Every time I see a FedEx truck now, I see the arrow. The negative space between the E and the x, pointing right, hiding in plain sight. Once you see it you can't unsee it. Better still I smile every time it shows up.
Kerning gave me the same thing. Once you know what it is, you start reading typography the way you read words. You can see whether someone cared. Sloppy kerning is the visual equivalent of a typo in a formal letter; most people feel it. It is part of whether a product feels polished, feels like quality. Kerning is bundled in with a whole host of design decisions of course that add up to the full picture of a product feeling "right". It's a whole other language operating all around us, trying to make you feel that this text is important, or playful, or trustworthy. Thoughtful formatting vs. something slapped together. You start to imagine what it would be like to speak thieves' cant, a code hiding in plain sight that only certain people can understand.
I wanted to make that moment of initiation into a game.
The Build
Typography Rescue started as a simple concept: letters and words with bad kerning, where your job is to fix them. This idea felt like it had legs. That "once you see it" quality felt like exactly the right foundation for a game that teaches you something.
I got it spun up. And then I hit a wall.
The One I Couldn't Hold
The mechanic and concept seemed solid to me. The feel never did.
I tried a couple different angles to see if the game would land. Zen: a slow, meditative exercise, place everything where it belongs. Arcade: go fast, score points, beat the clock. When those didn't land I tried adding mechanical friction: randomized controls where each keypress would rotate a letter or nudge it left or right rather than placing it directly. None of these actually made kerning fun to interact with. The observational hook that made the idea exciting didn't survive contact with a game loop.
What I Actually Learned
I was really chasing a moment of perspective shift, not a game mechanic, and those are fundamentally different containers. The moment the vision switches on. The feeling of being initiated into a language that was always there. The FedEx arrow works because it's passive and the piece still works whether you notice the arrow or not. A game loop is by definition active and deliberate, which is structurally incompatible with the "sneak up on you" quality of the original experience.
I don't know what the right container for that experience is. But working on this taught me something about the gap between a good hook and a good mechanic that I will remember going into projects in the future. Some lateral thinking down the road, some completely different design space, I hope this experience will be part of how I find an answer.
The Verdict
Graveyard with a slight chance of resurrection. If you're reading this and you know what this wants to be, build it.