Constructing the Kaleidoscope

How do I approach game mechanics?

183:724676096 (Kathrin Janowski) — Sat, 12 Feb 2022 10:14:32 GMT

Project "Nonfi Nis", Week 57

I couldn't help but notice that I've been talking about worldbuilding for a year, but not actually coded anything for the game. I'd like to look at the reasons behind that for a bit. And then I'd love to tell you about the game jam in which I took part recently, and the lessons that I learned from it.

The Technology Trap

For several years I've been teaching students about the user-centered design process, which is essentially turning the coding nerd's approach on its head. I know from personal experience how tempting it is to jump right into the technical part - to try out all those shiny toys, solve the tricky mathematical problems below the surface and make the user interface pretty. But there are two main problems with this approach.

The Geekocentric Worldview

When you're a computer geek, it's so easy to forget that most people are not that geeky. Take my mother for example. When I was a kid, I thought she was similarly comfortable with computers. After all, she was playing Mah Jongg so often, so she had to know how it worked, right? Yeeeeah... eventually I learned that she only knew how to click on the pieces to make pairs, and how to start a new game. She didn't know how to use any of the helper functions hidden in the menus. In fact, she didn't even know how to launch the game or how to quit it - my father had set up it up to launch when the computer had booted up, and when my mother was done playing, she just turned the power off.

When I first learned coding as a teenager, I produced a number of little games that nobody else ever played. Let's just say, some of them had overly complicated control schemes or required a ridiculous amount of precision. And apparently, that's a common phenomenon - software that can only be operated by those who built it. Not really ideal for a game, unless you plan to follow in the footsteps of the Myst series.

Traveling Without A Map

One other thing that I've seen way too many times is projects that evolve into grotesque mutations of the original idea. Pieces of software that look okay on the surface but are a mindboggling mess behind the scenes, because people kept grafting on stuff without ever taking the time to plan ahead. Cool demos that never turned into an actual tool anyone could use, because the bugs kept piling up as the programs got older.

And yes, way too many times I've been one of the coders responsible for this mess. Oh, there were always "good" reasons for it - a deadline to meet, a necessity to move with the times, budget to spend on new devices before the year was over. But it's deeply frustrating in the long run - all that work done and nothing to show for it in the end. Sure, you may impress some people for a short while, but eventually you shove that abomination into a ZIP file on a backup drive where it can't harm anyone.

Now, between 2017 and 2020, I've started familiarizing myself with the Unity game engine. I've also gone on several shopping sprees whenever there was a sale at the asset store, and by now I own a lot of useful plugins that I plan to use on the games set in my Kaleidoscope world. I've had fun playing with procedural level creation, weather simulation, dialogue trees, various A.I. frameworks, character configuration, shader design and space ship piloting.

But in the end it was just that - playing. All the things I've made so far are technology experiments - sure, they may be good for learning, but they are far from being an actual game. And most importantly, they won't help me answer the big questions that stand between me and my vision for the game, like:

What is the story about?
What reason do the characters have for doing those things?
What is the player doing to progress?
What does the player get out of it?

This is why I want to take the time and plan things properly this time.

The Joys Of Jamming

About two weeks ago, something else happened. I logged in to my itch.io account in order to download a game that I had bought a while back - and before the day was over, I found myself participating in a game jam. Remember what I said about distractions some posts ago? There's usually something inside them that I can use for the "real" project. So let's see what I got out of that experience.

Practicing for the Practice Piece

When itch.io greeted me with lots of helpful recommendations for game jams, my first impulse was to feel mildly annoyed. I've got a full time job and the Nonfi Nis game in the works, so why would I waste my time on that?

Then my mind connected the dots. Why did I do cheap OC-tober sketches a while back? Why am I participating in many worldbuilding challenges that WorldAnvil hosts, even if the prompts take me away from my actual ToDo list? The answer is: Because it's challenging me to actually finish something in a short time frame.

If I'm being honest with myself, Nonfi Nis is already evolving into quite a complex project of its own, despite being intended as a simple practice piece. It may no be the enormous task that my main game will be, but it's still quite ambitious. So much bigger than the cute little games which teenage me coded in school... and which I happened to stumble upon just a few days earlier. Cue the nostalgia. So maybe making a small, unrelated game was not a bad idea after all.

I found a game jam that caught my eye - the Narrative Driven Jam looked like it would fit in perfectly with the things that I wanted to practice. And it was starting just that evening. I argued with myself for a few hours, then I joined.

The jam's main theme didn't really fit my Kaleidoscope lore, but that was just fine. Less at stake, then... I also couldn't use any of those neat toys that I had bought from the asset store. Well, technically, it was allowed to some degree, but I didn't feel like that was in the spirit of the jam. I figured that using Script Inspector for the coding (and Magix Music Maker for the soundtrack) was as far as I would go.

The main theme was "magical realism", with optional themes being "lying on a bed of stars", "memories" and "pizza lover". My brainstorming resulted in a story of someone recovering their lost memories from the star that is made of them. I won't say much more here, in case anyone wants to play the game first.

Making a Game Mechanic

After I had my plot and protagonist figured out, it was time to look at the other side of the screen - what does the player do, and how can I make that part enjoyable?

The jam went for ten days, so I didn't have time for a complex, branching storyline. That ruled out the usual point-and-click adventure for me. So what could be the alternative - something skill-based? Reaction-based? Time to dig for inspiration - and here's what I unearthed:

The game "Fahrenheit", also known as "The Indigo Prophecy", features several sections where the player has to solve minigames so that the character remains calm.
Due to my research, I'm highly familiar with dimensional emotion and personality models.
From my own battles with depression, I know how overwhelming emotions can be and how important it is to center oneself in order to keep functioning.

Taken together, this led me to my game's core mechanic. Whenever the player needs to deal with a memory fragment, a matching emotion is shown as a dot in the valence-arousal space. To progress, the player needs to return that dot to the center and thereby create a neutral emotion state. And to make things a bit more challenging, I decided that the dot would keep trying to return to the emotion's position, but loose strength with every moment that it was kept in the center.

Now, I'm aware that this is not a perfect metaphor. It does look somewhat like the player was repressing the emotion, when in reality it is much healthier to acknowledge it and left it drift away. But on the other hand, passively watching the emotion fade did not sound like something that I would enjoy as a player. Theoretically, the button mashing for centering the dot could also represent the need to actively focus on one's center, like paying close attention to one's breath. But in the end, I can't tell how many players are actually familiar with techniques like that. All things considered, I think this mechanic is a good compromise between something that's playable and something that fits the topic.

With that I had enough to create a first working prototype. I implemented the movement of the dot based on the two forces - emotion and control input - and added a postprocessing effect that blurs the image based on the distance from the center. The latter was meant to help the player notice when they were getting closer to the goal, and also represented how the emotions kept the protagonist from thinking clearly.

Spotting the Flaws

Once the coding for this mechanic was done, I felt quite proud and already saw myself re-using that mechanic for appropriate situations in the Nonfi Nis game later. But now it was time to put this idea to the test and see if it met my expectations.

I sandwiched this minigame between two halves of a dialogue scene, published the prototype on itch.io and tweeted about it to invite people for testing. Unfortunately, I did not get any response, so I did the next best thing and tried to put myself into the players' shoes. And I noticed something disturbing - I was not looking forward to playing a game that solely consisted of linear dialogue and this emotion mechanic. Well, damn.

So what was missing? The biggest problem seemed to be that it felt like watching a movie - with commercial breaks that had to be fended off by button mashing. Huh. Eventually I figured out that I would prefer to move through the environment and have more varied things to do. I began looking for ways to add that, but the short time frame kept perching on my shoulder and most activities that I thought of threatened to distract from the actual story.

Finally, I remembered the question that came up when I sketched the plot: What prevented the protagonist from flying straight to the star and retrieving the memory? And my answer was that whenever a memory is added to the star's mass, it drifts in the direction of the emotion attached to the memory. Eureka! This gave me the second minigame idea - chasing the star through space with a control scheme that was similar, but not quite the same.

