💾 Archived View for drew-bio.flounder.online › gemlog › 2024-12-04.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 08:56:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Going off yesterday's post, I fancied making a post to show off the script I made for Balleborough.
In-game, I have several assets which require text (wall posters in alleys, advertisements, newspapers... wait, I don't need to explain where text crops up in daily life, do I?). I didn't want to use English for this for a few reasons:
Cool. So, what does it look like? How does it work?
Well, for the assets, I thought about how, if I was a nerd with a favourite game and saw a neography, I'd want to see if it was a cipher for the Latin alphabet. Splatoon had this - there's a LOT of fantasy text in that game, and it's all a cipher for Latin letters & can be decoded for some cute easter eggs.
But I want my world's people to have their own language, so I instead built things from the phonetic alphabet & dropped/added symbols where I wanted to. Those that I added are just digraphs in English. I also really like the abugida writing system, where each symbol is (most often) a pairing of consonant and vowel, typically with the vowel following the consonant, so I went with that. I decided that making my own language (at least for the task of making assets) would be too difficult, but I didn't want to just make a complex phoneme cipher, so I decided that my script would be used to cipher words in Esperanto, as it's a language I really like learning. Finally, I like the swooshy shape of Eastern calligraphy and Hebrew, and the way that this can be "modernised" with straight lines in place of the calligraphic script, so I was ready to go!
You can probably see some subtle parallels to the Latin alphabet: /b/ and /d/ are sort of similar looking, /n/ and /m/ have that single/double relationship going on, /r/ is based on a capital 'R' without a back (because I like the shape), and /k/ and /t∫/ are related despite being quite differently placed in the mouth.
Some new takes I wanted to include were that /h/ and /w/ are a lot more closely related than the Latin alphabet gives them credit for, but I kept them as distinct symbols, rather than using an accent. /æ/ and /e/ are much more similar looking, too, and I aimed for their shapes to reflect how the mouth looks while saying them. Ditto for /o/, which I guess is the case in Latin too as it's been left the same.
Well, what does it look like in use?
