I recently worked with a few friends, Tuojin Yin, Albert Phan, Yen Ting Low, and Wei Yuan to make a simple game called Tingting’s Dictionary. We used RPG Maker MV to create an interactive story in which users meets an alien named Tingting, learns to communicate, and then apply their newfound language skills to build a machine that can save the world. I played two main roles in the development of the game: management and alien language development.
Management
My main takeaway from creating the game concept is that stories flow better with fewer cooks in the kitchen. Our first team meeting was an overflow of enthusiastic ideas, but actually converting ideas into a logical story just wasn’t working. I pulled out a piece of paper and started drawing a story board, and when this turned out to be helpful, we migrated to an electronic story board.
I oversaw documentation and organization of the project on our team platform, Confluence. My first step was to create a meeting minutes page and Phase pages of the game design. I also provided a tutorial video showing teammates how to navigate the pages. During meetings, I led by assigning tasks and documenting who was assigned to complete what by which dates. During meetings I also served as a scribe on our Phase pages, writing detailed outlines of exactly what each step of the game should look like. Since we were working in such a limited time frame, having an organized platform where every task and all game logic was documented was extremely helpful.
Our game was originally much more ambitious than what we planned for, but we decided to take an agile approach by first constructing a skeleton and then adding bells and whistles after. I would strongly recommend this type of game creation model to others. We didn’t have time to create all the branching alternate engines teammates had envisioned, but since we had focused on completing a core version first, we could still have finished product on-time.
Audio
It was important for Tingting’s Dictionary to have an audio component. Reinforcing the newly learned alien words with audio feedback could help players internalize the language, and it also made the came cuter and more entertaining.
Samples of Tingting’s Language
I recorded the audio sounds in Adobe Audition and cleaned the sound so that there was no background noise. I then added them to the game’s Sound Effects folder and set up commands so that Tingting would speak the equivalent of the words written onscreen.
To decide what Tingting should sound like, I did some research into constructed languages (or conlangs) by watching video breakdowns online. I wanted Tingting to sound cute, but a little strange. A takeaway I have from trying to invent Tingting’s dialogue is that what sounds alien to me may not sound so strange to a different locale. Some of the sounds Tingting makes sound more compatible with Japanese, Chinese, or maybe even Hindi. For a larger project, I think it would be best to workshop your conlang to see if it properly conveys strangeness for that locale.
Written Language
Most aliens in popular media are meant to be intimidating, but for this project, we wanted something that looked odd, but endearing. I looked to two examples of alien written languages for inspiration: Boovish, written by the Boovs of the children’s book the True Meaning of Smekday, and Gallifreyan, written by the Doctor in Doctor Who. Both of these alien languages use bubble-based writing systems. I decided to look for a writing system that also had bubbles.
I eventually found Nyctographic, provided by Pixel Sagas. Nyctography is an old cipher originally invented by Lewis Carol for jotting down quick notes in the dark. The characters originally would have been written by following the edges of a square holes in a gridded card. It worked well as an easy, cheap way to add a sense of strangeness to the game, without having to make a character system from scratch using something like Calligraphr and FontForge.
Getting Nyctographic into the game was harder than I anticipated. Most work in RPG Maker can be done right inside the interface without messing too much with code. While it’s easy to pop into the code and change the game font for the entire interface, making only certain lines switch was not as simple. We ended up using a Load Custom Fonts plugin developed by Yanfly to replace the font for Tingting’s lines.
Conclusions
Overall, I was not impressed with RPG Maker MV’s localization capabilities. It’s a very easy platform to make a game in, but it doesn’t have good built-in solutions for adding more locales, and the localization plugin we turned to was not compatible with some of our other plugins. Nonetheless, it was a worthwhile learning experience to see just how much work goes into even a simple game, especially navigating one that has an alien language in addition to the target language and incorporating custom audio, fonts, and graphics.