Out into Space

Now, this is where the aforementioned experiments in Unity came in handy. Back when I toyed around with Ycalla flying through the Kaleidoscope system, I was confronted with a lot of problems that I now knew to avoid. Problems such as the lack of friction, the impossibility to create space-scale environments in Unity's regular coordinate system, and the tendency to get very, very lost in a vast 3D space. But I also remembered one other thing that I tried out with Ycalla - restricting movement to a sphere around a planet. That was the perfect starting point.

So I decided to turn that idea inside-out and have the spaceship move on a spherical surface. Which was very straightforward to code - I put an empty game object at the center, attached the camera and the ship to it and moved them down by about a kilometer. Then all I had to do was rotate the root object around two axes, based on the WASD input. The trickiest part was locally rotating the ship to match the movement direction.

Likewise, anything that the ship needed to hit was placed on the same sphere with a different initial rotation. But even with limiting movement like this, it was still easy to get lost - and according to the feedback that I received later, many of the other jammers did. I did add some hints, like placing targets juuust within the field of view to make people curious, or leaving a particle trail behind moving targets, but it seems that these weren't enough. Which further proves the point I made at the beginning of this post - just because something looks obvious to the developer, it's not necessarily so for the user.

Ready For The Next Round

The really interesting part began after the submission phase ended - when everyone caught their breath after rushing to finish their own game, and sat down to play and give feedback on the other entries. And gosh, there were so many wonderful games to discover...

I got some really encouraging feedback for my entry, which makes me feel way more confident about tackling my "real" projects. But most importantly, I finally learned what people thought of the game mechanics, what they found confusing and how it could be improved. I made a list of the things that need to be repaired, and will give this game at least one major update now that the rating phase is over. A detailed breakdown of the feedback and my plans for the update can be found here: What I learned from the jam

Another thing that I'm taking away from this jam is how quickly I grew attached to my protagonist. Over the course of those ten days, I've sent Pat on a heartwrenching journey with a satisfying conclusion. I set up facial expressions and body postures to show people what was going on in Pat's mind, and had to keep myself from tearing up in the process. Right now, I'm not feeling that attached to the Op family - but it looks like that will only be a matter of time. It's already starting, now that they have proper character articles and backstories.

Wrapping Up

Coding stuff without a plan may be fun at first, but it causes more problems down the line. It's also easy to forget that the players do not have the same background knowledge as the programmer - and I've seen this confirmed with my entry to the game jam.

The jam as a whole was a great learning experience. Not only was it rewarding to see a project through from start to finish, it was also a great opportunity to learn what works and what does not - either from feedback I received for my own game, or from giving feedback to other participants. And seeing what is possible in 10 days really helps to make the task before me less daunting.

I plan to take part in other game jams in the future, and will also try to prototype some stuff for the Nonfi Nis game soon - just to have something out there that I can get feedback on. It will probably be something related to dialogue, and maybe I'll already find a way to plug in the emotion mechanic that I made for the jam. Or maybe I'll focus on how the characters will express their emotions, so that I'll form a better bond with them? ... Or both?

If there is anything in particular that you would like to see, just let me know!

How do I create the characters for my first video game? (Part 2)

183:724676096 (Kathrin Janowski) — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 22:28:15 GMT

Project "Nonfi Nis" - week 51

Almost a full year since my first blog post. And guess what? I've finally turned the raw personality scores into actual personalities and biographies! So let's have a look at what I did.

Facets and Flipsides

I'm using the "Big Five" personality traits for my characters. This model is widely used in computer science, and I've dealt with it for about a decade now. Now, there are scientific papers which list different facets within these traits - originally, I wanted to look at those, but then I decided to just wing it. After all, this is not a research project, right?

Nevertheless, I had to think about the adjectives and behaviors which are commonly used for defining or measuring these traits. So let me sum them up here.

Openness is associated with creativity and unconventional thinking, curiousity and an interest in aesthetics.
Conscientiousness is associated with order and organization, discipline, reliability and adherence to rules.
Extraversion is associated with confidence, assertiveness and authority, as well as sociability and expressivity.
Agreeableness is associated with friendly, caring and forgiving behavior, along with a trusting mindset.
Neuroticism is associated with impulsivity, mood swings and strong negative emotions like anger, fear or guilt.

Alright, with that in mind, let's have a closer look at Op Vaha, the grandfather. Back when I assigned the personality scores, I did so by letting a random generator select a number between 1 and 5 for each trait, and then manually tweaking them to keep them balanced among family members. The chart below maps these values to the midpoints of 5 intervals on the axes.

He's very low on Openness. So he lacks most of the associated qualities.
He's low on Conscientiousness. So he lacks many of the associated qualities.
He's neutral on Extraversion. This means he is quite balanced in this area.
He's very high on Agreeableness. So he has most of the associated qualities.
He's very high on Neuroticism. Note that this trait is negative - so he has most of the associated problems .

Now it's time to translate that to human terms. On WorldAnvil's "character" article template, there are several sections where the associated descriptions fit in. Here's how I filled them.

The severe lack of Openness goes to the section "Vices & Personality flaws". There, I described the opposite of an open mind:

"Vaha had a deeply conservative mindset and did not adjust to change easily."

For Conscientiousness , I picked one adjective that is used in personality questionnaires and indicates a low score for this trait. "Forgetful" caught my eye. I decided that the section "Intellectual Characteristics" was the best fit here, and thought about what this forgetfulness implies.

"He was clever but quite scatterbrained.

While he had a great memory for his field of expertise, he frequently misplaced objects or mixed up dates.

His wife Akos often joked that he would lose track of his head if it wasn't attached to his neck."

His Extraversion is pretty unremarkable. Anyway, it goes to the section "Social Aptitude" like this:

"Vaha was neither particularly shy nor outgoing."

Now Agreeableness comes to the rescue. This is his strongest positive trait, so it clearly goes to "Virtues & Personality perks" .

"He was a very friendly person, caring and forgiving."

This character strentgh also affects many other areas, such as his social aptitude. Therefore, I can now elaborate on the lackluster sentence from before. This is also a good opportunity to think of the downsides of such a strong trait - nothing in life comes without a price tag attached.

"Vaha was neither particularly shy nor outgoing, but most people considered him a pleasant conversation partner. Even when a topic got him worked up, he stayed polite and avoided disagreeing openly. The downside was that he often suppressed feelings to the point when he could not stop them from bubbling up in private."

Note that this already hints at the last trait, his high Neuroticism which indicates strong emotional reactions. According to this traits' definition, these tend to be negative. So I have one more sentence for the "Vices & Personality flaws" section.

"Furthermore, he quickly got stressed and emotional."

Now that the fundamental traits are written down, I can take a moment to look at two other sections of the template and put some thought into the wider implications of his personality. How do they translate to his overall life goals?

Well, let's get back to the warmhearted, caring aspect. He's not going out of his way to meet new people (neutral Extraversion), so this is most likely to refer to his family. I also need to keep in mind his conservative way of thinking. Taken together, this gives me the following snippet for the "Motivation" section.

"One of his primary drives was to provide his family with a safe and comfortable life."

Now let's look at his tendency to get emotional. Remember what I said about looking at the downsides of a strong trait? This works the other way, too. Here this means that he's likely to get passionate about something - and what would that something be for a conservative Rilanga citizen?

One of the Rilanga core values was knowledge, mirroring the way that the Nimýric Empire strives for enlightenment and spreads this enlightenment to others, whether they like it or not. Last summer, I had already decided that Vaha would be a retired teacher of some sort. Specifically, he is now a retired university professor for geography - a subject that covers relatively stable environmental conditions. Remember, he does not like change. I also decided to have him specialize in the connection between said environment and the cultures that live in it, because that's a topic that I need to learn about anyway for my worldbuilding.

So here's the rest of the text for the "Motivation" section.

"Besides that, he was passionate about teaching and getting young minds interested in the complex interactions between geography and society."

Stuttering Starts and Sneaky Snarls

The biographical side of the article was a lot more trickier, however. When I decided to fill in the "Education" section, I immediately got stuck on the fact that I did not know how many years he would have spent in school. I also needed a proper name for his home town.

