World Building Through Fictional Languages

Every serious game developer knows that world building is an integral part of the process that creates a truly immersive experience. There are a variety of techniques that can be used to achieve this: from presenting the backstory of your player with a wall of text, to clever level design tricks known as environmental storytelling. The latter is often preferred. Unravelling the lore of your world from a few hints scattered across the levels is, de-facto, a game within the game. And while most players might just ignore them, others could find great pleasure in resolving this meta-puzzle.

This article will discuss some techniques that can be used to create new languages in videogames, linking to existing resources and to possible ways to decode them. A few notorious examples will be discussed in this article, but please keep in mind this is not supposed to be a comprehensive guide to fictional languages in videogames. Quite the opposite, it aims to be a useful resource to get inspired from some titles who managed to integrate their languages.