Just wanted to poll people and see if anyone has a good font choice for the game. The goal is to pick a font that reads easily as a map. I would probably prefer a square font although a lot of ASCII games do not use a square font.
I did a little testing using MonoGame to see how the fonts looked. I first tried Consolas because it is a modern fixed width font. When placing characters equal distance horizontally and vertically it was not visually pleasing because there was more blank space between characters horizontally than vertically.
So I did an internet search and found a font called Press Start 2P (http://www.dafont.com/press-start-2p.font). This font is almost square. The picture below is with size 12 point. It looks decent. It would be nice if the periods were in the center of the font instead of the bottom since it sort of makes the room look off kilter.
The @ is the player. The $ is money/gold, and the + is a door.
It occurred to me someone could design a font for the game jam or modify an existing one. If anyone is interested please post. Or if you have a better choice in mind, please post about it.
I created the graphic using DrawString in MonoGame to place each individual character. This way I didn't have to worry about messing with the font spacing in the XML file. This isn't how SpriteBatch.DrawString() is supposed to be used, so there may be some performance issues. I didn't notice anything drawing these 100 characters. The benefit of drawing each character separately is that you can change the color of each character individually.
