[MUD-Dev] An accidental experiment with language

[Damion Schubert]

For the Revelation release of Meridian 59, which 
was about a year ago, a couple of the designers
on the team came up with our own language.  We
added a new island, but we wanted the culture on
that island to be markedly different from the
mainland.  So we made the NPCs there intersperse
their normal english with a language called 
Ko'catanese.  In order to do this, we quickly made
up the meaning of what a few syllables meant, trying
to keep an Aztec flavor to the whole thing, to match
the architecture found in the town.

The players have since dissected it.  You can find
their interpretation of the language here at:
    http://www.sirius.com/~joe23/koca.htm
About 80% of it is accurate.

I found this site because of a message on a board 
talking about players on one of the servers roleplaying
Ko'catanese people.  The people in this guild are 
required to speak in a broken English-Ko'catanese 
mix, the way that the NPCs do, and hold 'mainlanders' 
in some disdain.

Why is this exciting?  Well, because this language was a
rather last minute interpretation of what we were doing.  
Originally, we were going to do a more formal, computer
controlled version of language, where a player might have
a language skill, and if you didn't have the adequate skill,
the NPCs you spoke to would spit out random characters,
emphasizing z's, c's, t's and apostrophes.  From that starting
point, we made more and more elaborate plans to make
language more realistic, and at the same time, simpler for
the end user.  As we approached mid-project, though, we
realized we had too many programming tasks, and were
forced to cut this from their to-do list.  As a result, two  
members of my design team put this quick and dirty 
language together overnight, and inserted it in the half-
completed dialogue they had written.  

In retrospect, the system that we came up with 
ended up giving the players a lot more than any 
of the hard-coded skill-based language schemes 
we had planned.  

Well, anyway, *I* think it's neat.

--damion