Frontispiece - The Title Screen, Generated, for GameMaker

The title screen, generated, for GameMaker: your game's name CUT letter by letter into slate, leather, oak or lacquer, framed by a border and a cartouche, crowned with a device read from your game's own words, over a command menu built from the same furniture. No image files, no sprites, no stock window.

Give Frontispiece your title and the words your game uses for itself (its elements, classes, places). It chooses one of six houses, a ground, a border, a cartouche, a hand of lettering, a cut, a device and a menu that belong together, and draws every part of it once, in pure GML. Then the screen comes up the way a title card should: the letters are cut in one by one, and the device and the menu rise after them.

my_screen = fsp_screen_create("Thanehold", {
    subtitle: "A Tale of the Late Kingdom",
    words: ["Frost", "Axe", "Wolf", "North"],
    enabled: [true, file_exists("save.dat"), true, true]
});
fsp_screen_step(my_screen);                  // Step
fsp_screen_draw(my_screen, 0, 0);            // Draw GUI
var my_choice = fsp_screen_confirm(my_screen);   // the row the player chose

The lettering

• A title that is cut, not typed. 79 hand authored letterform skeletons, drawn stroke by stroke, rendered through one broad nib pen into five hands: Lapidary (Roman inscriptional capitals), Uncial, Textura (blackletter), Stave (straight chisel cuts only) and Grotesk (monoline). 245 glyphs.
• Four cuts for how a letter meets its material: incised (a V groove, only the shadow the cut casts), raised, inlaid (metal in a bed) and printed. Each solves an absolute contrast, so the same cut reads on pale vellum and on black lacquer.

The screen

• Eight grounds worked as materials: vellum, tooled leather, riven slate, planished bronze, black lacquer, woven linen, quartersawn oak and brushed steel.
• Six borders, six cartouches, twelve fleurons, six device layouts and six menus. The chosen row lifts, deepens or runs out; a disabled row (Continue with no save) is drawn greyed and cannot be confirmed.
• It reads your game. The words you pass choose the house; with none, a hash of the title does, so a game always gets the same screen and two games do not share one by accident. Every axis can be overridden.
• Cheap to show. Built once into sprites; after that a frame is two or three sprite draws.

Tested

• Igor package build clean on the shipped source, and proven able to fail on it.
• 78 in engine assertions on a real built exe: every glyph in every hand, the fill rules pixel by pixel, all six houses drawn with ink where it belongs and nowhere else, the chosen row visibly moving, the six screens measured as six different pictures.
• 32 more in a blank project that installed the package the way you will and ran the Readme's own code at its own screen size, asserting the title is cut, the menu is drawn and every house renders.
• 116 adversarial calls against all 29 documented functions with zero crashes.

Requirements

GameMaker 2024.14 or newer (built and tested against runtime 2024.14.4.268). Pure GML: no extensions, no DLLs, no shaders, no sprites. Import the .yymps, open rm_fsp_demo, press Play: H changes the house, T the sample game, R cuts the title in again.

One commercial licence, unlimited games, no attribution required. Everything the package draws in your game is yours to ship, including on your store page and in your key art.

Also from this studio: Frontispiece for RPG Maker MZ, the same title screens for MZ projects; Puzzlework, dungeon puzzle rooms that draw themselves; Loopwork, a time loop engine for GameMaker; and more GameMaker systems at csaf.itch.io.

AI disclosure: the code and the generated artwork in this package were produced with AI assistance. Every store image, the cover included, was rendered by the product itself. Fonts for the menu and subtitle: IM Fell DW Pica (SIL OFL 1.1) and Open Sans (Apache-2.0), notices included.