Battle of the Gods Typography

For Battle of the Gods I wanted a font that suited the theme, so I decided to design my own. I knew that the text would be laser etched, in which case it would need serifs (based on my knowledge of the way Romans carved their letters into stone), so I started by taking some good fonts and adding demonic style serifs, because I thought they'd look cool.

 Kari Display Pro plus spiky serifs

 Futura Black with curly serifs

Helvetica Black with spiky curly serifs

I realised that if I'm laser etching this it will be quite thick, which would make it expensive. So I looked into another style of text I like, Blackletter, because it's a lot thinner and I thought that the intricacies of it would come out nicely etched into wood.

It looks cool, but it just says medieval, it doesn't say Fantasy wargame. To make up for where I was missing I looked at some wargame fonts, I checked out:

I tried to write my game font in the same style as these, with varying successes:

I decided that due to the size constraints I would be better off with 2 layers than 1 single line of text, and I was inspired by the font Alchemy to have letters that were a bit bizarre looking.

I realised that due to the nature of the laser etcher I was better off with just outlining the text, which meant that the outline had to be pretty cool, with some overlapping underlapping shit. That was how I settled on this style of B.

Now that I had these overlapping spikes I designed the rest of the text with this in mind. Because it's a display heading I really just considered how each letter would look in the word it was part of, considering it as a whole image. 

 With this I decided that a smaller O was good and a snake like S (like my dragon) and the Bone style serifs I had for the letter B carried over to the D.

I spent a long while trying to figure out how the G and O linked into each other. I wanted to the decorative serifs to lead into one another, and for the finished thing to look a bit mental.

Which all lead me to this finalised version:

My dad's always saying that beauty is about how symmetrical you are, so I tried to make my title text symmetrical. so the S and G both have parts that curl down and towards the centre, and the B and the L + E mirror each other. I slotted the "of the" part in the middle, which I'd decided on by seeing how the curly Fs I like to draw could link up with a much simplified version of the O I used in "GoDS"and then writing "the" so it matched. I think it managed to combine the madness of the Mordehiem title with the sleeker look of the Warmachine title. AND most importantly it focusses on the line rather than the fill, which is what the Laser Etcher is all about.

After that I use the website myscriptfont.com to create a font out of what I'd designed for the display text. I simplified it somewhat and got this:

The end result doesn't really work at small sizes because the lines are so thin. I tried using it to write everything but the response was it was too difficult to read, so I only used it for headings and just used the same text they use for Warhammer source books for my body text, Garamond. The good thing though was I was able to make some symbols for use within the game, such as Energy and Damage, these extra characters were the £ and € symbols in my font. So whilst it was mostly written in an already existing font my display font allowed me to personalise the titles and add symbols into the text easily.