Hi there. I've been spending a good deal of the past few days procrastinating on making games by making literally anything else, so at some point along the way I sort of made a font.

The entire (pointless) reason for this is that my favorite coding font — Input Mono — is only free for private use, and thus I’d be unable to use it as the font of choice for my web applications or code samples without paying for a license. (I wouldn’t be adverse to paying for a font I like, but I also had trouble understanding Input’s license terms, which was a bit discouraging.)

So I went to Google with three main criteria:

1. the font must be free to use both for web and desktop publishing purposes
2. for the most part, I’d be using the font for code. But I write prose in my code editor as well, so it should be readable for paragraphs
3. at minimum, I wanted regular, bold, and italic styles. This disqualified a surprising number of free fonts, including the well-respected Source Code Pro and Fira Code fonts.

I didn't actually end up finding a font I liked that fit those specifications. However, I did find Iosevka-- a very nice font on its own, though a bit too narrow for my tastes -- which is also open-source and programmatically generated, so I was able to go in and start changing the generation scripts.

Diffusion is the result that came out of that. Iosevka's source is remarkably well-documented; it was fairly quick to figure out how to change between different glyph options with a private build, though the width and character spacing edits required digging deeper into the parameters file. I thought that the end result looked sufficiently different enough that other people could take a look at it, if they wanted.

At any rate, I've been using this font as my default for a few weeks now, and I've been embedding it into some tools too, which all remain unreleased for now (but may be in the future).

I suppose that at some point I should probably get back to making games.