So off I went to write about the home town and the school system. The latter was on my ToDo list anyway, because I had found a prompt for this topic some time ago and I had already written about the graduation ceremony. You can find both articles on WorldAnvil: Rilanga School System (organization) and Kiv Mingumisel (settlement)

I put the milestones for his school education in the family's timeline, but then I was itching to continue writing his article. After all, I had been puttin g this off for far too long. So I mentioned the degrees he had, and the fact that he was working as an "academic teacher".

Back in summer, I had also decided that his wife had been working as his secretary. Boss and secretary may sound like a rather cliché romance story - but they're both conservative personalities, so cliché works just fine for them. Also, it made sense that Vaha would develop a strong bond with his secretary - he's an absent-minded professor, and Akos has enough Conscientiousness to compensate for this. Read: She's the one who keeps him functioning. The backstory of their relationship was sorted... or so I thought.

After finishing Akos' article, I suddenly realized that the family's timeline did not make sense anymore. I had completely missed the fact that Vaha would need many more years to get to this position after graduating from school. If he were to meet his wife at that point in his career, their children would be born long before the parents even knew each other. Oops.

That left me with two options - change the age of the following two generations, or change the backstory for Vaha and Akos. Option one would have required me to change the basic information for 5 out of 7 characters. Sure, they were all still in the early draft phase, but that didn't sit well with me. Also, this would have eliminated the partners of the youngest generation - Ures' wife Kohip, who was supposed to be in the shelter with them, and Etru's lover whom I had thought of when I came across an interesting prompt for a "secret love letter".

Option two it was, then. I reluctantly erased the text I had written for Vaha's and Akos' relationship. And then I sat down to write a proper article about the academic education system in the Rilanga Union and get my timeline in order. You can read that article here: Rilanga Academic Education (organization)

Several days after my decision to finally write the character articles, I found myself filling the timeline with events instead. And unsurprisingly, there was this nagging feeling that I was wasting my time and avoiding the "actual" work that I had been planning to do a year ago. I had to remind myself that this planning step was necessary, and that I had just seen what would happen if I did not pay proper attention to the timeline.

Explanatory Events

Let's have a closer look at some of the events that shape the lives of the family members.

Re-imagined Romance

First o f all, I need to rework the first encounter between Vaha and Akos. A professor and a secretary obviously have rather different career paths. But what if they meet at the university? What if, in Rilanga society, secretaries require a degree for managing anything related to education? This makes sense - those more-civilized-than-thou snobs took their education very seriously. So Akos gets a basic degree in accounting.

Now, where and when would two students from completely different fields meet? During lunch, most likely. I still wanted to keep the "scatterbrained Vaha needs Akos' help" dynamic, and I wanted it to already shine through in their first encounter. Enter the real-world experience. In my university's cafeterias, people use electronic cash cards which double as the student/employee ID card. And over the years, I've seen several people almost leave their cards behind at the coffee machines, if it hadn't been for others alerting them. The perfect touch point between two strangers.

So Vaha drops his wallet at the drink dispenser, walks away without noticing and Akos comes running after him to return it. Right now I won't bother with how exactly they go from "hey, you dropped your wallet" to Akos managing his entire life, I just write down "she quickly came to like him" and leave the rest for later. They probably start talking because they find each other cute, hot or both. Right now it doesn't matter, because I have to take care of the other family members.

For Ninu and Ures, I simply go with the "highschool sweethearts" approach and have them connect over shared interests - namely, literature. Ninu goes on to become a theater director (those more civilized-than-thou snobs love the arts), and Ures becomes a literature teacher. On to the next generation.

Sudden Stop

Now, after setting up the milestone events for the youngest generation, I notice something odd. By the time the family moves to the shelter, all three of them are in the middle of their studies. Why on Ranul would those more-civilized-than-thou snobs neglect their education like that?

Well, whenever I need an explanation for something on Ranul, the answer is usually related to the Final War. And in a story about the war, this is a no-brainer. Therefore something war-related has to happen to their university. Something that cuts the teaching activities short and makes it unlikely that they will be resumed soon. Something awful and destructive.

But the university is still a civilian target. And while both factions in the Final War are racist a**holes, neither of them is that monstrous. The Ran-E-Zu still need a reason that somewhat justifies such an attack. Enter a random "high-ranking politician" who gives a talk in front of the university students. As it turns out, he also was a driving force behind a Rilanga attack on Ran-E-Zu cities. REVENGE!!!11!1!

This idea gives me a lot to work with.

I have the needed explanation for why the university suspends teaching activities - its main auditorium hall is destroyed, and many academic teachers were among the casualties.
I have something to put into the "Mental Trauma" section for several character articles. And in the case of Urem and Kohip, the two conservative students, it's a justification why they hate the Ran-E-Zu even more than they did before.
I have a reason why the family says "screw this - we're out of here" and gets far away from civilization.
I have a use for the Kef-Endu, a species of dragonfly-like insects which are trained to carry bombs into enemy territory. One of the things that I wrote during WorldAnvil's Summer Camp challenge a few months back.
I have reasons to put scars on the characters and make them visually unique.

You can find the result in the character articles of the youngest generation:

Op Etru | Op Urem | Op Kohip | Ed Obla (Etru's secret lover)

Conclusion

Expanding raw personality scores into a human-readable description is rather straightforward. Think of synonyms for the adjectives associated with the trait, and if a traits is especially strong in the character, don't forget to have a look at possible downsides of the apparent qualities.

The history behind that collection of flaws and qualities may require more attention to detail. Without a defined timeline, events can quickly become inconsistent, especially when there are multiple characters involved. So I recommend thinking of important, "mandatory" milestones like school graduation or career steps before diving into social encounters and the like. But if a conflict occurs anyway, try to find a good explanation for it - one that makes sense based on the world in which the characters live.

My next blog entry will probably be about creating clothes for the family. I've grown tired of putting the Rilanga into the seamless shirts and leggings that may make sense for their distant future descendants, but not for a culture that is more similar to late 20th century Earth. Therefore, I've tasked myself with creating three outfits for each of the seven characters in 2022 - regular outfit, sleepwear and outdoor winter clothes.

If you have any comments or feedback, just let me know!

How do I create an alien language?

183:724676096 (Kathrin Janowski) — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 13:08:56 GMT

Project "Nonfi Nis" - Week 46

Last time I said that I'd try to write another blog post before WorldEmber. And for once, I actually do as planned! This weekend I spent a considerable amount of time translating a piece of text to the language of the Rilanga, so I'd love to talk about artificially constructed languages, also known as "conlangs".

Why bother with an alien language in the first place?

I've been fascinated by foreign languages since school. I enjoyed learning English, Latin, French and Spanish there, and during my university years I took an introductory course in Japanese. When my day job took me to conferences abroad, I used that as an excuse for looking into Dutch and Turkish.

Sadly, so far English is the only language I've learned well enough to feel comfortable writing and speaking it. Now and then I make half-hearted attempts at refreshing my memory and improving in the other ones, but adult life leaves me with too little time for that.

But the fascination never left - it even grew when I encountered fictional languages. Of course, like every good nerd, I was tempted to learn Klingon every now and then. I took notes of Goa'Uld words while watching Stargate. And when I was gifted the second book of the Inheritance Cycle, I loved the detailed appendix explaining that world's languages. (Never got around to reading the rest of that series, unfortunately.)

Languages are a massively important part of daily life, so adding one to a fictional world helps a lot with making that world feel alive. Imagine a character cursing in their native tongue, or an elegantly flowing phrase which drives home how sophisticated a particular culture is. It can also add interesting complications by introducing a language barrier and the need for one character to translate for the others.

For "Nonfi Nis", I plan to do a bit of both - creating an immersive, alien atmosphere, and confronting the protagonist family with speakers of a different language.

To give you a taste of what I'm talking about, here's me reading a text in Rile, the language of the Rilsu.

Te-Sakal , upon being awarded the Spring Crab Medal

"I feel deeply honored to receive this award.

I thank you for the trust that you placed in Ub Lenliz Lu Kegmilut,

and I am proud to say that we delivered on our promises.

But still, the greatest reward is to see the plants grow, blossom and bear fruit after all these years.

We have shown that this world is far from dead. We have shown that there is a future waiting for us.

