Want “alien” writing for your fiction or game? Check out Dscript.

I got an e-mail out of the blue from Matthew DeBlock, which seemed… strange.

My name is Matthew DeBlock, I am a Canadian currently living in China. I came across some of your writings in my usual searching and “nerdyness”.

I have developed a conscript ( constructed script ) called Dscript that I have been developing for nearly a decade. It “matured” to a reasonable level recently.

Dscript is a 2D writing system that turns alphabetical words into glyphs and symbols, they look quite “ancient/alien” that are legible in both letters and sequence.

If you or anyone you know may be interested in applying Dscript I will gladly help out in whatever way I can, free of charge of course. Dscript itself is creative commons, free to copy, edit, sell by anyone. I am always happy to see it used.

Kinda weird, huh?  But yet… intriguing.  So I poked around a little bit, and it’s actually pretty neat. Neat in the way Esperanto is neat, mind you (e.g. I don’t have the time to learn either), but still cool.

Check out these examples from the generator:

Alliteration Ink

Ideatrash

Steven Saus

 …and Matthew points out the generator produces very simplistic examples, and they’re still way cool. For a more complex example, check out this glyph he made for "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds".

Dscript is also under a Creative Commons license, so that’s pretty rad too.  You can check out Dscript at https://dscript.org/, with a PDF introducing the concept and a generator that makes (simple) Dscript

One thought on “Want “alien” writing for your fiction or game? Check out Dscript.

  1. LOL!! Believe it or not, one of the books sold through Alliteration Ink already uses DScript!

    We needed an alien-looking language for "The Glass Marines" by Pete D'Alessio, so we used the DScript translator (although we flipped it horizontally to save space). Don't worry, though, we credited Matt DeBlock on the title page of the book.

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