That is just amazing! Great work! I’m sure these will be much wanted prizes.
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What do you mean, non-trivial? Like translating something into/from another language, or just using words from another language?
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Incorporating another language in some way that would significantly impact the game if it were removed. A language-based puzzle counts, an NPC who only speaks French counts, but a room titled “La Seine” instead of “The Seine” doesn’t.
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Finally I have a reason to make that game where you are an American tourist with an English-Dutch dictionary trying to get to the Lekkerkerkerkerkerkerkerker, and your first choice is whether to go to the church, the main street, the graveyard, the port, or the farmlands.
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This reminds me of a scene from Eurotrip poking fun at difficult foreign words where an American tourist is given a safe word they cannot pronounce.
The scene is NSFW, so don’t click through if that’s an issue for you:
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Prime AIF material here.
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When guess-the-verb puzzles get dangerous…
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For a third one:
nu uttar=pat apāt natta kaneššun
then word-ABS=EMPH that-ABS not recognize-1S.PERF.ACT
“I didn’t recognize that word.”
I was torn on how to express “verb”, since we don’t know of any grammatical terminology in Hittite. So it’s either going to be “word” or “action”, and I settled on “word” (uttar). Then I put an intensifying marker on it to make the lines more balanced.
Or maybe I’ll drop the intensive marker and shorten both lines a little bit…
Perfect.
Also nicely small and portable compared to the others.
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The lab I was working at is still having technical difficulties, but I’ve found another place to get things printed. With any luck I’ll have these three seals in hand tomorrow!
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Three seals in hand! The 3D printers at the other lab have a few limitations, and I’m going to see if I can tweak some settings to make them come out smoother; they have a few rough edges right now. But they print great!
(The lighting direction isn’t right for these pics, but it’s what I’ve got right now.)
“That’s not a verb I recognize.”
“You can’t go that way.”
“You can’t see any such thing.”
I’m still going to experiment a bit more to see if I can polish them any further. A coat of spray paint might also help the little rough bits. But one way or another, they’re going into the IFComp prize pool!
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Awesome!
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I’d like to get my hands on the code/files for these with a mind to end up with cylinder seals made of fired clay. Or a pattern to print and apply as acid-resist on a cylinder of metal, limestone, or marble.
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I find it fun to see how games react to foul language.
Real adventurers don't use such language.
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I can definitely hook you up with that! All the code is open-source but a real pain to use on your own, since I haven’t put much effort into making it easy to install. But it outputs SCAD for the model, which I then manually tweak a little bit (there’s one parameter that I still haven’t figured out how to calculate so I have to just try a few different values and see what looks right) and export to an STL for printing.
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Now that I’ve got access to the ECE lab again, I’m doing some experiments to see if I can make them any smoother. The ones I already have work fine, but I want the prizes for IFComp to be as perfect as possible.
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From H2G2:
“No tea”
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Ran into this video about seals and signatures.
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All right! Time for a long-overdue update!
So, last fall I made two versions of each seal, using two different 3D printers. And I’ve been trying to find some way to show the different versions so the winners can choose which they want.
Turns out, photographing cuneiform is really hard! So if some of the signs aren’t appearing—that’s generally my fault, not the seal’s.
So for comparison purposes, here are some close-up photos, where I cranked up the contrast as high as I could to bring out the details.
The white ones look a bit jagged, but the wedges are extremely visible.
The black ones are smoother, but as a result, the wedges aren’t quite as pronounced.
Both of them make good impressions on the clay, even if it doesn’t photograph well:
“You can’t see any such thing.”
“You can’t go that way.”
“That’s not a verb I recognize.”
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I just love the archaeologically correct bright blue putty!
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