And I promise you - I promise you all - that the feast we just shared will merely be the first of many to come."

Where does this language come from?

Well, when a mommy language and a daddy language love each other very much...

No, seriously, that's not too far from the truth. Understanding real languages is an important foundation for creating one of your own. The more, the better. Besides teaching you about important common principles, this also gives you a lot of inspiration to draw from.

Basic Look And Feel

When I sat down to redesign my alien cultures in 2016, I picked one or two real-world cultures as a starting point for developing each one's look and feel. Calyrra's people got ancient Greece and Rome, and their mortal enemies got Spanish conquistadores and Aztecs. The Rilsu got modern-day Japan. And Those Who Know... uh, okay, they're the odd ones out. They're mostly based on Goth aesthetics, and they don't have a spoken or written language anyway.

So let's focus on the Rilsu, the culture which emerged from those in the "Nonfi Nis" setting. A key element that I took away from my beginner's course in Japanese was a lack of exotic vowels - no Y, no umlaut characters, no nasals. As for the consonants, there were no "compound" sounds like the German X (spoken as "ks") or Z (spoken as "ts"). Therefore, my first step was to eliminate unnecessary letters from the Rilsu alphabet.

Finding Patterns

Once I had the sounds figured out, I took a closer look at the names from my early drafts. Teenage me had mostly taken random sounds and mashed them together until the result sounded interesting. Back then I wasn't thinking about cultures, either, so the look and feel was all over the place. Time to change that.

There were two names in particular that caught my attention - Larxeon, the name of the system's star, and LariVoc, the name of some eldritch Temrophian deity. And somehow it occurred to me that the "lar" syllable could be a common root and a word of its own.

I decided to simplify these two names according to the reduced Rilsu alphabet. Larxeon became Larekon and LariVoc became Larivok. This made me notice the next interesting tidbit - a bright vowel joining the word "lar" to another one. Hmm, why not make them the same vowel? I settled on the E.

But what did matter to them - immensely - was the Kaleidoscope. And there was the connection that I had been looking for. Both the star and the Kaleidoscope were important celestial bodies, two bright things in the sky for which the Rilsu would need names.

Whoa... the puzzle pieces began to fall into place! "Lar" came to mean "sky". "Kon" became "eye" and "vok" became "fire", matching the appearance of the respective objects. The "e" came to mean "in", joining the two nouns in an unfamiliar order. Now I already had three - no, four - words of an alien language and a first bit of grammar to go with it. Neat.

The Magic Of Technological Progress

Still, at that point I never thought I would develop a full language from that, let alone translate entire sentences. Since I wasn't even able to learn all the real-world languages that I wanted, I figured that this approach would only give me a couple of alien words to throw in for flavor now and then. And for several years, I was fine with that.

Then, at the beginning of 2020, I stumbled across WorldAnvil. And while exploring the template for language articles, I discovered something else - an import function for languages generated with a tool called Vülgår . Huh. That sounded interesting, so I decided to check it out. And gosh, am I glad that I did.

Computer-Aided Language Generation

I already loved the idea of using computer-generated content in my Kaleidoscope game because you're unlikely to be surprised by something that you created yourself. And I want to be surprised. I want to explore.

Therefore it felt quite logical to let a web tool generate a language based on my preferences. As it turned out, that tool had pretty much everything I needed. It let me select the precise sounds that I wanted in my alien language. It let me limit what kind of sounds could occur together and handled the translation from IPA to Unicode characters. I could define suffixes for verbs, noun gender and the like.

But what I enjoyed most was the ability to explore my culture's language - to discover the words that Vülgår had generated for me, to get inspired by the grammar it suggested, to find out what I liked and what needed tweaking. And within a few days of playing with that tool I had usable conlangs for the Rilsu, the Nimýric Empire and the Pereqaian Alliance. Much more than I ever dreamt I would have.

Polishing The Raw Material

A computer-generated dictionary is a good starting point, but a piece of software can't read my mind. So obviously I keep finding imperfections that need manual refinement. There are some words that don't quite fit the desired look and feel, ones that are too complicated for my taste, or ambiguities and unfortunate similarities.

Like most of my worldbuilding, the languages are a permanent work in progress - anything might change if I happen to find a reason for it. Which is not so different from the way languages work in real life. They evolve as people simplify frequently-used terms or name their new inventions and discoveries.

When I come across a word that I do not like, I change it or delete it. When I don't find the word I need, I look for synonyms or transform adjectives into nouns and vice versa. And of course, sometimes I add new words to the dictionary.

Getting To Know My Language

The best way to familiarize oneself with an unknown language is to actually use it. This is why I made a habit of translating my worldbuilding concepts to the respective conlang.

This helps me with finding words that don't fit in, figuring out what is missing, and deciding and refining the grammar rules. Besides that, it's a wonderful way to add a unique flavor to my world.

Names That Actually Make Sense

Gone are the days of mashing together random sounds. Today I have mostly moved on to using "proper" words for locations, people or species. I usually start with the words that I find in the dictionary and experiment with ways to combine and streamline them. Sometimes I also work backwards and create proper words from the random sounds that I chose in the past.

Take, for example, the following locations from Ranul.

Translating Sentences

The next step for me was translating actual phrases and digging into the grammar. As in, figuring out the order of the different types of words, choosing the proper tenses and all that.

I started with short quotes that I could insert into articles. Simple phrases with just a couple of words and a straightforward structure. For Rile, one of the first was the Rilsu motto. Let me walk you through this example.

First, we need the English phrase: "In destruction lies a lesson."

Now think back to Larekon and Larevok. When one thing is inside another thing, the latter comes first, followed by the preposition "e" and the thing in focus. So where does the verb go? Well, I don't remember whether it was suggested by the Vülgår tool or whether I chose that one freely. But I ended up with an object-verb-subject structure. This gives us the following: "Destruction in lies a lesson."

Somewhere along the way I had decided that I would keep things simple and not add rules for conjugating verbs in Rile. (Or any of my other conlangs, at least for now.) Also, the Rilsu avoid indefinite articles when they are not strictly necessary - some real-world language gave me that idea, but I'm not sure which one that was exactly. So anyway, let's apply that to the quote, and we get: "Destruction in lie lesson."

With the sentence structure figured out, I can turn to my computer-generated dictionary. The word for "destruction" in there is "dotengi". "Lesson" is "golkiz". So far, so good.

But the verb is trickier. There is only one entry for "lie", which is "masru". But there is no clue whether this is the word for being located somewhere or the one for telling lies. Now I have different options. I could either use "masru" because, well, there is nothing to indicate that it would be the wrong choice. Alternatively, I could look for a synonym. This gives me the verb "palru" with the meaning "be" as in "exist/there is". That one is perfectly clear, so let's use that one.

Time to assemble these words. Et voilà, the result is this: "Dotengi e palru golkiz."

Making Things Up As I Go

Translating longer texts is obviously more difficult. As the sentences get more complex, I'm more likely to reach the end of what the web tool generated. But remember what I said earlier - the best foundation for developing an alien language is knowing several real-world languages. When in doubt, I can refer to the grammar rules of those. I can borrow rules that I like, turn them upside-down to make my language more alien, or anything in-between.

One thing that I learned along the way is this: Whatever grammar rule I decide to add, I need to write it down for future reference . I do this in my WorldAnvil article for the respective language, like this one: Rile (language)

Examples never hurt, either. This is another good use for short quotes like the example from the previous section.

If you look at the Rile article, you'll find the phrase "Dotengi e palru golkiz" illustrating the sentence structure, and the name "Larekon" illustrating the placement of the "e".

By keeping my examples in one place, I can return to them easily and make sure that my translations are consistent. And the more I use my alien language, the more comprehensive and helpful will this reference become.

Wrapping It Up

There's much more to to say about this topic, but I guess I'll save that for later. Time to sum it up.

Languages are a fascinating element of any world, be it our own or a fictional one. Designing an alien language takes lots of steps, most of which get easier to handle with every real-world language that you can draw from.

