Custom fonts in Unity

How to use custom fonts in your game

Danielle H
3 min readNov 24, 2023

My game Space Short was pretty much done, but the name itself bothered me. It looked kind of… blah.

I had a vague impression of wanting maybe a motion blur or something, but it didn’t really look the way I wanted. After some thought, I realized that I want a different font for the two words, where “Space” would be heavy and massive, and “short” would be narrower.

So I started browsing through Google Fonts. I chose them because they are free for commercial use, and have a lot of options. As I intended to use them in a Unity game directly (that is, use the ttf file) and not embed in a website, I figured that I bypass the privacy issue.

After playing with some different options, I realized that the look I like best has the same kind of font for both words, just “Space” is bold and wide, and “Short” is narrower. In short, I needed a font that had a Condensed version.

I gathered the options I liked best and did a quick in-family poll, and 1 won by a landslide:

What do you think? (I’m not changing it now, though ;) )

1 is the Saira font and the Saira Condensed font. I downloaded the family and installed the font…and Unity doesn’t care.

It was surprisingly difficult to find out how to do this, as some links led to old tutorials, but in the end I found this

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Danielle H

I started programming in LabVIEW and Matlab, and quickly expanded to include Android, Swift, Flutter, Web(PHP, HTML, Javascript), Arduino and Processing.