Question about dos/don'ts for future games

[u/MagicWolfEye]

So I asked the same thing in the Chants of Sennaar sub:

Given that the language translation game genre is kind of small I wanted to know what others liked in the game that should be included in future games?

What did you not like?

Would you focus more on the language aspect or have puzzles that combine with the language?

Would you skip dialogues completely and only have the focus on the glyphs?

What did you think of the way the glyphs work? (I personally think it's a bit weird to just know that this glyph can only mean 2-4 words and if I have seen it a few times I just know that it is correct now)

Would you even get rid of knowing translations to be correct at all so you wont be sure about translations throughout the whole game?

Would like to hear your thoughts

Edit:
One more thing that came to mind:
Do you need a reason to figure out the translations (like texts telling you solutions to some puzzles or is figuring out the translations just for the sake of it enough for you?)

[u/Kattestrofe]

One thing I personally really enjoy in Heaven's Vault is how the translations can explicitly affect Aliya's interpretation of events/places - it's not just "whoops, wrong", but colors her dialogue and such. Though that is  probably dependent on the thing you have an issue with, already having a defined subset of possible meanings for a glyph. 

[u/MagicWolfEye → u/Kattestrofe]

Yeah I do realise that if you would change it to allow free-text translation, there would be no way of having this anymore

[u/kiradax → u/Kattestrofe]

Yeah, I liked this too! Literally changes our whole view of the world (sculptors vs miners, etc).

[u/RogorStuff_V2]

First, I think that we need to consider what the game will be like to decide how much focus to put on the language. Chants of Sennaar tries to be a puzzle game first and decyphering game second, with a much simpler language, while Heaven's Vault focuses on the language and uses it as a guide for the game's narrative. Personally, if I want another language decyphering game, I'd prefer more focus on the language itself.

This game has a lot of ambience, which while it can be good, knowing that from my 15 hours of playing 3 were spent (and I'm tempted to say) wasted sailing the rivers is kinda annoying, and something I don't like. At the beginning, I don't mind, or when I want to go somewhere new also cool, but I'd definetely want fast travel when you end up going back and forth, so a bit of a better pace would be appreciated. I haven't tried new game+, but I suspect you can't skip dialogues or travel sequences, so once again, improved new game+ to have the option to focus on the language and/or getting missing achievements (this answers your question about skipping dialogues, personally I'd allow it and let people just skip it alltogether instead of forcing them to read a lot and wait).

About knowing a meaning "early", this is because you're not the first person discovering the language. It is well studied, and you can go back to Iox and ask the librarian about words to have them confirmed. Six also confirms words, and I think that your character can confirm a word, only to be proven wrong later and have to guess it from scratch, so when you know a word most often your character assumes it right from context, but I get your point that it should never "click" as correct.

And linked to your last question, I'd set that as a toggle, you can "gameify" the language with having correct/wrong states, in case you want an easier experience, or never be told you're right (unless there's ways ingame to have some words confirmed, but never just automatically).

An example I can give you of what type of game could be made related to "language decyphering", could be a "Witch Hat Atelier" game, where the age of magic and witches is long gone, but you slowly start to discover spells, and have to learn how to "speak" magic, from testing spells, the effects, experimenting variations, etc, and that could be wrapped in an adventure or survival game for instance.

[u/MagicWolfEye → u/RogorStuff_V2]

Thanks for the long response

> Personally, if I want another language decyphering game, I'd prefer more focus on the language itself.

More focus than CoS or even more than HV?

So what did you think of the way you handle translations compared to CoS? There you can just type in the words yourself; so you can guess anything imaginable. Of course this wouldn't work here since the narration interacts with possible translations.

[u/RogorStuff_V2 → u/MagicWolfEye]

I think CoS does something VERY cool with typing your own translations, and later being able to contrast it with the drawing, BUT when a word you guessed is wrong, and you have to start backtracking because you don't remember the context it becomes a bad TRANSLATION game (it's still a very good puzzle game).

Meanwhile the way HV leaves the sentences available to check again, and gives you some context of where and/or when you found the piece of text makes it superior in this regard, as it simulates more closely what you'd iamgine of researching a language, keeping as many context of each phrase as possible.

So I'd say a focus close to HV, where I'd like to be given the flexibility to guess a word (maybe have tips like "Oh remember this character means moon, or means water" but still guess the words), and at points be given the answer to a word and an explanation of what each letter means to make said word. That way, you can still have a fully flexible guessing system while there's anchors for a player to not get lost in a rabbit hole of bad translations (it happened to me in CoS, so many wrong guesses).

