Automating UDEL 1.0

Hail Santa at Terminal Velocity invented UDEL, or “Uniform Data Entry Language,” a conlang for Mothership and other sci-fi games. I’ve written this tool to help write it, and while it’s not feature-complete, I thought I’d better release something soon rather than tinker with it forever.

It’s pretty straightforward to use: type the words you want in the box, and click the link to draw them. Words connected by underbars (“_”) will be drawn in a cartouche (i.e. proper nouns). Numbers are drawn correctly, but you’ll have to “pre-process” them, which is to say, break them into groups of 3 digits, etc. If a word is not on the word list, it will be drawn as a blank stave.

Right now the tool is hosted on a Blogger “Page” instead of a proper post, because making it a post somehow hides all the other posts on my blog and I have no idea where to start with that.

Todo

• Implement underlines. How should they be represented in input?
• UDEL is nominally symmetrical in many circumstances. I’d like to add an “up” arrow to the left side so that a UDEL plaque, for example, could be oriented from any direction.
• Implement punctuation.
• Improve the layout engine. It’s really clunky right now, and strongly favors square numbers of words.
• Automate representation of numbers.
• Automate representation of plurals, posessives.
• Highlight out-of-list words in the input field.
• Suggest in-list synonyms for out-of-list words.
• Add a function to export the final image.

Play with it, use it, test it, break it, let me know what you think!

Containment Spheres

Until tomorow (22 Dec 2020), the Mothership Discord server is hosting the 20x20 Jam. Make a piece of Mothership content (any sort) in Playscii in 20x20 format, and upload a png to the server. Winner gets a shirt?

I entered this thing, “Containment Sphere 5”.

20x20 is just too dense to be easily digestible, so I thought I’d expand some of it here (the submission itself is still only the image).

• The map is the net of a regular icosahedron (d20). The repeated letters at the top and bottom are the same room with connecting hallways doubled. The map wraps at the edges of the screen.
• There is an energy management game implied: it costs 2◆ to pressurize a room and 1◆ to open a door (hallways all have heavy blast doors and fail closed).
• Additionally some amount of energy is taken each “turn” by “anomaly containment”. The intent is that the +- value is a projection of the next turn’s consumption. (There is already some risk in the present configuration.)
• What happens when there isn’t enough power for anomaly containment will depend on the anomaly, but it might be related to VENT.
• WOOD is intentionally weird and vague. It’s a leftover from the derelict generation tables in Dead Planet.
• I opted not to use any of the available CRT effects. Instead, I drew on my real-life experiences designing operator interfaces for modern LCD monitors using tools from 10-20 years earlier that only go up to 640x480 anyway. The CRT effects all look “fake” to me, but the weird muted colors look very real.
• Possible missions on the containment sphere might include evacuation, recovery, restoration of power generation, or anything anomaly-related.

I kept thinking about usability, so after I entered I kept tweaking it. I re-keyed all the rooms so that rooms on opposite corners are in the same row as each other in the key. This might be useful if I made an interactive version, because it would aid memory if you rotated the map.

Finally, I wanted a way to communicate the “wrapping” nature of the map. Without making it interactive, animating it seemed to be the way to go. Ultimately I think it hurt the usability too much, but it was an interesting experiment.

Anyway, Playscii is fun and if you’ve got a bit of time today, you can still get your entry into the game jam. Good luck!