someone else post in this thread, i'm embarrassing myself with these self-bumps
Anyhow, here's a small digression to typography, writing and stuff. For the meta-setting of this game/world, I've been devising small flavour points: one of them is the typography associated with them. Typographical variation is a cheap way to create exoticism or otherness, or just give something a particular vibe: like, say, if you made a Britannic style story or game, you might use Uncial or Insular (for Celtic) or Old English typographic styles, with yoghs and dots. For this stuff, I decided to create a small variant of Latin, with which I intend to write names in the codelang deviced for this, and other language snippets other than Meta-English. As a base for the design I raster-edited on glyph samples from a Open Font License font named Sorts Mill Goudy by Barry Schwartz:
The plan is to take the modifications here, turn it into a separate font to use in the game (alongside standard SM Goudy, though the game SDK I'm using also handles bitmap fonts, which would be simpler), and license it with credits and all that stuff in the Open Font License.
For those who don't know, /ŋ/ means the velar nasal sound you get at the end of "sing". The n-with-a-hook is a letter for that sound (in IPA, and in the above Latin variant because ŋ is a bitch to invent a new letter for, as you can see). The letter that looks like n-with-a-j and a dot is just an abbreviation/ligature standing for "ja", 'and' in the codelang of the game (which is, as said, based on modern Finnish (ok, I lie, Old Finnish - I presume that most sound-changes that cause irregularity in modern Finnish do not take place) with a set of sound-changes that turns modern Finnish into something that doesn't resemble modern Finnish, because this is a really simple way to create a flavour-language without actually doing any proper conlanging (and which anyone with basic knowledge of Finnic diachronical linguistics and etymology can easily use). I've also played with the thought of doing an English-based codelang. We'll see how that goes. Maybe I'll do something with reversed-English, plus some sound-changes to fudge things.
Anyhow, today I decided to play around with my ink-pen in lieu of anything productive (I'm suffering from a slight cold), and decided to design a miniscule style to write this in.
Apologies for the unfocused shot, I can't seem to get any decent pictures with my old camera.
Still a work on progress, though I'm fairly happy with the look. It's old-fashioned looking, but not in any particular sense of old-fashioned: a mixture of different styles, some original strokes, and all in all it looks quite suitable for use on a fantasy map. I might try to digitise this to use on my map.
Lastly, a small update with further elaboration on climes and ocean currents.
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