Worldbuilding - How To Develop Your Game's Setting

The best games create a sense of the setting as a real place with their own consistent rules. Consider open-world games like elden ring, which have a setting with its own logic, and go beyond contrived sets of levels that exist for the gameplay's sake only. While our game is vastly more small-scale than these games, I felt that a little bit of worldbuilding would go a long way. I actually got heavily into worldbuilding in the past few months, and got really down in the weeds, starting at the beginning by creating a whole solar system. I even learned to use Gplates, a software intended to be used to reconstruct earth's tectonic history, but which works quite well for creating your own fictional tectonic history.

However, once again I am limited by the scope of the project. So I kept thing small. First, I did some conlanging. That's short for constructed language, and involves making a language, like is done in Lord of The Rings, Avatar (the blue cat one), and Game of Thrones. I came up with fragments of a language, not a complete language with its own grammar, but enough to give a sense of one. The clay statues that are used as servants in-world are a key feature of the setting, so they needed a name. I came up with Orilla, which sounded cool in a vaguely spanish way, and didn't resemble any real word. (Or so I thought. Later I realized it was exactly the same as "Gorilla" without the G. Go figure). I also came up with a symbol for it. The writing system is a logography, which means one symbol per word.

As the symbols were to be carved in stone, I made sure the letters were sharp and angular, with no curved lines. Next I named the civilization. As it was supposed to be an injust and oppresive society, I figured it made sense to be an empire. And since we had decided the game took place in a jungle civilization, I came up with symbols for "Jungle" and "Empire". I also invented a word for jungle, but kept empire as empire for clarity in-game. Sure, Jungle Empire isn't a very creative name, but many real-world place names aren't either. Consider the Sahara Desert, which is redundant - Sahara means "Desert" in arabic!

An empire needs a ruler, but rather than just calling him a king, I invented a new word - "Sa" - for monarch. I took the symbol from the center of the symbol for empire, as the core of an empire is its leader. I named the current Sa Tavit (Bold) O'ana (Conqueror), and the first Sa Danaktis (Jungle) Oran (Dweller). I didn't make a symbol for Oran, as it does not appear as text that is visible to the player in-game.

The most important symbols were the ones that go on the tablets. There are three tablets, one that prevents jumping, one that prevents dashing, and one that prevents crouching. I invented the word Olloktis meaning "On Ground", commanding the player not to jump. I used the root word "Tis", meaning ground, that appears in "Danaktis", meaning fertile ground.

The word that stops dashing is i'olla, meaning "Stagnant". And the word that stops crouching is O'av, "Standing".

The last symbols were numbers. I decided to make the current year 1235, but to use base 6. Base 6 uses 6 instead of 10 as a base, so for example "11" in base 6 is equal to 7 in base 10. It's the best base number because it's small and divisible by the two smallest prime numbers. For further reading, check out wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senary. Anyway, 1235 is written in base 6 as 5414, and for the numbers I decided to use a set of sort of sideways tally marks.

In addition to the main symbol, on each tablet was written Orilla, then jungle empire, then Sa Tavit O'ana, and lastly the year in base-6. These served as a sort of signature, and made the tablet more interesting than it would be if it only had one symbol. The Danaktis lanuage is written from top-to-bottom, then left-to-right.

Lastly, I wrote a couple of short passages from books to explain information about the world that wouldn't work in character dialogue. I talked about how Orilla are created and controlled by blood magic, as well as how the Danaktis Empire was founded in the 1000th year by the first Sa, Danaktis Oran. Between these details and all the conlanging, I created an interesting world that felt complete while fitting within the scope of our game.