Released on March 17, 2022, the Zelda-style RPG puzzle game Tunic received "exceptionally positive" reviews after its launch on Steam. One of the features of the game is that many of the text is written by a special kind of rune, even including a beginner's tutorial in the game, which requires the player to understand the hints themselves through the graphics of the prompts and the surrounding environment.
But these runes are just another challenge for players, and many gamers who love the game immediately began to work hard to translate them, including Reddit user oposdeo.
Oposdeo is a programmer, not a linguist. He has so far defeated several bosses in the game, managed to determine the vowel, consonant, and grammatical structures of fictional rune languages, and is working on translating all of the game's cue manuals.
"Reading these pages usually provides a lot of interesting knowledge and plot, as well as specific explanations of the pictures," oposdeo said in the review, "You don't usually learn much extra gameplay, but you can definitely discover things earlier than other ways, get to know the game better and find some interesting secrets." ”
According to Oposdeo, these characters are based on English text, and the language will have different pronunciations depending on the region in the game.
In an interview with TheGamer, game developer Andrew Shouldice discussed creating languages.
"[Tunic] is very much about the secret and the mysterious, kind of like, really feel like you're surrounded by things you don't fully understand," he said.
"Glyphs [in the game] make the player feel like they're in a place where they don't belong, and if they have any meaning, the point is that it's not just a letter-by-letter code and an English translation."
"In this day and age, if you see a set of glyphs in a game, you might think it has some kind of meaning, maybe we'll try to dig deeper into it, and if it's just a password that replaces the letters, it might not be that interesting for people." Those who delve deeper into [the language in the game] seem to have a lot of fun. ”
He added: "There is a theme in the game, hexagons. There is a strong (hexagonal theme) everywhere in the game, so even the language has some structural similarity to the layout. ”