Have any of you ever created, or plan to create, your own language for a game? I have been thinking about how to for some time, and realized recently that in simple acts like translation, composition, decoding and so forth as a player gathers and begins to understand and utilize the symbols, letter or iconography you choose for your language design. I''m thinking along the lines of unintelligible NPC babbling that slowly through clue exposition creates the awareness the player might want to learn this language as the game progresses and enough clues are found to warrant the translation or learning process. I think this would be a neat way to embed important information needed for game advancement in a less mechanical way, and create some dynamic, fluid interaction with players who love to play games but also enjoy linguistic intelligence types of puzzles, rather than graphical mechanical. Do you think this would be a fun activity for the player, a sort of intellectual puzzle to use the old Sid Meier term? What kind of things would you include or not, and why? Thanks for the tips and opinions, Adventuredesign

i know there is a game like this in a recent 3D nintendo systeme (gc or 64) you where on an island and have to learn customer langage which express themselves through symbole but i have forgot the name (i think it was never release outside japan)

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
be good
be evil
but do it WELL
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

In Final Fantasy 10, there is a race of people called the Al Behd (SP) who speak in a different language, which is made simply by replacing letters in english with alternate letters. As you progress through the game, you can find 26 Al Behd Primers, which teach the player one letter substitution each. The letters you have learned are automatically switched in to the spoken text. In the end, I don''t think it really served much of a purpose, which made it annoying to try to find all of them. Just trying to give you an example of a game with an alternate language. It would be interesting to have the process of understanding the language occur through intuiton or discovery in some way, instead of finding items. Perhaps talking to people and saying certain things will allow insight into the language, perhaps by learning a word or phrase.

quote: Original post by Magius
I think if done properly it could evoke a very interesting dynamic. Consider the possibilties of misinterpretation (a player thought a certain phrase meant something when in fact it meant something completely different) and directly untranslatable words or phrases (a phrase which cannot be directly translated to another language, allowing for questionable semantics). This could make for interesting decision making and consequences for a player, especially in critical situations. It has the potential to add depth to certain genres of games if done properly. On the other hand, if done improperly, it could just result in another set of processes that need to be done in order to complete the game. Have you thought of implementation details, or are you simply in the initial design phases at this point?

Magius

The details are implemented to the first level of information architecture. The real challenge was in thinking about the ways such a feature would make gameplay more interesting and intellecutally challenging in ways that fed the gameplay style overall. Plus, I had to make some design choices about how I wanted the information to be found.

An example of this is in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" when Indy finds the tomb of the Knight of the First Crusade under the church in Venice. While looking for the entrance to the Knight's tomb itself Indy or the female lead finds an iconograph of the Ark of the Covenant from the film preceding this one in the series; it is a simple pictographic representation which contributes dialogue prompt opportunity and reinforces the franchise aspects of the brand simultaneously.

Also, I had to think about the purpose of the invention and use of the writing system to begin with in terms of how plausible was it to find reliably in existance in the first place in that ancient culture and peoples that were part of the game story to begin with.

I had good examples to draw on historically, such as is the case with Egyptian Hieroglyphics, where elaborate strings of hieroglyphs told the story (after translation) of daily life, order of the Kingdom, interpretations of life and the journey through their afterlife as the egyptians saw it. Similar examples can be found in runic inscriptions, Viking Symbology, Native American Indian pictographs and other lost, vanished or declined cultures.

Then, I had to choose a unique method of systemitized choices of representation (the walls of tombs and formal architecture and papyri for Egypt, cave walls and bark for some native american cultures, metal plaques and jewelry enscribed as in Persian Cultures, scrolls for some ancient nomadic tribes, pottery, and other "vehicles of message or partial message delivery."

It had to be unique, not too difficult to put together (in the interpretive process of the player, which included how much help I was going to give them in the accompanying game manual in terms of "this is what you want to be on the lookout for, Mr./Mrs Player") consistent with the level of sophistication of that particular civilization, and consistent with the same type of reasoning this civ had with similar civs in comperable time periods of history.

From there, I could find reasonable methods of exposition: where player found icon, pictograph, letter, symbol or heiroglyph or object, what condition it would be found it (i.e., was it instantly translatable or would it have to be sent back to the 'lab of NPC's'?), what order of exposition it would be in (i.e., you have to find the map, or all parts of a map first before being able to find the object itself).

Finally, and one of the more contemplative considerations of the system, did there exist a 'rosetta stone' for this dead language and where and when in the game should the player have the chance to find it and use it, if necessary, and as an extension to that, did this culture have it's own version of the great library of Alexandria, a collected repository of it's aggregate writings over the life of the culture, and was that useful or necessary?

What really drove me to think about this in terms of using it in my own epic adventure game was not so much that I thought it would be a great or useful feature, it already was in my mind considering how complex both the story and game worlds were I was asking my player to try to figure out while still qualifying as a fun activity -- but rather -- the motivation came when I played Myst, and found that the book in it I had to read to try to make sense out of things from pieces here and there were too complexly designed (for me, taking the fun out of that part of interfacing with the game immediately) so I thought it would have been better if I could hvae figured out in a virtual tactile sense or from direct observation of objects or processses in the gameworld itself the same things.

