Not directly related, but here's a couple GDC talks with Zach Barth that are pretty entertaining.

GDC 2013: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH7gL3ivgFA GDC Vault: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017983/Ahead-of-the-Curve-The

GDC 2018: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAfcJB1WaDU GDC Vault: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024969/Inside-the-Indie-Mind-...

Thanks for sharing those. There's also: Zach Barth: "Zachtronics: Ten Years of Terrible Games" | Talks at Google - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df9pz_EmKhA

> Most characters are grouped into “words”, which start with the “start word” character and are connected by a vertical line on the right side. I don’t have a logical reason for why the same character is present at the start of every word

Well, you could argue that English puts the space character at the start of every word, other than the first one. Maybe the aliens want to delineate their words but think blank spaces look ugly.

I love Zach's games, just picked up EXAPUNKS and loving it. My favorite since Shenzhen I/O, but they are all great.

/r/conlangs and /r/neography are both really fun subs for this kind of stuff (this is more the latter really) if anyone is interested.

Oddly enough, the final output rather resembles a pixelated version of traditional Mongolian script, which in turn originates from Arabic written vertically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script#/media/File:M...

So, basically it's digital Voynich Manuscript. Devious.

The only part of the article I can pay attention to is the fact that it's encoded in cp1252, and I'm on a Mac, so all the apostrophes show up as �.

Looking at the page source, it was most probably handwritten in Notepad, hence the Windows encoding.

Looks like arabic script written in square kufic style, vertically.