- First you will need to travel to the astral realm
- Courses on this are available at most major universities, but are usually elective and sometimes not offered every semester. You may need to talk to your advisor. Plan ahead!
- Once there, you will need to find and kill your ‘shadow self’
- In Commonwealth regions this is referred to as your ‘antiego’ but it’s the same thing
- Use a knife. Most people recommend a sharp, slender single edged blade no shorter than eight inches long, but this is a matter of personal preference.
- Having done so, you will need to then escape the astral realm with your shadow self’s heart.
- Leave the knife behind. I know this is expensive for beginners, but it’s important not to anger She Who Mends the Threshold, who uses these discarded knives as needles.
- When you return with your shadow heart, it will immediately begin to sublimate into black smoke. You will need to work quickly to open the heart and transcribe the writing inside.
- Most people’s hearts are inscribed in Sumerian, but other languages are possible, so it pays to learn a wide breadth of languages. Coordinate with your dev team to make sure that among all of you, you know a good selection of dead languages.
- The transcribed inscription will instruct you on how many frames of hitstop you need.
Good luck!
Regarding the language of the inscription, you can get a headstart by noting the material the heart is made of. Stone hearts are almost always hieroglyphic --- usually either classical Mayan or Egyptian. Clay hearts are inscribed in cuneiform, which tends to be in Sumerian, Akkadian, or Old Persian. Things get dicey with paper hearts (due to the number of possible languages), but as long as the paper is reasonably modern you'll probably luck out and get old German or early English (if you're really unlucky it'll be in Voynich).
If your heart is plastic or some unknown/exotic material, the script will unfortunately be undecipherable. However, it is advised that you submit photographs of the specimen to the Xenolinguistics Department at your local university for further study.
Hope this helps.