Ballebrian Script, 04/12/24, 11:32am

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:

• 1. The people in Balleborough don't speak English! Why would they, England doesn't exist in Avaloft!
• 2. It's boring.
• 3. Making a custom script is exciting & a new way to develop the culture of Balleborough.
• 4. If I ever realease this thing, it might require localisation on image assets <- (Proper gamedev reason). Fake language = no localisation!

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!

• A/N: it may not be clear from the guide, but the /eɪ/ diphthong utilises *both* the red and green pips, not just the green. /a:/ is just a single pip.

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?

• A/N: I realised as I was developing this that neighbouring consonants often share a common vowel in the preceding/following slots. It can often look quite nice to conjugate these into a single, wide symbol - case in point, the final two /u/ sounds in 'ba-le-bu-ru' above.