Glyphs

One of the things about writing a small format game is the need to convey information quickly an efficiently.

A method to do this is by developing sigils or glyphs that can be used to replace words. Card games like "Magic: the Gathering" have been doing this for years. Simple glyphs to replace common words like "tap" or colours of mana. It's like a form of data compression, a designer only needs to define the glyph once and then every time the word or concept is used throughout the data set, the simple glyph can be used to represent a word, a sentence or even a paragraph.

I had this idea a while ago, and drew up a series of glyphs that were incorporated into a font. With the glyphs in a font, it becomes easy to incorporate them into a document, altering glyph sizes to match changes in text size, allowing them to be incorporated into titles and anywhere else they might be needed. It's even possible to make outlines, add drop shadows to them, or anything else that your word processing program might normally be able to do with words, text, numbers or other symbols.

Some of the symbols here were destined to become attributes, others would become types of actions, or symbols for game concepts such as reactions, modifiers, success results or failures.

If anyone is interested in these symbols as a font (with a few dozen more glyphs to maximise the font potential), let me know. I might finish of the font and make it available for release.   






















Comments

Anonymous said…
As an uber-preparing GM I can well see myself using these in my docs. Go for it!
Thursday, 13 December, 2012
Spiralbound said…
I too would be interested in a font like this. Also, I'd be interested in knowing what concepts you would connect to each glyph.
Thursday, 13 December, 2012
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