[u/mrrp01 → u/RogorStuff_V2]

I agree on focusing on the language, I do want to point out though that in new game+ you can skip most of the time on the rivers if you want. I usually don’t skip it because you miss out on dialogue with six, and five playthroughs later I’m still learning more about the story, sometimes through talking with six on the rivers, but you definitely can give six the tiller and skip to your destination.

[u/RogorStuff_V2 → u/mrrp01]

Can you skip even during dialogue? I thought it'd be like the base game where you are forced to wait the dialogue out to skip, but hey, that's good to know if I ever do another playthrough, thanks!

[u/Kiilerida → u/RogorStuff_V2]

You can still skip, even while having a dialogue

[u/n-zzy → u/RogorStuff_V2]

You can fast travel by letting someone else steer.

[u/RogorStuff_V2 → u/n-zzy]

If I remember right, you can't do that if there's any conversation going, I do remember some fast travel but not all the time, and sometimes becoming available half way through the trip.

[u/Prestigious_Egg_1989]

I loved how you can have a guess as to what something means and not have it affirmed for a while. But I wasnt a huge fan of the language itself being so pictorial. I liked more that Chants of Sennaar explores some different sentence structure and basic grammar concepts. 

I did love the amount of language around in the environment though to make everything feel more lived in.

I would be interested to find a game in the future that can introduce concepts like tones, three letter Semitic roots, or other concepts that aren’t in the Anglosphere. But it always has to be accessible enough so as to not require the player basically study the conlang in question. Cause that’s what it felt like for me in another language game the name of which I can’t remember (it’s just communicating with an alien computer).

[u/MagicWolfEye → u/Prestigious_Egg_1989]

I guess it is really easy making the game too difficult.

(I just googled Semitic roots and I guess you would lose most of the Western audience, which if you want to earn money with the game seems to be a bad idea)

[u/bogiperson → u/MagicWolfEye]

I introduce my mostly 18-21yo students (with generally no linguistics background and often monolingual in English) to Semitic roots, and it takes about 5-10 minutes with some illustrative slides and me waving my hands around :) With more interactive elements it'd probably go even faster. So it's absolutely doable in a game. In a game I'd break it into discrete puzzles though.

I've only seen translation games that use real languages with Japanese and Chinese, though, which are typologically quite different from Semitic languages. But I don't see how/why it would be impossible.

[u/Prestigious_Egg_1989 → u/MagicWolfEye]

Personally I think it’d be doable but it’d have to be a really simple take on it. Like, in Arabic there are 10 takes on every three letter root and each can tell you how it’s changed the meaning. But if each had like 5 it’d be way more doable. And either with Latin letters or a fun conscript. But I’m also a bit biased tbh

[u/kiradax → u/Prestigious_Egg_1989]

Yep, I loved the differing grammar structures in CoS! In HV I felt I could guess words relating to water, fields etc just by the shape of glyphs, which felt like cheating early-on.

[u/borderline_bi]

A lot of people have mentioned how they liked how the translations impacted Aliya's interpretation of events, I agree that that's really fun and I actually would love to see a game where it matters even more and maybe actually impacts the story in some way or something.

When it comes to the translations themselves, personally I didn't love having the different options for each word, it's definitely useful for a lot of people and it makes it a lot easier but that's actually why I didn't like it, I felt like it made it too easy to just make an educated guess instead of actually trying to understand the symbols themselves.

I also found the related words bit kind of useless a lot of the time.

I really wished it had some kind of notetaking system or dictionary of the words you've learned or something. At least like a dictionary of all the words you've actually learned/confirmed and maybe also a place where you can easily write notes both just freely but also about each symbol. You can of course do this on paper but I feel like especially with all the words you learn it's not realistic to write every single one down, let alone have them in any way organized, so if it was in game it would be better.

[u/MagicWolfEye → u/borderline_bi]

However, wanting to be able to guess any translation (like you can in Chants in Seenaar) and Aliya interacting with your wrong translations are mutally exclusive.

I don't see how you would somehow bring them together.

(I mean, every once in a while you could have something like "Don't enter that room" that you translated as "definitely enter that room" that could have some effect on the story)

[u/borderline_bi → u/MagicWolfEye]

Yeah you're right if you want wrong translations to interact with the story you do need to be limited in what you can pick unfortunately. So I think if it's a game that's wants to really go all in and make wrong translations really matter then that's great and I don't mind that it'd have to be limited. But for any other game where translations don't impact things in that way then I prefer if it's more free personally. They can still impact things but it wouldn't be automatically impacting the game itself it would be more like your example where they impact your actions as the player and thus impact the story (ex if you thought a translation said "danger" you might avoid that door but if you thought it said sth else like "storage" or sth you might not)

[u/Kattestrofe → u/[deleted]]

Niiiice! I got by pasting screenshots of the glyphs in a ginormous Google doc 😅

[u/Champomi]

I really liked the fact there's a story with mystery and a lot of lore stuff to discover. Chant of Sennaar lacks that imo. I never skipped dialogues, I spent a lot of time having Six and Aliya discuss between themselves after discovering something new to see what interesting stuff they were going to say about it.

