Fer.al Dragons + The Beta Font Quest Continues

Hey Jammers! So a couple days ago, I got an email notice from Fer.al:

This was probably the first actual email update they ever sent out, if you don't count the original beta-testing form.

I was hoping it was gonna be an announcement about Fer.al finally going out of beta, but I guess all good things take time, because it was just a notice that they will be accepting a new wave of players into the closed beta:

If you signed up for beta so many months ago but were never sent an invite, this could be a lucky sign!

Though, I have a funny feeling I won't be accepted. Why? Well ya see, I have two email addresses that forward email to each other's inboxes, and I may have accidentally input an email address into the beta form that was originally sent to my other email address. 

It's a small thing, so maybe they'll ignore it, but maybe they won't ^_^;

However, this email notice was not just about the new wave of closed beta invites... it revealed something new, too!

This is a screenshot from the new-and-improved Fer.al homepage. Along with the well-known kitsune and senri, it seems Fer.al players may be able to play as dragons as well!!!

This made me very excited because when I originally heard that Fer.al featured mythical creatures, I wasn't imagining dragons; they completely slipped my mind. BUT NOW... I am super excited to play as a dragon.

According to the Fer.al wiki, this is some leaked concept art for the dragon:

Super cool and sleek :0

You know, I wonder how far Fer.al will take its array of mythical creatures. 

Will they also tap into urban legends as well as ancient ones? Will we be able to play as bigfoot!?!?! That is the question we should all be asking.

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The next section of this post is all about my obsession with figuring out the name of a particular font Animal Jam used in beta testing. It sounds boring, but if the idea of seeing me go full detective mode sounds amusing, read on! X)


So, you might possibly remember around August, when I was being productive trying to redesign my blog's header:

It is almost done, I just want to add on some leafy accents to it to make it feel complete. I've sketched them out, planned to trace them digitally... and I'll do that... eventually :P

The reason why it's taken a million years for me to make progress with this is that I view my blog's layout like an art project; a visual tribute to my favorite artistic aspects of Jamaa as it's changed over the years. I wanna get to the point where just looking at my blog will make me (and you too, hopefully!) instantly happy and peaceful. 

So naturally, I was very very very particular about everything in this new header, especially the font. I gotta be honest with you– I'm tired of TikiIsland (the font in my current header right now).

You may have noticed that this font I chose for the "ANIMAL JAM" text in my new header is not TikiIsland. So what is it?

The truth is, I have no idea.

In case you forgot, or if you're new here... I actually drew that "ANIMAL JAM" text by hand based on a mystery font that was all over the beta Animal Jam homepage. I know; I still can't believe I had the patience for that. 

Here are examples of that mystery font:

In late August, I looked everywhere trying to find this font. I used font identifying tools, looked at the beta site's page source code... but no luck. I eventually came to the conclusion that this font is impossible to find because it was made specifically for Animal Jam to use.

That's what I thought... until a few days ago.

So, I was bored and decided to look up some old kids shows from the Discovery Kids channel that I used to watch when I was little. I found one called "Truth Or Scare," and to be honest I didn't remember it at all... but they used this mystery font EVERYWHERE in their show! If you look closely, you can tell.

And that show was produced a long long time ago, around 2002... so this font was definitely not made specifically for Animal Jam. Therefore, it should somehow be publicly available.

Still, beyond that it did not give me any new leads. It's not as if TV shows ever put the name of the font they use in the credits.

However, it gave me a new drive to figure out this font, and I spent hours and hours doing the following:

– Using the Wayback Machine to look at the beta site and go into its page source to see if the font name is recorded somewhere in the code. (Don't worry, it's all legal– just good ol' fashioned Inspect Element on Google Chrome.)

...and the result of that? Nothing, because all uses of the mystery font were in images, not in highlightable text.

 – Uploading image examples of the mystery font to font identifiers like FontSquirrel and WhatTheFont.

...and the result of that? Nothing. No matter how clean those images were, no matter which ones I used, none of the fonts it matched to them were even remotely similar.

– Looking up things like "tiki font" or "chunky font" or any other words that might describe the mystery font on font databases and Google Images. 

...and the result of that? Nothing, unless you count my mini discovery of a font that I recognized that was probably in an old Jam-a-Gram:

However, I tried to look at old Jam a Grams to see if I could find the one with this font, and I couldn't... which is weird cuz this font looks super familiar.

I looked everywhere, all through the biggest font databases... and I ended up with nothing.

I still have two last bits of hope: 

1. Maybe, someone at AJHQ will know what the heck the mystery font is and tell me the name. Honestly, I've become so obsessed with it that I might just pay real money for it if that's what I have to do.

2. If that fails, and I feel like it might... I will just straight up recreate the entire font for myself just so I can use it a few times on my blog. It's making me lose my gosh dang mind

Until then... this font will haunt my dreams.

                                                

Well, not all was for nothing. While I was looking around in the page source for the beta site, I found this really lovely background image that I think I haven't seen before!

It's ominous in a peaceful sort of way. I think it would be a wonderful background for me to use on my blog sometimes (maybe for Night of the Phantoms?), and I bet you can use it as a desktop image if you want!

The original file for it is big enough for that, but maybe it'll get compressed if I upload it to this blog... hopefully not.

I hope you enjoyed this earlier-than-normal post! See you in Jamaa, and remember to be kind to yourself and others~

~DoomyPanda