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[Mipe]

"The princess is in another castle."

[Simon Andersson]

"The princess is in this castle. But I have to warn you, she aint pretty!"

[Tokyoma]

Long ago in the days of the giant clams, there was a castle, a magical talking castle.... (and the story goes on) and so to this day the castle warns any who may pass of the victory and triumph of the giant clams who defended the castle's walls with such ferocity and bravery that even this mighty castle's bridge must fall before their righteous glory.

[TheAngryWaffle]

I have divided the information gleaned from this thread (and a couple of others around the net) into the following categories:

GOOD NEWS:

• I am surprisingly good at drawing giant clams
• Some people did seem to at least get the gist of the image

BAD NEWS:

• "There are traps in the castle" was the original thought -- sadly, it includes no giant clams

I did try out an alternative image elsewhere:

That one seems to get the idea of "traps" across a little better. The real crux of this particular experiment was actually to try and express "in" -- I wasn't worried about "castle", and traps / giant clams would probably be less of an issue with more context (and might already be resolved by the updated image for some people).

Is the idea for all the no-text dialogue to be easily understood by the player, or will part of the game be learning the gobbledygook language sort of like solving a puzzle? It might not be a bad idea to frame the game as the player is a foreigner, and you aren't supposed to understand. The images are just the result of animated gestures by the NPCs.

In this case, I'm hoping the icons will ultimately be fairly easy to understand; though a game in which they weren't and making sense of them was a puzzle would certainly be interesting too.

I'm a bit reluctant to switch to more detailed art because I want to keep the concepts very broad, and I feel like the lower resolution forces the image to be more symbolic rather than literal -- that might all pan out to be a load of bunk though, and I may very well wind up with higher res art by the end of things.

I consider the whole experiment a rousing success in any case though -- because some of these interpretations were hysterically awesome (and a couple were even right in line with what I was hoping for)!

Thanks everybody!

If you have more ideas or feedback, feel free to keep posting them. I'm sure I'll have another image to test out sometime in the future too.

[AndrewFM]

Would animating the dialogue images be feasible? I think that would help with conveying the messages.

Just as an example, lets say you had a guy trying to tell you to climb up a mountain. With still images, you'd probably have to show a picture of a mountain, and then a picture of a ladder next to it. With an animated image, you could just show a mountain, and then a little pixel bouncing up the side of it.

[Corpus]

vagina dentata.

the new version is miles better! much more readable.

[SirNiko]

Consistency of the images would help too. If the player's exploring an area and nearly steps in a bear trap, perhaps he'll pop up a little 'text' with him frowning and displaying the trap, saying "I hate traps!". Then later, when you see an NPC displaying the "trap" image, the player will recognize it to be the same image and know that there are traps there too. Combine that with images like the one above (To me, that readily indicates spiked floors) and it should be very easy for the player to understand what's being conveyed.

1. This makes it even easier to understand, and the player sees the same images regularly, so they quickly learn the 'lingo', AND the game is language neutral.

2. This makes the game expressive. The little character pantomimes his dislike for certain things without coming out and saying them. The player is left to interpret whether their hero is expressing foul-mouthed anger (mother-fuggin' traps in this mother-fuggin' castle) or solemn distaste (why, god, did they put a trap HERE?).

Either way, I like where this is going. I'm curious to see what sort of playstyle this supports.

-SirNiko

[AlbeyAmakiir]

If you ever played LiveALive, the caveman chapter had a similar concept, except they used another form of expression at the same time. Facial expressions were on the characters, they would jump up and down, they would swing objects or point at things or each other. All while using only images for talking. Unless you're only talking to signs, bodylanguage can be really expressive.

[nihilocrat]

Spoken/written language heavily relies on context, so I figure pictograms would too. If the player knows that icon looks like a trap, and they know a trap is not an item they can equip and use, and the castle is a location that the player can enter and explore, it's probably a warning that there are traps in the castle.

[Landshark RAWR]

"DUDE, THERE'S UPSIDE DOWN CLEATS IN THE CASTLE"

[Strong]

If you go into this castle, be warned. You might have to kill a bear.

[Skofo]

The new icon looks like "ark falling on kingdom".