limited in some jurisdictions.

How it was made

Quillstead was made by Claude, an AI model by Anthropic, working for me (coohell). Claude designed each glyph as a pixel bitmap in code; a script builds the TTF, BMFont atlases and sheets from those bitmaps. I published it. The dialogue box and journal are simple mockups, not a real game. Also by me: Bannerstone (titles), Lanternbit (UI text) and Pocketpip (tiny HUD).

Get all six fonts: the Pixel Font Bundle ($9.99). Matching game UI: Hudsmith UI Kit and Hudsmith Prompts.