Let me preface by saying, this game is intended to be played first. We want you to play through the game, and experience it as opposed to solely reading about it online. That being said, this first blog post is to talk about the conception of our project and the current state of the game.
We are students at UC Denver, and we are in a class called Digital Media And Learning. For our final, we needed to make our very own digital "thing" that teaches the world in some way. Therefore, we came up with "Lost In Translation." Lost in Translation is a game where you're simply a nameless character, living in a small town. Your only objective is to finish your to do list. However, everyone speaks a language that you simply don't understand. You're tasked with stumbling through the village and trying to do simple things like buy groceries, hopefully picking up at least a word or two along the way. The ultimate goal, is to display exactly how difficult it can be for an immigrant that doesn't speak the language of their new country to get a long with no help from the locals. THE CONCEPTION OF THE IDEA My girlfriend's Abuelita (who was born and raised in Mexico, and moved to America as the mother of a newborn) was recently diagnosed with late stage cancer. I knew that this project was coming up soon, and I wanted to do something to highlight the struggles of people like her to the world. Her family was what is known as "Heritage Speakers," she spoke Spanish while her children learned English and communicated between each other with both languages. It's pretty much universally understood that learning a second language in later stages of life is very difficult, and while she can understand some English her primary form of communication is the language she's spoken her entire life. So, I came up with this idea to show exactly how hard it is to live your life when the world refuses to go the extra mile to help you. THE FIRST STAGES OF THE GAME We're making the game in RPG maker, none of us have any experience in making games so RPG maker seemed like the most beginner friendly method. As opposed to using a dead language, like Gaelic or Latin, I opted to create something completely new. I wanted to avoid someone actually knowing the language used in game, as that would negate the point we're trying to make. I started simple, I wrote every letter of the alphabet on little slips of paper and went down the list replacing each letter with whatever letter I drew out of a bowl. Then I instituted a couple rules to make it seem more like a language, and less like a mess of random letters on a screen. The dialogue will be inserted into the world when it's ready. I will continue posting as we go a long, so keep looking here or on our twitter page for updates!
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