There are different ways to go about drawing the characters. Some create them in real life and scan them. Others create in font editors or other preferred software.
The choice of font editor partly depends on how polished you want the results to be. Bad vs good spacing between characters (kerning) can make such a big difference to whether a font looks 'right' or 'broken'.
Font editors that do a lot of the kerning work for you can be a life-saver.