The Reach of UnifontEX

This font was in its early days put on FontSpace and to some degree on Github. The FontSpace version in spite of increasing obsolescence got popular. I got quite a few good comments, someone even wanted to use it academically a week before. FontSpace ended up being where Gem Frenzy (the first production game someone has made with my content) got it. I frequently posted about UnifontEX on Discord during its development. The Github location got the most traffic, 35 people loved it enough to Star, and I had people follow me there over it. Also, some of my stars include Iranian, Chinese, Floridian, and Russian developers. Yeah, I was surprised. Also surprising was that BOTH Chinese AND Japanese developers have liked the glyph shapes even though I used Unifont-JP. Japanese developers hate Chinese glyph shapes being used for Kanji by the way.

So I’ve gained some traction, even amongst international audiences that I expected to hate my guts. I also have people on my Github stars from JetBrains (they made their own coding font but evidently someone from there starred it, and I admire them for that), FFmpeg, several big developers (including/especially foreign ones), a Chinese font company, and some gamedevs, and a Minecraft server admin. So people tend to find me on Github, but gamedevs look on Fontspace.

Also, I’ve had someone put UnifontEX into a Roblox emoji mod. People on PlanetMinecraft love it. I suspect Mojang put in .hex support so people wouldn’t complain about default needing Plane 1 but it not being there. Funnily-enough, for versions of the game prior to chat signing, UnifontEX is useful because you get Plane 1 and those versions are older than Unicode Plane 1 support.

As for marketing that didn’t work, well, I would say that Sourceforge and OpenGameArt is rather desolate, and I don’t know how many people downloaded it off RPG Maker. Also Fediverse seems to be going better regarding UnifontEX than Twitter/X or SpaceHey/other blogging. I tried. Lemmy got some initial attention. Discord has had some users. AO3 didn’t want to self-host it. I haven’t tried other literature sites. SoFurry got some unofficial tags, but FurAffinity, Furry Network, and InkBunny didn’t receive much traffic, because on furry sites, while bitmap font sheets DO exist, it is somewhat of a periphery demographic. DeviantArt didn’t get huge traffic either. One IRL friend was going to use it on his website eventually.

So I got in a game’s credits, and my biggest fans of UnifontEX come from the most unlikely places. I’m surprised my JummBox SoundFont didn’t end up in a game.

Also, Paul Hardy of Unifont finds our conversations pleasant, and I’ve spoken with Rebecca Bettencourt of Unifont before on Mastodon, so…

I’ve had people on Mastodon bring up the font, and I’ve sometimes had to swoop in and clarify some misconceptions about it, or notify them that there were updates. If people are talking about UnifontEX on the Fediverse enough to not ping me about it, I’d consider that my font went outside my original orbit to be a good thing. I also got an IRL friend to use it in his writing. So the question becomes taking the victory of it being used in Gem Frenzy and finding out where to go from there. I hope people use UnifontEX in their projects. At 65417 glyphs, there are MANY possibilities you can do with it. Now where to go from here? Also my Reddit posts on it have received small numbers of upvotes. Hopefully that number of upvotes gets bigger.

So that’s the answer to the question of marketing, and what worked about it plus what didn’t work. Perhaps the answer to marketing experts is to try posting on the more niche channels when you have the time.