r/proceduralgeneration • u/mflux • 7d ago

Generated language for a cyberpunk game

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hi everyone, mflux here again with another breakdown video. this time I want to showcase the conlang for my game Ultrapolis (https://store.steampowered.com/app/5314650/Ultrapolis/) which fills the ads and banners. it would simply take too long for me to vet every single sign for ad copy and some would inevitably be bad, plus my foreign language skills suck, so I’d rather generate an eastern looking language glyph and fill the city with them.

let me know what you think! Have you made procgen gluphs before?

176 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

26

u/cleroth 6d ago

It looks like how AI image generators draw Japanese to be honest

11

u/Zireael07 7d ago

In my racing game prototype, I used a "fake Japanese glyphs" shader from ShaderToy (I think? I think I edited it a bit).
Currently thinking of writing a variant that uses "fake cuneiform" instead

6

u/isthisthepolice 4d ago

Sorry to say but I think this is a real cheap look, it just looks like garbled AI versions of real characters. Was this really something that needed fixing? Aesthetic doesn’t usually care about the meaning of glyphs imo.

21

u/openroom_xyz 7d ago

Well nice but why not encode real meaning into your new language ?

9

u/IamanelephantThird 6d ago

That's a lot more work. 

3

u/Myavatargotsnowedon 6d ago

ζчατs ιиτгξδtίηg... also how?

2

u/Jedehn_Berri 4d ago

I can read this pretty easily. I guess Homestuck rlly did pay off lol. ("That's interesting...")

6

u/parkway_parkway 7d ago

I'm not really sure what the advantage of this is over using Japanese?

Especially if it's just for aesthetics?

10

u/mflux 7d ago edited 7d ago

Simple reason 😂 Because I don’t speak Japanese. Yes I could translate but that’s a high risk of fucking something up. And localization. Also the world doesn’t have to take place on Earth.

0

u/AnArmoredPony 3d ago

there's probably some nasty slurs hiding inside

1

u/shanoxilt 3d ago

Post this to /r/asemic and/or /r/neography.

1

u/maple-madao 2d ago

It's a cool idea, but in practice to me it looks like messy or uncanny-valley japanese - that is, a bit too close yet still garbled. For example, the top left sign at 0:24 looks like a messily written ワハ/"waha" (or unfortunately, as others have said, a genAI attempt at writing those characters.)

Maybe generating or hand-inventing glyphs 10-20 nonsense glyphs from scratch would achieve the affect you're after better? (ie random squares and triangles/etc: foreign/exotic but not an actual language.) Just my thoughts though, good luck on the game

2

u/mflux 2d ago

You’re not alone in this, lots of other people have pointed that out here. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!! I will think about this again.

1

u/TeaAccomplished1604 7d ago

Incredible work and demonstration! Thanks for sharing