I’d say a great option is to choose a phonetic inventory, and just glue words together in a logical string of syllables whenever you require a word. Generate words rarely so you don’t upset the conlangers, store a dictionary, and slowly mutate the inventory and the original words. A standardized romanization is fine because the latin script is entire non-diagetic. In-game writing systems would be cool as hell, but might be a bit hard. I’d say, though, number one rule: do as much as possible in English (/other game language if translators can manage). Not too much so the game feels like star trek, but enough that you can avoid having linguistic snarls.
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Obviously there’d be a syllable limit. Also, I’m pretty certain the second one used to have a much shorter name before they changed it for tourism reasons.
Honestly, I think that’s the real solution. Just let the player rename things. Maybe, to circumvent the issue of ‘how does the game detect regional traits to determine a name?’, when renaming you have an option to randomly generate a suitable name based on traits about the region you select.
Obviously, the golden ideal is having a low-power linguistic auto-evo, but I think that’s not particularly important for something that’s cosmetic. The names of landmasses aren’t going to have a gameplay impact other than, you know, the purpose of names, being to identify specific things.
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Yeah, it’s hard to see the developers taking so much effort for a cosmetic feature…
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Yeah, the only way linguistic auto-evo is coming along is if a hobbyist picks up the project to code.
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We should take this idea and run with it. Continental drift, baby!
Don’t think the devs would think alike…
Those seem like good solutions for sure…
You can ask a chatbot
hey, this person plays a game in [english] and the game needs continent names that sounds exotic. research [english] literature on the internet, and come up with a name that sounds like [sun] + [land] but not that obvious
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We’d need humans to better design this system rather than chatbots
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That’s going to include things like human languages. If it’s all English, fine, but the AI will add other languages. I drove past an avenida del sol the other day, that’s a normal street name in the US. That will be very immersion breaking. Additionally, CHATBOTS BAD !! Using them in a game is an awful idea. They’re alright at making up data or filling out stuff, but not content.
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Will all continent names use the latin alphabet by default?
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I’d assume… I mean, how else are you supposed to pronounce it? We as English speakers know how to read the Latin alphabet, other writing systems are totally valid but it’d be a bit weird to shove them into the game.
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Perhaps there’d be support for other alphabets if needed?
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I think it might make sense to generate names fully for only one to three languages we have active devs working on, and everyone else can choose which one they like most and the literal words (“bay” should be translated, it adds nothing to leave it in English) and everything else is transcribed phonetically. If your language uses the latin alphabet the same way, no change needed, if you use cyrillic or a specialized usage of the latin alphabet, it could just be rewritten to something that sounds identical but follows your languages rules.
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It will surely take a while to code in…
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Despite translations being available for ages in the game already, no one has offered to write language specific name generators. So it seems like the chance of this ever happening is pretty low.
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Thrive’s devforce will likely have grown in diversity by the time we are handling the naming issues…
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