Something stunning for you
over 7 years ago – Tue, Jan 03, 2017 at 10:34:25 AM

Hello 3000 times over! There are more of us now with more coming still. Good timing on your part, since we have something epic to share. 

From the masterhand of Jill DeHaan, Dialect artist extraordinaire, behold her newest piece:

Oh, how we love this. The beauty of the quote, the evolution of frayed rope into knot, of thorny vine into fruit. There is a vastness to Jill’s art that hits us in a pretty profound way (in the heart, the stomach, the brain). We think this piece is delicious and we hope you enjoy it, too. There is more to come.

If you’re looking for something to meditate on, or just to push your mind to think deeply on the power of language, the lecture that serves as the origin of this quote should do the trick.

Talk soon, lingplay folk.

K+H from Thorny Games

Truly
over 7 years ago – Tue, Jan 03, 2017 at 10:33:51 AM

This has been a tremendous and humbling campaign.

Dialect started as an idea qua question 14 months ago: “can you tell a story of a people while building their language?” We have been doggedly pursuing that idea as hunters and gatherers of game since the moment it came to us. It has kept us up at night, dominated our dreams, dirtied our hands, and remains a thorny splinter in our minds. After legions of playtests, conventions, feedback sheets, we have finally come to this arena to find all of you, our kindred in language and play. Thanks for this raucous party as we enter the next phase.

Two things!

Dial M for Mystery Box

The GLORIOUS LANGUAGE MYSTERY BOX is a rare curated space for delight, linguistic curio, cypher, secret. It’s a place to put precious things. There’s much we have planned for this artifact over the coming months, but we wanted to hint at one of those things today.

We are currently commissioning beautiful art by the indomitable Erica Williams. Erica is the artist behind our Thorny Games emblem. She has an exceptional talent for capturing nature, mystery, animal, forgotten spaces once occupied by people, and of course, language. We’ll ask her to do all of this in an upcoming piece that will be included in our GLORIOUS BOX.

Take a peek into some of Erica’s previous work for yourself right here and see an early sketch over here.

Language revitalization

Dialect shines a light on language and how it connects to our human stories. It also aims to give a morsel of empathy of what it means for a language to be lost. A game that centers upon building and losing a language threatens to be fatalistic, but it's very important to us that players don't only end in a place of loss - but also one of motivation for action for what can be done (and is being done by some exceptional folks) to document and revitalize languages in danger.

To honor this, we’ll be including a chapter on language revitalization; that special art that breathes new life into languages in decline. We will work with other linguists to highlight what it is, who’s doing it, and how you can find out more.

Making things is hard. What you make is also what you believe in. Dialect is worth making. Thank you for the kind support while we do it!

Truly and playfully,

K+H from Thorny Games

Backdrops and the final days
over 7 years ago – Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 04:57:48 PM

“We’re in the final days,” we whisper to you, as one cryptolinguist to another through a secret Kickstarter keyhole. “You know what that means … with the grim specter of time bearing down on us, now comes the last of the backdrops.” 

Below is the last backdrop triad to round out our amazing worlds -- notice that we said triad instead of dyad. That’s because in addition to the talents of Alex Roberts, game journalist/designer/podcaster-about-town and Gavin White, game designer/thinker/activist-about-town we’ve enlisted the cyperpunk/cyborg/robot-love expertise of one Kira Magrann, game designer/community-builder/snake tamer-about-town. It’s time to complete the set.

Alex Roberts: Beyond the Village 

 You're not exactly one big family. Just a bunch of queers trying to survive, connected by love, creativity, and rampant sexual deviance. A backdrop about resisting assimilation, inspired by games like Dream Askew and stories like Lockpick Pornography, dedicated to anyone who doesn't give a shit about the nuclear family.

Gavin White: The Self-Actualization Project 

A story set in the modern world, where a community gathers to focus on personal growth and high-quality relationships. Eventually, their standards for integrity prevent them from interacting with the rest of the world and the words they used came to mean new things.

Kira Magrann: 2081, Solar Slums 

When the weather in the U.S. became too harsh to live outside, corporations built high tech biodomes for people to live. Anyone unwilling or unable to work for them and live by their laws were stuck in urban slums full of pollutants, fake food, solar burn, and gangs. It's here where you live, a group of rebels who refuse to cave to the cultural suicide that is corporate life. The plan is to take down these corporations who are trying to force a consumerist dictatorship on the country, but that's gonna require a resistance of competent cyborgs and hackers. Here in these neon city streets, you gotta talk fast to make friends, and you need to prove your cred to be trusted.

With these three in place, let’s pause and bask in the multitudes. Dialect will ship with the following settings:

The core backdrops 

• The first Martian colony 
• A compound in 90s rural America 
• An island nation after a conqueror leaves 
•  Artificial Intelligence

Settings from collaborators

• A 1950s British Boarding School (Graham Walmsley) 
• The 1918 Boston Flu Pandemic, where one island is quarantined (Meguey Baker)
• A nomadic people, the Czaten Dacha, in a low-fantasy almost-Europe (Jason Morningstar) 
• Lost in a forest with voices + Children in a massive, uncaring city (J Li) 
• Life after a slave uprising (Laura Simpson) 
• A queer community in a post-apocalypse (Alex Roberts) 
• A dalit colony in rural India (Ajit George) 
• Real-life Anishinaabe-inspired (Elizabeth LaPensée) 
• Cyberpunk Extravaganza (Kira Magrann) 
• A self-help community striving towards enlightenment (Gavin White) 
• A build-your-own guide! (By you)

Last of days, best of days. Talk soon, lingplay friends.

In Bright Idiom, ;)

K+H from Thorny Games