Imagining and deciphering writing systems for games

[Administrator]

Invented languages have been a part of fantasy storytelling at least since Tolkien wrote his Middle-Earth stories. By now we're all used to the idea that one way to make your imagined world feel real but unfamiliar is to invent a new language for at least some of its inhabitants to speak - usually the ones you consider the strangest and most 'other'. So Tolkien's elves have their Quenya and Sindarin; Game of Thrones has Dothraki and Valyrian, and in sci-fi there's the famous Klingon language, or, more recently the interesting creole spoken by the Belters in The Expanse.
As a world-building technique, invented languages obviously work. But they have their limitations too. Done badly, they can sound silly and off-putting; even done well, they can be hard for actors to work with, turning carefully-scripted dialogue or meaningful speeches into stilted and tedious nonsense (Star Trek: Discovery, stop shuffling at the back).
So another option is to make it purely visual. As visualised language, writing can achieve a similar sense of place and culture to spoken language, but woven into the overall art-design. Sometimes you can do this with real writing systems in unfamiliar contexts, such as the ubiquitous Far Eastern scripts of post-Blade Runner Cyberpunk futures; but more often in science fiction and fantasy, designers create their own entirely original writing systems, like Star Wars' Aurebesh or Doctor Who's various Gallifreyan scripts.
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