That Thing about Compo Fonts

The Compo rules state that content has to be hand-made within the time frame of the competition or be a derivative work from premade material.

But fonts are an exception to that.

While I find that reasonable, I have seen Compo entries that use fairly extravagant fonts in their games, which I felt crossed a line. At some point a spiffy intro screen containing a game title made from some well-designed font kind of defeats the spirit of the Compo for me in that specific context.

It would be a different story if someone modified a more generic font to make it their own so that the “derivative works” rule would still apply.

We could take the “any font allowed” rule to its extreme and create a game that makes heavy use of well-designed clipart fonts for its graphical assets. This, for me, would cross the line of the Compo spirit by a wide margin, yet technically it would be allowed. And, I think it’s not very far-fetched that a decent game with visuals like these could get a very good placement in the “Graphics” category.

So, what to do? Since I’m fairly new to Ludum Dare myself, I wonder whether this has been discussed in the past and if there is a consensus on this matter.

My position on this is that external fonts should clearly be allowed to be used in the Compo. However, I would like seeing a restriction about what type of fonts can be used. Since drawing a line between valid and invalid fonts would be nearly impossible, my suggestion would be to define two small sets of allowed public domain fonts (for pixel art and higher-resolution games, respectively). The concrete selection of these fonts could be decided on in a poll.

As an advantage, regulating the “must have legal rights” rule would become easier (I don’t want to know how many people just download any font from some website without checking it’s usage terms or forget to give proper attibution).

“But wouldn’t that make games less diverse with only a handful of fonts to choose from?” Precisely! If one happened to create a font themselves (as I’ve seen people do in some post-mortems), it would be a neat selling point to make their game stand out, just like when people record their own sound effects instead of just using bfxr like everyone does.

So, what’s your opinion on the fonts issue in the Compo? Would you like stricter regulations or are you fine with the way the rules currently are?