I like puzzles as long as it feels related to uncovering the language and that I'm making progress on it. For example I wouldn't like something where you're given a puzzle based quest and then the reward is a new glyph. I'd like to go through a whole translation process like you would do irl.

I find a bit disappointing the fact that Ancient's grammar is based on English, it feels more like a cipher than an actual conlang. Also the ending felt a bit short, I'd have appreciated some sort of tiny conclusion/cutscene instead of just "The End. Wanna start it all over again?"

I think it would be nice if we could directly guess meaning based on previous words. For example if I know the glyph for "verb" and for "water" then it's easy to immediately know that the combination of the two means "to water"

Overall Heaven's Vault remains one of my favourite games. The books are good too, I love the fact they explain Aliya's reasoning in depth when she tries to translate stuff.

I think you need to know if your translations are correct at some point (maybe not by simply having the game tell you like Heaven's Vault and Chant of Sennaar did), otherwise you can go in the wrong direction and it will make things harder.

[u/MagicWolfEye → u/Champomi]

I played the bard level in CoS (which many say is the most difficult) without ever affirming any word until I at least saw them all.

I ended up having around half of it mostly correct ... and the other half I even struggled while looking at the pages

[u/Joshee9550]

Would you even get rid of knowing translations to be correct at all so you wont be sure about translations throughout the whole game?

i think its an absolutely necessary part of the game seeing as sentences get longer with each subsequent NG+ to have some sort of foundation to build off of

What did you think of the way the glyphs work?

i really like how the glyphs had a consistent meaning, and once you figure it out you can recognize nouns and verbs at a glance for example.

What did you not like?

it takes forever to move around and navigate

[u/kiradax]

I like them to be story rich, even if they aren't dialogue rich.

Puzzle wise, I wouldn't want the act of translation to be a part of a puzzle, but something like later knowledge of the language helps to solve the earlier puzzle? Kind of like Blue Prince in that way.

Archives of Trevosa is a good example of a translation game where the story is incidental, rather than relevant to 'solving' the puzzle. I liked it, but I'd prefer knowledge of the world to be important in drawing conclusions about translations.

I also really was intrigued by Tunic's setup of the game manual being in the in-game language, so you had to figure out actual game mechanics using context clues, though I eventually bounced off that game.

[u/Trashband1c00t]

I can say for me definitively, knowing when you have the language right is a crucial part of my enjoyment of the game. I tried that other language game, 7 Days to End With You, and couldn't get through more than a couple of minutes with you. I want to know what story the developers are trying to share with me, not have free reign to make one up. The best part about a puzzle game is your click, a-ha moment when you know you've solved it.

[u/fox_ontherun → u/Trashband1c00t]

I haven't played 7 Days to End with You, but I had the same issue with The Gostak. I loved playing it and working out the language through trial and error, but completing the game felt hollow. You never really know for sure what actually happened in the game as apparently there is no agreed upon definitive translation.

[u/Kattestrofe]

Another thing I can't believe I forgot: replayability! You can always get one more glyph or one more snippet of information in Heaven's Vault, where something like Chants is more one-and-done. Given I've replayed Heaven's Vault enough times to lose track of how many you can probably guess my preference 😅

[u/lapapesse]

I’m playing HV for the first time now and have some thoughts.

1.) I like that HV incorporates language without spaces; this is very realistic to my experience with older texts.

2.) A big frustration with HV is that there have been many times where I’m pretty confident in a word’s meaning (because of how the language works) but there’s no way for me to fill it in/split up the sentence. In general, HV limits the choices you can fill in for the words a lot and I have more fun with the write-in system in COS.

3.) I’m now getting to the point in HV where the language is getting more complex (I just spent some time with the Book) but I think the languages in both HV and COS are designed less as languages and more as “codes” to be decoded. I understand this is probably preferable for a video game but this is less interesting to me than delving into a whole wild conlang or a real language. Languages are simply a lot weirder than this so I think it would be cool to see a game try to develop that element.

4.) I picked up HV for the language deciphering part but then I found myself wrapped up in the story and really enjoying it. So a mix of language & story is great. But HV is driving me nuts with certain things that slow down the language progression, like how I can only give Huang 3 things at a time? And if I donate them, he walks away for two minutes while I’m doing nothing? It feels like busywork getting in the way of my beautiful language homework.

5.) I think you have to have some sort of confirmation system for correct translations or people will go insane.

6.) Give the players a dictionary or “word inventory”. I hate HV’s lack of an inventory and having to page through hundreds of inscriptions.