And actually, I do have one more thing I can share—a little bit of unrealistic-ness that I couldn’t find a good solution for.
At one point in the game, some of the alien messages include question marks and exclamation points. Meaning, presumably our intrepid hero(ine) can tell by the intonation what’s a question and what’s a command.
Now, I will readily buy that these aliens are shaped basically like humans and their language is full of sounds humans can make and understand. That’s been a staple of science fiction since the second century CE. But even humans on Earth can’t agree on what sounds like a question and what sounds like a command!
In English, for example, we indicate a yes-or-no question by raising the pitch on the last syllable. “Do you un-der-STAND?” But in Swahili, they indicate it by raising the pitch on the second-to-last syllable! “U-na-e-LE-wa?” This means Swahili questions tend to sound like direct statements to new learners (“You understand.”) until they wrap their head around the different pattern.
The more realistic way to do this would be to have the alien language work something like Mandarin, where instead of intonation, extra words are added to mark something as questioning or commanding. But I’m already pushing things, expecting players to decipher 20 words. Adding more would just be too much.
So for now, I must live with this inconsistency that I suspect will bother absolutely no one except myself. Our protagonist lucked out, and the aliens’ intonation happens to line up well enough with their native language that their first guess is right, and the “?” and “!” in the transcriptions don’t need any further refinement. I imagine by that point in the game, players will appreciate something being made a little less complicated!