Books

One of the things that makes the Elder Scrolls game unique is the inclusion of readable items: books, notes, etc., and it is something that I am absolutely going to replicate. So I've been working on that today and yesterday. But one thing that I want to do is make some things not immediately readable. 

I haven't talked much about the setting or the lore, but the World Basin is dominated at its center by a city called Urrum, the World-City. Hence the name of the ancient language that was spoken in the area, Urrumi.

So, in the game, if you find something that is written in Ancient Urrumi, you can't read it. Well, I can't, but maybe you can. But if you have a piece of paper and a piece of charcoal, you can take a rubbing of it, bring it to an NPC and they'll translate it for you. Like I said before, Archaeology!

I'd been putting off actually making the text system because I want Ancient Urrumi to have its own alphabet. Despite being a linguist and having an interest in worldbuilding, I'm not into conlangs and stuff. There are enough cool real languages that I don't want to waste my time making fake ones. Unfortunately, that means that I have no experience trying to create an alphabet. I gave it a couple goes in my notebook (Old Blacky), but I wasn't happy with any of the results.

Then, as if in answer, I woke up yesterday morning and saw this on Reddit:

That's it! That is what Ancient Urrumi looks like.

In order to get something usable out of it, I went to Calligraphr, a free font making website. To use Calligraphr, you select the language you want to make a font for and it spits out a template that looks like this:

They tell you to print it and write in the squares with your own custom characters, but I don't have a printer. I took this and loaded it into GIMP, as I also did with the photo. I used the fuzzy select tool to copy and paste the characters from the photo into the template, scale them and arrange them in the boxes. Then I took my filled-out template and plugged it back into Calligraphr, which spit out a TTF file and an OTF file with my font.

I loaded that into Unreal as a Font object (under User Interface when you go to add a new Blueprint class in the Content Drawer). This allows me to use this font in any text objects in my widgets. I'll go over the way that the blueprint for texts works at some point, but for right now, I'll show you that I also added a new nametag widget for when the player looks at an object in the world, like a statue or a sign, that is in Ancient Urrumi.