Glass Bubble Week 10

This is development week ten out of eighteen for Glass Bubble. The previous week's devlog can be found here.

I spent a lot more time working on the Baskiv language than doing what I was supposed to be doing, which was refactoring the dialog code and setting up the base level for the Glass Bubble demo. I think I did this mostly because I didn't feel like I had much time to actually sit down for an uninterrupted period of time, so I ended up working on Baskiv in between classes and while I was on the bus.

I created a nice little program to help me keep track of the words I made up for the language. The program allows me to add baskiv words and english words that can be considered synonyms of the baskiv word. It then also lets me delete those definitions if I make a mistake and allows me to get information about a word.

For example, here's what the program looks like when you try looking up the word that means question:

>> get question
"sok" (sohk) - ask, question
"tome" (tohmeh) - question, what
"game" (gahmeh) - question, where
"dxme" (daimeh) - question, who
"kakome" (kahkohmeh) - question, when
"yame" (yahmeh) - question, why

As you can see, there are a couple of results here. With this tool it was much easier to look up words that I needed to use when translating Kelsi's script.

While translating Kelsi's script, I had to come up with a lot of grammar rules along the way to express certain ideas. One of the more complicated sentences I had to translate went something like this:

Kelsi: Oh, he's probably in town, buying supplies or meeting with his friends at the bar.

When translated into Baskiv, it looks like this when romanized:

Kelsi: Ah, gojin ginben gameva, rezegun kentakva aev baba faeyen cathicks san footgil.

Something I didn't expect about having to invent grammar rules along the way was that I found myself going back into previous sections that I had already translated, finding something that seemed erroneous, and then fixing it.

Something else that concerned me at first was the verbosity of the language, but it generally seems that Baskiv is comparable to English in length.

Anyway, I ended up completely translating Kelsi's script and now I'm considering how difficult it would be to actually translate the rest of the dialog and get it voice acted.

Something that concerns me a little is that it restricts my likelihood of modifying the script as I won't want to also update the Baskiv version. Additionally, if I get it voice acted, I will be even more loathe to changing the script.

But that time investment means nothing if I don't at least have a base level to play the game in. I've done all the narration work, but I don't have a level that you can walk around in to play through all of the parts. I will do that next week.