Start with setting the look and feel by picking one or more existing languages as your main inspiration.
Brainstorm and re-visit old ideas to find out how they fit into said look and feel. You may even get a grammar rule or two out of that.
Look for software tools to help with generating a large vocabulary, storing it and keeping it organized.
Get to know and understand your language by using it. Test its limits by translating actual text snippets.
Add to, modify and refine both your vocabulary and grammar whenever you reach those limits.
Keep track of every rule you add, and use examples whenever you can.

Now, I can imagine writing further posts about this. For example, I could tell you how I designed the Rilsu alphabet and made the font. I could explain my approach for creating the predecessor languages Rilangun and Zuni. Oh, and I've dabbled with setting up a Text-To-Speech voice for the Nimýric language - doing the same for Rile should be fun, too! If any of these suggestions sound interesting to you, just let me know.

But now, WorldEmber is already knocking on the door. This time I'm determined to finally get those characters fleshed out... after all, I've been dancing around that task long enough. Well then, see you around!

How do I tie prompt-driven worldbuilding into my game?

183:724676096 (Kathrin Janowski) — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 22:40:11 GMT

Project "Nonfi Nis" - Week 38

Still struggling with getting back into the groove - I had hoped to write this post two months ago. But better late than never, right? Last time I announced that I would use WorldAnvil's Summer Camp challenge to try and make some progress on the worldbuilding for this game. So let's see what I got out of it.

Taking Stock

The articles I wrote during that challenge are listed here: Summer Camp 2021

Also, I kept track of ideas for how I could include them in the game.

As you can see below, I did not complete all of the challenge's prompts. Besides time, one reason was that I could not think of any answer to those prompts that would benefit the Nonfi Nis project. (Or the main game, for that matter.) And while background flavor is always nice to have, I was trying to stay on track this time.

However, for those prompts which I did answer, I could think of a use more often than not. At the very least they could serve as decorative objects or as the inspiration for idioms used by the characters.

Stumbling from Challenge to Challenge

So... one reason why I did not get to writing this blog post earlier is that the people behind WorldAnvil are very generous with inspiring challenges. By the time I had recovered from the weeks of writing, September had arrived and with it came the "Shipwright Challenge". I did not want to miss that chance to write about Ycalla, the very ship around which the entire worldbuilding project had formed. The result is here: Ycalla (vehicle)

Then as soon as that challenge was finished, along came the "Spooktober" prompt list. And I thought: "Hey, why not do the same thing as I did with Summer Camp?"

As of writing this post, I have answered 5 of the 30 Spooktober prompts. This time around I am focusing on fleshing out ideas that I already had in some form - stub articles, concepts mentioned in earlier articles and so on. And I'm happy to say that 4 of these 5 are useful for Nonfi Nis ! Yay!

I wrote the long-overdue article about the Ralenlos Mountains where the shelters are located.
I wrote about the day-night-cycle on Ranul - the reason why the "Empty Night" lasts about 8 days.
I wrote about the lanterns used during the spring festival.
I wrote about the crest on the Rul skull and finally settled on its function.

Developing a Prop

Let's have a closer look at the lanterns for the spring festival. What purpose will they serve?

Look and Feel

At the most basic level, they can appear as background elements that make the storage room appear chock-full of the Op family's belongings. That may not sound like much, but as I've learned in recent years, flavor details should not be underestimated. Like 3D models that need a scratched texture to stop looking completely artificial, or fantasy costumes that look kinda bland before you start adding pouches, talisman amulets and/or a knife strapped to the ankle. But why are these little details so important?

Well, first of all, they add to the overall look-and-feel of the environment. As an artifact of the Rilanga culture, they will reflect their aesthetics, which in turn gives rise to different ideas about what their culture is like.

In case of the Rilanga, I wanted something elegant but at the same time well-ordered, emphasizing their ideal of conformity. This is why I went for clean, geometric shapes. The ornamental pattern is mainly composed of circles and ovals, repeating seamlessly. I always associated the Rilanga more with soft, smooth curves whereas the Ran-E-Zu have more harsh and edgy "feel" to them.

To stress the idea of a spring festival, I wanted these basic shapes to form something like flowers. I decided to color them in yellow and orange hues, partly because yellow is the national color of the Rilanga Union and partly because these colors are warm and sunny. Fitting for the celebration of longer daylight phases and rising temperatures.

But for the background color between the petals, I faced a dilemma. The obvious choice would be a nice grassy green, reminiscent of the plants beginning to sprout from the ground and the leaves growing on the trees. However, green is the national color of the Ran-E-Zu, the mortal enemies! Awkward. I tried making the background red, but that looked more like an autumn color scheme than a spring one. Not ideal, either.

In the end, I went for a pale, yellowish green. Not quite fitting the color of Ranul's vegetation, but more in line with the color palette of the Rilanga. And it still looked nice and fresh.

Materials

One other thing that I had to think about was the material of the light screen. My first idea was paper, but this would be unlikely since Ranul is mostly a desert moon. Sure, there are lush forests on the coasts of Mustik Hamesi's seas, but I figured people would have better uses for those than turning them into lanterns which are only lit once every 521 days.

So what else could they use? Pergament? That would be a sensible option - a by-product of keeping livestock, probably. But then my mind locked on to another fact - they have lots of sand! As in the main ingredient of glass. This made stained glass the most logical choice.

The next thing I had to decide was the kind of light source that these lanterns would contain. I thought about using harnessed crystal fire - a volatile crystalline substance carefully exposed to oxygen. But that didn't really strike me as safe. Electric lightbulbs? Hrm... not quite. Those lanterns were supposed to be a long-standing tradition, and the Rilanga are a rather conservative culture. Candles, maybe? Or oil lamps... yes, that one felt about right.

Mind you, the oil that they use could not be fossil fuel because Ranul has very little of that. So I settled for oil extracted from certain tree nuts. That's another plant that may become useful in the long run - as environmental vegetation, as a trade resource, and who knows what else.

In the end, this gives me a set of lamps which are of a non-flammable material and offer an alternative to electric lighting. Hehe, I sense a power failure coming up in the Op shelter... and without a maintainer to fix it, these festival lanterns may be the only light source for a while... See how the ideas from the different prompt answers are coming together, forming a semblance of a game plot?

Characterization

Finally, there is one more thing that these lanterns tell us. Why did the Op family bring them to the shelter? If they wanted emergency light sources, they could have brought regular candles or flashlights. Which they may have, too.

But these lanterns are used in the celebration of an annual event. A celebration that brings the community together. A holiday that is certainly tied to fond memories. In other words, the lanterns have sentimental value for the family - people who are now separated from their community and who probably expected to stay in the shelter for so long that they would celebrate there at least once.

Suddenly, these innocent background props became loaded with emotions. Emotions that make the characters relatable and that may bubble up to the surface at the worst possible time. Because of the rule of drama. Yes, that will be useful for increasing the stress level among the family members, and I can see a couple of dialogue lines appearing on the horizon.

Summary

Prompt lists are a great tool for exploring one's world. They can lead us in unexpected directions and spark random ideas that can be developed into something of actual use.

Everything inside a fictional world is connected to the rest somehow - the difficult part is figuring out the nature of those connections. Sometimes they emerge when we think things through to the logical conclusion. Why is that thing designed the way it is? Why would it be here in that place and at that time? What is it used for? What else can it be used for?

To avoid getting sidetracked by prompts, I also found it important to remember that these are only suggestions, not mandatory tasks. For instance, I'm following the Spooktober list very loosely, picking prompts out of order and trying to prioritize those that I can tie to the Nonfi Nis game on some level. What use is "winning" a challenge if it derails the project?

I'm curious where else the Spooktober prompts will lead me. I'll try to squeeze in another blog post between that challenge and the preparations for the next big challenge WorldAnvil challenge in December - also known as "WorldEmber".

Have you worked with prompt lists to develop your worlds? Feel free to let me know your favorites, and/or what you got out if it!

How do I get back on track with my project?

183:724676096 (Kathrin Janowski) — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 07:08:15 GMT

Nonfi Nis, week 23

Yay, I'm back...ish. So much for a regular schedule. Frankly, it shouldn't surprise me - I get distracted from most of my projects sooner or later. So here's this week's question - what can I do about that?

