dmorris [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

The Shavian Alphabet

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 17:22:52 UTC

Shavian Alphabet 1.0

by dmorris

[Click to Play]

The Shavian Alphabet

Romanization and Custom Font

What is this?

The Shavian alphabet (also known as the Shaw alphabet) is a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling using the Latin alphabet. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright Bernard Shaw.

The cart contains:

A custom 4x8 pixel font for rendering Shavian text in PICO-8
A chart for the romanization scheme used to type Shavian
An example text (the above paragraph) in standard English, Romanized Shavian, and proper Shavian

Why should I care?

If you are a Shavian alphahbet enthusiast, you can use it in your own carts by copying in the poke statement and using \14 in any string written in the Romanized to print in proper Shavian.

Otherwise, if you want a script to represent Elvish, Alien, or something else in your game, you can do the same!

How does Shavian work?

For details you can refer to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

https://www.shavian.info/

Here's a chart which contains the Shavian letter, its Romanized version, International Phonetic Alphabet rendition, and the letter name (which showcases the sound the letter makes).

By convention, the words "to for of the" are represented with single letters. In the Romanization these are the letters "t f v D", respectively.

What about the ligatures?

This was as small as I could get the font and have it look good; the ligatures looked hard to do, and I'm influenced by speaking a rhotic variety of English and being lazy. If you really want them, feel free to add them and let me know how it goes :D

Starbase Assault

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 16:14:34 UTC

Starbase Assault V3

by dmorris

[Click to Play]

Completed this game as part of the LazyDevs Basic Shmup Showcase Game Jam. I was going for a bit of a Star Wars-y vibe, though I was also influenced by the shooter I grew up with as a kid, Star Solider on the NES.

The soundtrack was inspired by a chord progression used in a lot of Japanese pop and Anime theme songs, with just a pinch of Duck Tales Moon Theme in the mix.

First edit: commented out the code that clears the high score every playthrough. Oops.

Second edit: V2 with powerups that bounce off the sides/top.

Third edit: V3 with levels that persist until all powerups are collected or exit the screen. Adds difficulty settings and logic that ties percentage chance of getting shields vs laser upgrade to the current % shields remaining.

Drogue 1.0

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 21:06:37 UTC

Drogue v1.0

by dmorris

[Click to Play]

Drogue (from "Dale's Rogue") is kind of an homage to old-school text-based rogue-likes. The main influences when working on it were LazyDev's amazing Porklike tutorial and one of my all time favorite games, Dungeon Craw Stone Soup. It features procedural generation of interconnected levels, monsters and treasure. The ultimate goal is a McGuffin in the rogue-like tradition: the mysterious Orb of Elad. The game is complete if a bit bare-bones; if you'd like to try using it as a framework for your own text-based rogue-like, go for it!

PicoSpaceWar V1.2

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 19:24:02 UTC

picospacewar 1.2

by dmorris

[Click to Play]

When I was a kid in the 80's I loved the shareware version of Spacewar that we had. I stumbled across it recently and figured doing a remake could be a fun project, so here's my version! Two player, no AI mode or planet/star (not yet anyways, those might be coming in version 2.0 if I can figure out how to do it). Most of it I came up with on my own, but I lifted the sprite rotation function off of someone wholesale and haven't yet tracked down whose it was to give proper credit.

Feedback welcome, thanks :)

Edit 9/25/19:
Updated some things including art tweaks (ship sprites redesign, fire/exhaust color change) a bug fix (fixed a bug causing lasers not to display when more than 10 torpedos were on the screen) and some mathematical tweaking.

Edit 9/26/19:
Tracked down the sprite rotation function, which came from user jihem at:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3593