But imo that limits the amount of information one can impart in a large story driven game like Myst, and you would have to have essentially had to figure out a book one letter at a time. So in some respects, the book was the right choice in terms perhaps of what had to be imparted informationally for the sake of the player, it was just a bad design decision on the method or device(s) of delivery.

Since my story is so much larger than Myst, I knew I had to have a device like this, but it had to be fun and intriguing, visually compelling and engaging, and not too difficult and useful to the larger mystery the game is based on itself. That method and design of the information delivery itself was what took so long to figure out.

Now, though, I have only to design the individual symbols themselves, now that I know what standard symbologies I can rely on as part of the overall reasons of what this culture would be trying to relate and archive purposefully - what was important enough for them to want to make a record of, and what familiar things they symbologically related to that would have comprised the standard classes of symbols they could derive individual and unique symbols for.

Believe it or not, I started thinking about how I was going to represent this graphically and logically six or seven years ago, and the entire (if I may paraphrase) class library of relevant symbologies to use for the language construction itself popped into my head and onto paper in outline form last night not two hours after I had finished the last page of a novel I had been working on for two years, and I was dead tired mentally and felt like I wasn't going to be creating anything for a week. :D

How the muse decides to amuse herself with us mortals. Now, I have a complete language, easy to interpret, not too easy to find individual components of, methods and objects needed to relate the messages from this dead culture they felt significant enough to relate, and have avoided doing it in an unfun way while still serving the player's need to get clues to further the discovery of the mystery.

Let's just figure out how to get it published, and you will all see what I mean.

Adventuredesign



[edited by - adventuredesign on October 25, 2003 12:04:12 AM]

I have a how-to checklist thingy for making up a language if anyone''s interested. I have a language I''ve been toying with for years now, although it''s still not finished enough that I could write anything in it. I would just upload and link to it but my webspace''s ftp server is down at the moment. Hmm, now that I think about it... why did I never submit that as an article to gamedev? O.o Maybe I should. Adventuredesign - are you interested in looking at this thing to see if you have any revisions/additions to suggest? Or maybe you could add some examples using your language?

In an interesting coincidence I just today ordered a dictionary of indo-european roots from amazon to help me work on the language. I still need to find a list of all possible english syllables somewhere...

quote: Original post by sunandshadow
I have a how-to checklist thingy for making up a language if anyone''s interested. I have a language I''ve been toying with for years now, although it''s still not finished enough that I could write anything in it. I would just upload and link to it but my webspace''s ftp server is down at the moment. Hmm, now that I think about it... why did I never submit that as an article to gamedev? O.o Maybe I should. Adventuredesign - are you interested in looking at this thing to see if you have any revisions/additions to suggest? Or maybe you could add some examples using your language?

In an interesting coincidence I just today ordered a dictionary of indo-european roots from amazon to help me work on the language. I still need to find a list of all possible english syllables somewhere...

Yeah, I''d be happy to see the list and suggest things if it helps or makes sense, just shoot me some mail. Writer to writer, isn''t it going to be almost as much fun to create the font for this ancient fabled language? It may have some marketing possibilities, too, a ''game'' font. Somebody''s probably already done it, but it sure would be a neat marketing trick if it became a popular font. As far as the article possibilities, some analysis of word games, or language games as a form of game design and how they can be incorporated to raise the level of overall game play, not to mention because of the changing demographic profile of the player and the raised expectations of entertainment value from game players (I think the whole core gamer to casual gamer is eroding pretty quickly, imo, too many players now to empower that segmentation too much longer) would be a useful tool, and also perhaps a fresh set of eyes and perspectives on it would take it out of the ''crossword/anagram'' paradigm it might historically be set in and perhaps renew interest.

Adventuredesign

quote: Original post by adventuredesign
Yeah, I''d be happy to see the list and suggest things if it helps or makes sense, just shoot me some mail. Writer to writer, isn''t it going to be almost as much fun to create the font for this ancient fabled language? It may have some marketing possibilities, too, a ''game'' font. Somebody''s probably already done it, but it sure would be a neat marketing trick if it became a popular font. As far as the article possibilities, some analysis of word games, or language games as a form of game design and how they can be incorporated to raise the level of overall game play, not to mention because of the changing demographic profile of the player and the raised expectations of entertainment value from game players (I think the whole core gamer to casual gamer is eroding pretty quickly, imo, too many players now to empower that segmentation too much longer) would be a useful tool, and also perhaps a fresh set of eyes and perspectives on it would take it out of the ''crossword/anagram'' paradigm it might historically be set in and perhaps renew interest.

Adventuredesign

Hmm, I was actually filing font creation under "appeals to the artist in me" not the writer, but yeah, that is definitely one of the fun parts. I doubt it would be a merketing success though - my language is a syllabary and as such any font set for it wouldn''t map onto English - only if you wanted to use the created language itself would the font be of any use.

I''m not really interested in word games (with the exception of this nift java magnetic poetry applet I saw recently) - I meant what I have is basically already an article on ''how to create languages'' and I was just thinking of adding more info about grammar and some stuff on how a created language could be used to enrich a game design.

Anyway, I don''t have your email addy, but my ftp access is back up so I''ll just post what I have and you can grab it from there. It was written for an English class where the teacher hadn''t even heard of creating languages before, so please excuse the elementary tone of the intro. Hope your set up for word documents with embedded images; if you have a problem tell me, I could convert it to html and lin the images.
Clicky