I press buttons until the light matrix shows colors I like. Currently working mostly with Elixir and Rust on various personal projects.
I'm the bitch who complains that the ending of Interstellar involves extremely inefficient transmission of information
http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x69d9eed60b242822
https://github.com/KodiCraft.keys
So, hey cohost.
People used to talk about wanting the "Citizen Kane" of video games.
But where's the Voynich Manuscript of video games?
Platine Dispositif's _____. The entire thing is written in a conlang which may or may not represent a real language, and which has never been decoded. Even details like the in-game score meter are untranslated, and the title is only ever referred to as _____ since the writing system doesn't exist in any font.
I'm not familiar with these. Are there any examples/videos you could link at me?
huh? how come an rpg maker game being in hungarian makes it the voynich manuscript of games? unless "hungarian rpg maker games" is a catch-all term for certain games made in hungary with rpg maker with indecipherable languages
Stephen Lavelle's trilogy (not really a trilogy but they were made over a two month period) "Cascode", "The Clotted Island" and "Cities of Day and Night".
The La La Land series (and to some degree the follow up by the same designer, "Uin")
Captain Blood (1988)
For many years I have dreamed of making a video game version of "Victory Over the Sun". This was a Russian futurist opera from 1913 (made largely by people who later participated in the communist revolution, then even later than that had their work banned under Stalin; Kazimir Malevich himself did the set design). The play is about a group of ontological revolutionaries who conclude all perceived reality is illusory, the source of these illusions is the sun, and therefore for the freedom of mankind they must overthrow the Sun and install themselves as the new demiurges who control what things can and cannot be perceived. Every element of the play was designed to be as abstract and avant-garde as possible at the time, with the costumes made of giant, cumbersome geometric shapes resembling lo-poly 3D art. The work was said to be so hated by audiences that they started fistfights. Video games offer potentials for abstraction that outstrip any other medium, due to the fact that video games can portray other modes of reality not just in what is perceived or what is heard but in what is experienced; every video game is a tiny universe with its own mechanistic laws set by the designer, and though games often choose those laws to at least some degree mimic those of our own universe, there is no reason they must. This makes games an ideal medium for a work which is, itself, about questioning or rewriting the laws of reality
Play clotted island and cities of day and night if you can find a computer that can do so. They're fascinatingly cryptic
Brough's Cinco Paus was written in Portuguese, first so Michael could practice the language, second for a touch of the exotic and unknowable
it now has a German translation for Portuguese speakers
You might also be interested in the interactive fiction game The Gostak.
https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45
The more I think about this game, the more I want to systematically deconstruct that fucking language. There's definitely a logic to it, and I can think of a few techniques to bring this closer to understandable: compiling a list of all the letters, noting letter frequency and relative placement (I notice the P and S characters can be duplicated), to what extent if any geometric transformations like mirroring or rotation figure into this.
The reason I'm not actually going through with this is because I'm lazy.
Yeah, the language is almost certainly being written right to left. There's forms that look exactly like ? and ! that appear at the left end of lines, and the dialog boxes animate leftward. It wouldn't be the first Japanese game I've seen have text that was in English with a substitution cipher (c.f. the "Roonic" dialog in Ys Origin), so that's my first guess. I might take a crack at this more analytically sometime.
Damn, I hadn't expected anything this spot-on to exist. Thank you!
What makes the score meter untranslatable? In the video it looks like an ordinary positional numeral system being written right to left. It even helpfully dims the leading 0's.
anyway this is fascinating and the digits seem like a good place to start. I wish I was the slightest bit competent at shmups
it uses a positional system but a presumably different number base
I wanted to say it might have been Arka (very stylized) based on the use of some Greek letters in there, but it's not and Arka is written Left to Right. However that doesn't mean these people didn't use it as some kind of base for their letters/language.
This lang draws some parallels with Ethiopic Ge'ez to me, except that Ge'ez is written LTR. It looks to be somewhere on the Semitic or South Arabic language tree.
Oh! I was just thinking the other day, "what if you wrote a game in its own bespoke conlang?"
I added a page for this game to MobyGames a few days after I first saw this post. That submission has finally been approved, and much to my surprise, the person who approved it one-upped me by using an image of the title as represented in-game where the description I originally wrote would use that title.
While not a perfect fit (since it's still in a decipherable language), a game that feels relevant is Zaum Gadget. It's an interactive hypercard stack that the creator claimed he found "among some Babelian ruins dated back to 9999 BC, then deciphered from a since forgotten machine language." It feels like someone tried to translate an alien text and only partially succeeded. https://youtu.be/3ujkgp7ev04