Hey, where did all that time go?

First of all, what exactly has kept me from working on this game for almost three months? Let's see...

Other corners of that world

I took part in the "Peculiar Plants" challenge on World Anvil. I love plants, and oh my, the participation badge was so irresistably pretty... You can find the result here: Umpu Deraksi (species)
I got lost in the Imperial Bloodline again. Unnecessary details that no one except me will ever care about. A good exercise in exploring the Nimýric culture and the Empire's political structure, plus a welcome excuse to work on my Ichtýd character configurator in Unity.
I translated a lengthy quote from a historical figure into the Rilsu language. And spent a considerable amount of time on the problem of how I should present both the English and the conlang version. The result can be seen in this article: Sakal the Crop Bringer (person)

Random unrelated art stuff

I found a prompt on DeviantArt which asked for a purple artwork. I need more purple in my gallery, so yeah.
I was catching up with other artists' work and suddenly felt the urgent need to paint a griffin.
I decided to create another world on WorldAnvil which could be a home for all my non-Kaleidoscope creations and the three creatures I've won/adopted from other artists.
I was gathering pictures for all the creatures that I wanted to place in the new world, and figured I should polish up an old 3D model to represent the Glass Unicorn.
I sketched an entry for a creature design contest.

Other hobbies begging for attention

I got really excited for the Mass Effect Legendary Edition and prepared for that.
I got completely distracted from that game about a week before release, because just then my family suggested to rewatch Doctor Who starting from the Eccleston season. And since I need to catch up with that show anyway, and watching together is more fun...
I bought some classic Doctor Who episodes to completely overdose myself during the weekends.
I spent an evening trying to get Rebecca Shepard's face right in the character editor of the Legendary Edition. Still not happy with the colors - where the **** is that pale lipstick option I had in the original game?
I remembered that old idea I had about building my own not-quite-sonic screwdriver. Went searching through online shops for suitable components, then modeled casing parts for them. 3D prints are now on the way.

What does this mean for my project?

Okay, so I have been very busy with a lot of other stuff. But if I look closely, there has been some progress on Nonfi Nis after all. Not quite the progress I had planned, but better than nothing.

Honing my skills

It's tempting to call unrelated projects a waste of time. But most of them also gave me something that will come in handy for Nonfi Nis as well.

The "Umpu Deraksi" article had me create not only one, but four images in Blender. I've learned a couple of tricks for creating better-looking renders and speeding up my overall workflow.
Translating Te-Sakal's quote to Rile gave me a better understanding of that language. This will be useful for figuring out the key differences between its predecessors Rilangun and Zuni. Neither the Rilanga nor the Ran-E-Zu have magical sci-fi translators, and I fully intend to work that into the plot when the families make contact.
The Imperial Bloodline had me explore the connections between the kingdoms making up the Nimýric Empire. Since the Nimýric Empire and the Pereqaian Alliance are meant to resemble the Rilanga Union and the Ran-E-Zu Confederation, respectively, this exercise will certainly help with fleshing out the latter two.
The unrelated artworks? More practice in image composition, creature design and using my tools efficiently.
Designing my Whovian multitool made me look more closely at numerous flashlights and swiss army knives. The Op family will certainly have to do some maintenance around their shelter, so it can't hurt to familiarize myself with various tools that I may need to model someday.

Gathering inspiration

If you have been following along, you've probably noticed that I've been dancing around the task of fleshing out the characters of the Op family. I can't help but wonder why - maybe it is some form of writer's block, maybe I'm having problems because there is no connection to my main story around which I could develop their biographies.

Well, one piece of advice that I see frequently is to step back and do something else when the brain gets stuck. This serves two main purposes:

It recharges the creative batteries. Thinking about the same thing day and night can be very tiresome, so focusing on a different thing gives the brain a chance to rest.
It exposes the mind to new ideas. Inspiration rarely comes out of the blue - most of the time, it's bits and pieces of information that we've seen or heard somewhere.

When I look at the remaining distractions, I quickly recognize two of the franchises that I wrote down for playing/watching in case of a dry spell. In fact, I wrote them down because the founders of WorldAnvil keep stressing the importance of these "Big Guns". So why are these two among my "Big Guns"?

Mass Effect is the game series that had me going "Yes! This is what teenage me had in mind for the Kaleidoscope thingy!" Learn from the best, people say.
The universe of Doctor Who is a treasure-trove of ideas, and the stories cover all sorts of moods, plots, characters and settings. And it's already started to bleed into my own world - my ancient magical hive mind became notably more playful and silly after I started watching that show... ;)

Getting back on track

Okay, so it seems like my brain had decided to take a vacation after the first three months. And now that I think about it, starting the project so soon after the big WorldEmber challenge on WorldAnvil might have been a bit too hasty... But what matters is that I did remember that this project exists, and that I am returning to it.

Have I truly stopped working on it?

There's one thing that I have not looked at yet - and that's the tiny bits that I managed to squeeze in between getting distracted. So let's take stock of these:

I tried my hand at the "Adventure April" challenge on WorldAnvil, which invited people to write a one-shot RPG. I did not submit anything, but I got some useful ideas out of my draft - the name of the Ran-E-Zu family, some potential character backgrounds and some things that could go awry in the shelter.
As mentioned above, I spent some time getting a better grip on the Rilsu language, Rile. Besides that, I've already started working on articles for Rilangun and Zuni.
I've narrowed down the region of interest on Ranul's map, and tentatively placed the two shelters within it. And I've started thinking about why they would be so close to the border in the first place. Though I haven't quite found the answer yet.
I started planning the architecture of the shelters. I googled for references and sketched out a bedroom in the Op family's shelter.
I did some spring cleaning on WorldAnvil. I sorted my stub articles into the overall category structure, started re-organizing my tags and made a central hub for accessing the information that I would need for Nonf Nis.

How to get back into the writing mood?

What really helps me with my worldbuilding is looking for prompts and artist challenges online. You can find them anywhere, floating around social media. For instance, October 2020 was "OC-tober" for me, as in Original Character. A group on DeviantArt had put up a cool list of daily prompts for that - I only completed part of them, but every little bit counts as progress.

Between my day job, my thesis, the pandemic and all the aforementioned distractions, I barely noticed how July is already around the corner. And with it comes another massive challenge on WorldAnvil - Summer Camp !

Last year I took part for the first time, and it was a really fun and productive month. So what would be better than focusing on this little corner of my world this year?

Apparently, the founders of WorldAnvil have read my mind. This year's homework before the challenge starts with exactly this question: What project will I be working on? Honestly, I love that the people behind this platform are part of the target audience themselves.

Well, with that question answered, it was straightforward to fill in the temporal and spatial extent of my focus area. One other question that I find really useful is when I plan to work on the prompts. I admit that it feels a bit weird to commit to a fixed schedule for a hobby, but then again, it's not that different from having training sessions on a particular evening each week.

You can look at the finished homework here: SummerCamp 2021 Pledge Document

Summing it up

Don't feel too bad when other stuff gets in the way of a project. That's life. What looks like a distraction may serve a purpose after all - practicing a skill for later, triggering inspiration or just letting the mind cool off. The most important thing is to keep moving, at least a tiny bit. One way to do so is to set intermediate goals - for example, by taking part in one of the many challenges that can be found on artist or worldbuilding platforms.

Do you have your own tricks for getting back into a project? I'd love to hear about them! Feel free to comment below.

I suppose the next blog post will be at the beginning of August, after the Summer Camp challenge is over. If so, it will sum up what I've managed to write during that time. Well then, take care!

How do I set up the calendar for a populated moon?

183:724676096 (Kathrin Janowski) — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 20:50:00 GMT

Nonfi Nis - Week 9

Only three blog posts in and I'm already going off the script. Yay.

Don't worry, I'll still get to fleshing out the characters, hopefully in the next post. Come to think of it, that might take several posts anyway.

Meanwhile, I've come across an aspect of my worldbuilding that has needed some clean-up for quite a while now - the calendars of my cultures. And Ranul, the place where the Nonfi Nis game will be set, has been particularly tricky. So I figured I could talk a bit about the process here.

