Learning a language in Hapax

[Legend]

Back when Hapax/VizionEck started, learning a language through gameplay was a pretty novel concept. Now however there is Sethian, Heaven's Vault, Totem, 7 days to end with you, Tunic, and Chants of Sennaar.

It's been great playing these games and seeing how other devs approached it. They all have really different ways to make learning a language less impossible.

	. Highly Limited Vocabulary .	. English Based .	. Builds words from smaller concepts e.g. "creature high"="bird" .	. Little expected from the player .	. Language understanding rarely gates progress .
Sethian	X		X
Heaven's Vault		X	X	X	X
Totem	X		X	X
7 days to end with you		X		X	X
Tunic		X			X
Chants of Sennaar	X		X	X

Hapax has changed a lot through the years but outside of not gating progress, it has never used any of these approaches. A big problem with the first four imo is that they go against the "easy to learn, difficult to master" concept. Most of these games struggle with their difficulty curves since they get easier as you learn more about the language. It eventually clicks into place since everything is so limited.

Instead Hapax goes for the crazy goal of really teaching players an alien language. Things get harder and stranger as you progress since initial assumptions are often wrong.

[Legend]

Expecting players to legit learn the language and memorize everything is a lot to ask, so the language is built into moment to moment gameplay. Players may not even realize they're learning a language.

I was partially inspired by the shouts in skyrim. Tell a player "fus ro dah" and they'll probably know what it does in game even if they don't know its English translation.

[Legend]

Soren Johnson once said "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

It's a great quote that most devs are aware of, but it can also be exploited. Players will happily do "unfun" things in the name of optimization. The player will actually enjoy this if it's in a small enough dose.

Sethian does this a bit by not putting English translations of words on screen. Instead you need to right click a glyph to see what it means. It's very slightly inconvenient so most players will subconsciously optimize this loop and memorize some word definitions.

Hapax does something similar. I'm sure I'll butcher it a bit and the outcome won't be that elegant, but some player tools are purposefully scaled back and less convenient.

[the-pi-guy]

Me in Skyrim carrying 1000 lbs over weight limit so I can make 1 trip through the dwemer places: that checks out.

[Legend]

Me in Skyrim carrying 1000 lbs over weight limit so I can make 1 trip through the dwemer places: that checks out.

What in tarnation, there's someone else in my thread!?!?

I did that so much in starfield. Once I got the jump pack it was actually kinda fun since stamina replenishes mid flight.


7 days to end with you is my favorite of these games language wise. Just throwing the player into the deep end and completely immersing them in the language is great, but the game does a lot of other smart things too.

Probably its biggest similarity to Hapax is that the world is "honest." Puzzles and learning opportunities are seamlessly integrated into the environment. In a linear game this isn't as important but in an open world game it's 100% necessary imo.



Take this cooking mini game for example. Regardless of when the player approaches it, it feels like it's balanced to their current skill level. The player never thinks "oh I guess I explored in the wrong order." This happens because the puzzle elements are believably and seamlessly integrated. This mini game for example can teach numbers but if a player learned numbers elsewhere, the numbers just feel like a mandatory part of cooking.

It was really great playing 7 days to end with you in 2022 and validating how important this approach is. Hapax's core philosophy is just fully immersing the player in a dense and real world, letting the player have full authorship over how they explore and how they learn.