First Words of Power game is now finally in development after 3 years of research on available game engines and tools 🥳
Godot fits my indie needs the best while being fun to use even after some real coding and my experiments indicate it should be able to handle the dynamic world I desire.
With the essential technological questions finally answered, I'm now able to proceed with the game development beyond prototype phase.
Back to Magic 🧙
Game assets and code aside, two primary magic-related tasks remain:
- create official TexnoMagic alphabet (symbols)
- create spell grammar to translate spells for use in the game
These are tightly interconnected as spell forms depend on available symbols. Furthermore, maximum alphabet size is limited by real world machine performance as each symbol adds extra computation step during recognition. Adding a new required symbol to the spell grammar is disruptive as it makes all existing alphabets which don't contain the symbol incomplete. In other words it's extremely important to choose a good starting alphabet.
Core Symbols Challenge was a first well-defined set of symbols required in a magic alphabet. I persuaded few mages to contribute their symbols (thanks!) and results are aggregated on the wop.mod.io mod portal.
However, it's already clear that these first magic alphabets are missing symbols required to represent all possible spells in a coherent manner.
In order to figure out which symbols are really needed I need to have a full-featured spell grammar. In order to figure out the spell grammar, I need to experiment in the game world which isn't quite ready yet for such complex interactions and I'm also missing art assets to give them proper form.
It's now impossible to accurately determine final symbol set, however, some symbols from Core Symbols Challenge are certain to be included and thus it's about time I processed the user magic on wop.mod.io and started working on the official Words of Power alphabet that will serve as a default in the game.
Words of Power online browser
In order to make browsing and comparing existing community magic easy and accessible without the need to install a software, I've deployed new wop.texnoforge.dev online app which displays all community magic from wop.mod.io mod portal in one place on any device with internet and a browser.
Symbols are rendered as simple SVG images so they can be scaled to any resolution without quality loss. Symbols Overview is available which lists all different forms of a symbol across alphabets - a feature that will come in handy when creating the default alphabet based on community creations.
See the magic for yourself:
wop.texnoforge.dev
As with all Words of Power core tech, this application is free and open source, you can see/fork its sources on texnoforge github, and even deploy your instance if you want.
You can also use the wopweb.cli to render SVG/PNG images from TexnoMagic symbols.
Next log: 9: TexnoLatin Alphabet in Training