I've had this idea for a long time. Let us say that there is a "magical language". You find a grimoire filled with magical spells, formulas, and so on. In the beginning your character only knows a few things about the language, which is provided to you in notes and a short tutorial. This allows you to access a few primitive spells. As you go along you find keys to the language, things that help you to translate it. However I'm not thinking FFX style where its automatically translated for you. I mean you actually have to read these things and perform the translations on your own.

The idea is to create a game mechanic that is player-dependent rather than character based, where the player just has to lead the character to the people, places, and things that will give them the knowledge.

Now the question. Do you think this is too complicated? Not to implement or program/script that. I mean for the players. I mean, I know I would love to play such a game, but would anyone else?

As awesome as it would be, I wouldn't want to bother making it if no one else wanted to try. Since I'd be designing it, I'd already have the language memorized anyways, so the value of playing it would be wasted on me.

It's not at all complicated. I have a tutorial, which may help you (nobody reads tutorials apparently, because 2/3 of them are too noobish.


http://www.rpgrevolution.com/tutorial/375

Basically, just make a naming event for a false character, triggered by a skill (you could also make this part of a custom menu) where you type in the name of the spell (which you either learned from characters, monsters casting it, or from reading books). If the spell is one of those on you list, and you type it correctly (AND you don't have it already of course), you learn the spell, otherwise it's a dud and you learn nothing.

The reason all of my tutorials are RpgMaker2003 is because they don't NEED a script, unless XP or VX outright removed a feature (like they did with side-scrolling).

It's an interesting idea, for it to work for me the spells would have to look pretty cool and maybe have different sidequests available depending on which spells you know. Also having a ranking system where you increase in "fame" as you pull off new spells might be cool. What I'm pretty much getting at is that you would have to reward me generously for putting my time into learning the spells with flashy animations and actual gameplay rewards. The more effort I put into learning your game the more I want to get out of it. So your world will also have to be something worth exploring and investing time in.
Basically, the more effort it takes to learn your game the more interesting it has to be to ensure the player doesn't just give up and walk off. Atleast that's how I see it! If you manage to appky it in the right way I could deffinitly see going out of my way to remember a few words so that I can pull off the craziest looking spells.

It's been done. Ultima Underworld spell casting is based around this concept. You find runes, each with it's own connotation and meaning. (to which you have to find notes and stuff to translate them or have the manual) Combining them properly and it gives you new spells.

It's... okay. I mean, the language obviously cannot be too complicated or else you risk completely losing the players.

There are some problems with this, though.
The player of the game could easily find a guide to translate the runes, which would ruin the purpose of the game, and would shorten their play-time by a lot.
For another thing, it would be very irritating to play if you couldn't remember what you'd picked up about the runes (say, you leave the game for a month or two, and forget what you learned)...
It would work if you had some kind of logbook to document what the player had learned about runes, though.
But this sounds like a game that would require a lot of reading; and not many people want to learn a pseudo-magic language to beat a game, lol.
Either way, I think the first reason I listed would largely impair the value of this game.
Though... if you look at the rune language like the songs in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, you could technically make it so that your character can only apply the knowledge they have picked up in-game.
I guess it could work that way.
:0
Maybe you shouldn't rely so heavily on the runes - they could be used for a side quest, or they could be used in part with the main storyline; but I would not have them take up such a large part of the game that the player is practically learning a new language.

I find this to be patently wrong to assume. sure, there are those just want to sit back, and zone out when the play games. But I can attest to more than a few people would enjoy this type of thing. Having said that, reason #1 is the basically the reason why you need to make sure the language is either simple enough to learn by yourself (so it's not too onerous), or you do it all in-game like the post said above.

I'm going to throw a tiny bit of input into this since I have earned myself a break after pounding the keyboard all day long cranking out a demo.



Use simple two letter combinations for the spells! Simple!

Fa = fire
Ta = Ice
Re = Wind
De = Blast
Lu = Heal

Fadelu = Firey blast of healing? NO OF COURSE NOT! It's a dud spell! Fatade = Firey ice blast, which could be really cool. Not only that, but the language WOULD be simple to learn!