The First Rilsu Calendar

Early Drafts

Until the beginning of 2020, I didn't have proper calendars for my cultures at all. I was struggling with finding a system for organizing my notes, and finding a way to map out my timelines was just one of the many challenges.

What I had were the parameters for my celestial bodies, such as their orbital periods, which were loosely based on our solar system. I came up with them by looking at the parameters for Earth, Mars etc. and adding or subtracting a few days. None of them would fit the Gregorian calendar, and I did not want them to, either, because this star system had no connection to Earth and humans whatsoever.

Alien Time Measurements

When I moved my notes to WorldAnvil, I finally sat down and started figuring out how my planets' and moons' movements would translate to months and weeks. This was rather straightforward for Chryphóra. Its moon Palia takes 25 days to orbit the planet, and this fit quite well into the 348 days of a Chryphóran year. It gave me 14 months minus two days, so two of these months ended up with 24 days. I placed them on opposite sides of the year's cycle. Neat.

Then I got to Kasavoa and Ranul... and realized that celestial mechanics would look very different to a culture that lives on the moon rather than the planet.

For starters, Ranul is in tidal lock with Kasavoa, so the planet always stays in the same spot of Ranul's sky. No real way to derive months from that - well, Kasavoa would rotate in place, but I doubt that this would be notable enough for early Rul cultures. Next, the Rul would not see Ranul waxing or waning. Instead, they would perceive this the way we perceive Earth's day and night cycle. A day for the Rul would therefore take the 33 hours of a Kasavoan day times the 32 days of Ranul's lunar cycle. So, splitting the year into days would make for a really coarse scale.

But what about using the day as the year instead? It kinda made sense - instead of counting a planet's orbits around the star, they would count the orbits around their planet. Then they could split this orbit into quarters which would make the months...

So far, so good. At that time I also liked that a Nimýric year, which is rather close to one Earth year, would equal about 10 Rilsu years. That made the Rilsu calendar pretty alien.

A Flawed System

I started using this calendar. I set up a spreadsheet to convert the Rilsu dates to the Universal Date Time that WorldAnvil uses for its timelines. I wrote several articles stating character ages and dating historical events in that system.

When a prompt asked me to describe their birthday traditions, I decided that they would celebrate every eighth orbit, in line with their base eight numeric system. When a prompt asked for a devastating natural phenomenon, I decided that seasons would be determined by the position relative to the Kaleidoscope - which in turn would depend on Kasavoa's orbital position. Easy enough.

But then the prompt for a food-related holiday came around. I wanted them to celebrate the harvest, because it was obvious that it would have gained a huge importance after the Final War... and that's when the whole system started to break down. Suddenly, the lunar cycle year made far less sense.

Well, then I'll just make a "grandyear" and stuff the shorter years into that, right? Yeah... except the 521 days of Kasavoa's orbit would require 16 "years" and 9 days leap days. But that should be feasible, too, right? Well...

Coding The Converter

The Grandyear Odyssey

Somewhere along the line I started dabbling with a date converter in JavaScript. I figured I could just transfer the formulas that I had in my spreadsheet, update them to handle the 9 leap days for Ranul, and have it all set up in no time. And the calculations worked... for positive years. Not so much for those that came before the turn of the era.

What followed were weeks and months of running into dead ends. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to handle these leap days. Every formula that I came up with failed to account for something, and every piece of advice that I found was tailored the Gregorian calendar and/or considered only the AD years.

Finally, I heard the piece of advice that I needed in one of the WorldAnvil Q&A streams. The advice that every culture would keep their calendar as simple as possible, because they would need it every day - for vital things such as harvest dates. In other words, for the very thing that had gotten me into the "grandyear" mess. I finally understood that I needed to make the "grandyear" my base unit after all.

Taking it to the Web

So the "grandyear" became the year, and the 16-odd "orbits" became 17 months, one of which had 9 "days" instead of 32. And with that, the Rilsu calendar suddenly fit nicely into the calculations that I had worked out for the calendars of the Nimýrité, the Pereqaiande and Those Who Know. No more leap days and complicated special rules. By the end of 2020 I was able to convert dates between my calendars without problems.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to connect this converter to my WorldAnvil articles somehow. I was delighted to learn that there is a way to embed external content, provided that the source allows it - and GitHub Pages turned out to work for that.

Since the GitHub project in question needs to be public, I also decided to place the converter logic under a GPL license, in case others find it useful. You can have a look at it here: Kaleidoscope Date Converter

Aligning the Celestials

While working on the converter, a new idea was sparked - to translate these dates directly into the orbital position and rotation of the planets and moons in question. As a bonus, this visualization helped me with finding and ironing out some bugs that were still lurking in the converter code.

And most importantly, I could finally check whether my existing historical events made sense - most of all, the launch date of the Pasutgiruta mission shortly before my main story. Turns out, Ranul and Chryphóra are in the optimal position about a Rilsu year later than I had placed that event. Annoying, but manageable - after all, I still need to go over all Rilsu articles and chase out the last remnants of the original, over-complicated calendar system. Seriously, whenever I least expect it, I find yet another date given in 32-day years...

One thing, however, turned out perfectly - the "Empty Night" actually does coincide with Ranul's inner face entering the shadow. So, a "night" on Ranul lasts 8 Kasavoan days, which in turn last 33 standard hours each. I still need to figure out the Rul sleep cycle, but 8 days indeed feel right for telling the story of the Op family. This should give me enough time to set up the scene, have them make radio contact, let them argue about their next steps, and eventually resolve the story by the time the dawn ushers in a new era.

Wrapping Up

So now I have a calendar syste m that actually works, a way to visualize the day/night cycle on Ranul, and a better understanding of how dark or light it will be at a given time. As a bonus, I can now rest assured that the "Empty Night" during which my practice game will play out does indeed line up with what the Rul would perceive as night.

Alright, but for the next post I'll try to finally dig into the characterization of the Op family. For this I might already need to sketch out some key events that they will react to... We'll see.

How do I create the characters for my first video game? (Part 1)

183:724676096 (Kathrin Janowski) — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 22:18:13 GMT

Project "Nonfi Nis" - Week 4

Last time I laid down the basic concept for a small video game that will let me practice for my big vision. I decided that I will be telling the story of two enemy families meeting after a devastating war in my Kaleidoscope world.

If you want to know more about that particular war, you can read about it on WorldAnvil: The Final War

And if you are curious about the species of the characters I'm about to create, I recommend this article: Rul

Defining the Fundamental Traits

For these characters, I have to start with pretty much a blank slate. Since I don't want their story to interfere with that of my existing characters, I have little to anchor them to.

So what do I have as a starting point? Let's see:

I have a basic idea for the two rival superpowers from which they come - key differences in core values, appearance and naming schemes.
I need one family on either side, which includes at least two different generations and probably siblings on some level.
I will be relying on the "Big Five" personality model with which I'm familiar thanks to my research career.

Randomized Character Generation

When you need inspiration on the spot, randomness is a great tool. I've seen this in tricks such as splattering ink across the empty paper and looking for promising shapes, or the numerous random prompt generators you can find all over the web. Besides, this fits perfectly with my world - the Kaleidoscope is, in fact, named after the toy that generates beautiful shapes from randomly scattered fragments.

I like the random number generator at www.random.org because it allows me to quickly adjust the range that I need. The first thing I decide this way is the faction to which the protagonist family would belong - the Rilanga Union. (Note to self: Flesh out the WorldAnvil articles about both factions.)

Next up is the name of the family . Both the Rilanga and the Ran-E-Zu use family names that consist of one syllable, usually without any special meaning. This means I can completely randomize the letters, as long as I had a vowel and a consonant. Three random numbers later - order, vowel and consonant - I have the name "Op". Sounds kinda weird, to be honest, but then again, it is an alien culture. I can't find a waterproof reason for why they should not be called that, so the name stays.

Alright, on to the individual characters. For each of them, I need a sex , a name , an age and the five personality traits . I start with the sex of the character, since it will determine what consonants I can use in the name. For both the parent and child generations, I also let the randomizer decide how many siblings there are. The same goes for the marital status of the children and the father's sister.