Just my input though. It's how I would do it.

heck, let's build on top of this.

every spell consists of at least two syllables, but goes up to say, 4.

that's 5^4 + 5^3 + 5^2 = 775 possible combinations. Of course, a lot of those will be duds. But that's okay. To really home it in though, something like Fa-Fa could be Fire level 2, and Fa-Fa-Re could be firestorm.

I already had an idea once to use that language which is why I'm throwing it out there, but I'll likely never use the idea and get rich.


Also, all my examples above were prefixes. How about two letter suffixes? Like...

ng = Pain
rp = Power
ad = Level 2
am = Level 3

Combine with the above and you get...

Fadarp = Fire blast of power
Ream = Wind level 3


Personally, I would only use two letter words, to make it simpler. You wouldn't learn or be able to use the greater powered spells until later in the game, like the level 2 and 3, or ice spells, and etc. To top it off, dud spells would have a negative effect on your character/allies, meaning if you just test willy nilly without using your brain, you could kill your whole party!

*giggle* fadarp. Nice

These are all really good thoughts ^^. As far as finding a guide to translate everything, yeah sure. They can feel free, but they'll just be cheating themselves out of an awesome game.

And if they went away for a long time they would have a "dictionary" to refer to. Something that contained what they had already learned in it. Also, it might be awesome to have sequels that built upon the language you already knew.

This is an example of what I had in mind. The syllables concept is very close btw ^^:


This is Dra, the word meaning "Create".


Dren: a word meaning life. The same design as Dra, just upside down. Life is the earthly representation of what is created, hence why is is below.


Dollum: meaning Mechanism or Machine.


Dradren Dollum: The creation of life in a machine: this is the simplified spell name. It's purpose is to animate a machine to do the bidding of the creator.

Thats the basic idea. It would have its own grammatical structure and such which would play a part. The idea isn't to make something too simple, but not too complex. Something that can easily be grasped but can also be very flexible and produce interesting results.

From just this you could just use Dra Dollum for "create machine", or DraDren for "create life" or, more simply "healing". Dren Dollum would be "life machine" which wouldn't make sense on its own, but if you combined it with other things like "create", "small", "instant", and "external" you could get "create small instant external-life machine", which could make you a potion.

And maybe to make things simple, players could combine things and create some of their own commonly used phrases to make "create small instant-" to a word like "Hoen" so it become "Hoen-Dren Dollum."

oh I like this. symbols that construct a glyph? nice

Yeah ^^

And as you begin learning how the symbols work, the patterns and all, then you will learn what some of the other symbols are without having to find some book or something that tells you. Like when you see the symbol for create above something, you know that the glyph is about creating something and you experiment with it until you come up with what its supposed to do.

If you've ever played "Lost Magic" for the DS, it's essentially this. It's an RTS game but with your hero (oversimplification), you draw runes on your touchscreen. A combination of 2 or 3 runes would each make certain spells. You had to memorize the runes, (there were 18, 3 of each element, 6 elements), and combine them. Order mattered, and each "prefix" to a spell would affect the effect of the 'suffix' or second rune used. Essentially 1st=type of spell, 2nd=power/element/special effects.

So I'm already naturally inclined to this game but this game was RTS and therefore, you had to move quick, how would you encourage memorization of your spell list and etc.? Potential vs practicality

Reminds me of the recently released hack n' slash Magicka. In that game, you place up to 5 glyphs in a line out of 8 total available to cast a spell. All elements have their opposites which nullify each other, so you can't use fire and cold in one spell for example. Generally, it was fun to experiment with these as you had a lot of different combinations.

It is something like that, only different. You see, not all the runes would be spells. Some would be instructions, stories, and more. Instead of just 18, or 40, or 100, there would probably be more like a few thousand.

The key, of course, is implementing a system that would make learning this simple and memorable.

Before anyone is like LAWL TERRIBLE IDEA TOO GRAND let me say this: Don't care

I like thinking up impossible stuff and figuring out how to make it work. And actually there is a purpose behind making it so grand. I actually want to design a video game around the concept of learning a real foreign language. Create a way to make language learning easy, like with Rosetta Stone, but far more entertaining, and no where near as bloody ridicules. Seriously, with rosetta stone, like four chapters into it its like KONICHIWA and I'm like ****ING HELLO I GET IT ALREADY!