Tweaking Names and Personalities

With the given names, randomization alone is not enough. While it gives me a first idea for the sounds that will be involved, I also want to arrange them in a pleasing way. Furthermore, I check my conlang dictionary so see whether these syllables carry any unfortunate meanings. Said dictionary can be found here: Rile

Regarding the personalities, I apply some common sense to make sure the spouses appear compatible. Do they have something in common? Do they compensate for eachother's less desirable traits? I also keep an eye on the overall distribution of personality configurations. I want the family members to be reasonably different so that their opinions will clash during the story and require the player to deal with that. In particular, I will need variety in the "Openness" trait because that one will greatly impact how they approach the enemy family. So I re-generate some values and adjust some others by hand.

Giving them a Face

Now it's time to learn what they look like, so that I can start seeing them as actual people.

While working on the characters for my regular storyline, I have already set up my Rul 3D model with the Unity Multipurpose Avatar system. I have also written a small script a while back that lets me "breed" children from two parent configurations, by blending the appearance parameters using random weights. (If anyone is interested in that script, let me know and I might write a blog post about it.)

To give the father and aunt the necessary family resemblance, I start by manually creating two parents with Rilanga features. This means warm reddish colorations, a crest that is angled downwards and a nose that is flush with the skull. Besides saving the parameters for their adolescent appearance (which I'll need for the secondary feather colors), I also configure the aged versions so that I can create portraits for their WorldAnvil articles.

Here's what they look like.

I now generate Ninu and his sister Refa, by running my script until I get a result that I like and adjusting their parameters here and there. Then I manually configure spouses for them, and let the script produce Etru and Urem. Kohip is created by hand again.

Looking at the family, I start to realize that a cast of parents, children and grandparents would make more sense than including the aunt and uncle. No problem! I just go back to the previous step and create names and raw personalities like for the rest of the family. And while I'm at it, why not create a kid for Refa and Beran? This one won't even need a defined personality because he'll never show up in the game. But a face will be useful, so that his grandparents can look at photographs when they worry about the rest of the family that is not in the shelter with them...

Do you see what is happening? I've stumbled over the first bit of what is going on in the family's minds! Now I've got a tangible reason why they will be anxious to establish communications with the outside world, besides the generic "they don't know what is happening".

So this is where I'm currently at.

Wrapping up

I've now got the bare minimum of who these characters are going to be - faces, names and how they are related to each other. I know on which of them I will focus and who will be part of the backstory. And I have the raw personality traits on a coarse scale from 1 to 5.

The next step will be to translate these numbers into actual characterizations. But for this I'll need to dive deeper into what the OCEAN traits mean, what facets of personality they cover and what that implies for the social dynamics. So I'll take a break here and make that a blog post of its own - maybe next week or the week after that.

What do you think of the progress so far? Is there any aspect about which you would like to know more?

How do I come up with the concept for my first actual video game?

183:724676096 (Kathrin Janowski) — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 23:15:57 GMT

Project "Nonfi Nis" - Week 1

For about two decades I have been dreaming of creating my own video game. An adventure game that lets you explore a solar system with exotic locations and different alien cultures, with a flexible story that adapts to your choices and various characters to befriend (or not).

But as it turns out, such a project is much more complex than teenage me expected. I've been fleshing out this world for years, and dabbled with the Unity game engine for the past two of them, but it still seems so far out of reach. Especially for a private project that I need to do in my spare time.

So after consuming a lot of helpful advice from various sources, I've decided to start a first practice project. A small, feasible game that lets me experiment with some of the mechanics, hone my skills and chip away at that enormous task ahead of me. And to make sure I really follow through with this project, I'm inviting you to come along.

Now, the first question to answer is: What kind of game do I want to make?

Brainstorming the Concept

The Fundamental Mechanics

Based on the advice to start small, I first thought about making a casual puzzle game. I thought it would be neat to simulate the kind of matter-transforming abilities that Those Who Know have - redirecting radiation energy to alter the configuration of atoms and later molecules. And then I could add some kind of cutscenes to show how the species evolved around that form of magic. A bit like "Breakout" meets "Doodle God".

But something did not feel right about that concept. It was too different from the big vision that I have for the "real" game, more like a weird minigame that would annoy players if it popped up in an epic adventure. I also thought: If I want people to get interested in the long-term project, wouldn't it be better to aim for consistency? Give them a taste of what they can actually expect once I'll get to making the "true" game? And most importantly: What skills do I want to practice?

So I took a step backwards and asked myself: What is supposed to be the core mechanic of my big dream game? And the answer is: Interacting with different characters and making meaningful choices to influence the story. And with this, I settled on the idea of a story-centric adventure game.

The Plot Hook

So, now I needed an interesting bit of story to tell through that game. For this, I turned to my worldbuilding notes and examined the various events I had mentioned here and there.

There were the recent events that set the stage for the "big" game - I couldn't use those because I would need them for the main story later. So what about the history of this world? At some point I had gone off on a tangent and started fleshing out the history of the Nimýric Imperial Bloodline. But the problem with those events was - their outcome was already determined. As a player, I would feel kinda cheated if I tried out a different path than the canonical storyline and then I'd be told "nope, that doesn't count".

That left me with the parts of history that were not yet defined clearly. Such as the aftermath of the Final War that made the Rilsu into who they are today. And that idea finally felt right. Because it meets two important criteria: It is useful for developing that culture's background, but I can focus the story on a handful of survivors whose actions will not change the overall path of history.

This leads me to the working title: "Nonfi Nis", which translates as "Empty Night" in Rile, my conlang for the Rilsu. Said "empty night" is the night immediately following the final wave of attacks in my world's lore, and therefore the starting point for this game's story. (By lucky coincidence, it also resembles the words "non finis", which is kinda poetic because this is indeed not the end of Ranul's civilization.)

Solidifying the Concept

Sketching the Plot

By settling on the basic mechanic - making decisions to change the path of the story - I now know that the story should be my main focus. So I started by writing down the major plot points. Where would the story start, and where would it go?

These are my three acts.

The survivors in one shelter realize that the fighting has ended, but they lost contact with everyone else.
The survivors manage to establish contact with another shelter, but it's from the enemy side.
The survivors encounter the group from the enemy shelter.

Well, this outline does not sound too original yet - but that's just fine for a small practice piece.

Next, I added in the major branching points, where the player's decision might influence the outcome.

For example:

Which side of the war do they blame, once they realize how bad the situation is now?
Do they actively seek out the enemy group, or try to avoid meeting them?
What are their intentions towards the other group when they actually meet them?

Now I have a rough idea of what paths the story can take. I'm forcing myself not to write down too many choices at this point - this will get complicated soon enough, and I can probably add in more choices once the prototype is done.

Limiting the Scope

Next, I decided what locations and characters I would need. Here, the decision to focus on small bomb shelters pays off - I won't need large, complicated environments because the shelters will likely be cramped and functional. As for the outside world, a single path through the mountains will probably do. That is, if I even show it in the end - I might just as well skip to the point where one of the parties has traveled to the other shelter. We'll see.

As for the inhabitants, the shelters will be very close to the border between the two factions. It's highly unlikely that anyone of historical importance will live there - which is exactly what I want, so that I don't mess up the overall timeline for my main story. So it will be two civilian families. This gives me a single digit number of people per group.

And the protagonist? Well, they need to be someone in the middle of the hierarchy - important enough that the family will listen to them, but not powerful enough to just force their decision on the rest of them. Otherwise the game would be over within a few minutes.

I'm tempted to add multiple POV characters at this point, to let the player choose one they identify with. But remember, my goal is to keep it simple right now - if things go smoothly, I can add more features later.

Wrapping Up

So, this is what my concept looks like in a nutshell.

It is an adventure game which tells the story of two enemy families in the wake of a devastating war. The player's choices will determine how their family approaches the other group, and how well this encounter will go.

(And already, part of my brain is itching to slap on RPG mechanics, personality models, combat sections and what have you. Shush, brain. Let's take one step after the other, right?)

Over the next few weeks, I plan to figure out some of the characters and maybe sketch a conversation or two. My goal is to post updates here at least once a month.

Feel free to let me know what you think about this concept!