Three Dollar Quill

So, Fair Fights. Here's the deal.

I've been messing around a bunch with the concept of a fakemon region. However, in the end, I decided to step away from "fan content for an existing franchise", and tried to come up with something similar but distinct. Playing a little bit of Cassette Beasts gave me the inspiration I needed to take the core combat mechanics in a different direction, and I ended up coming up with a few other ideas that further distinguished things. I won't go over those just yet, because I want to learn enough Godot to put together a prototype to determine whether all of these ideas are actually... good.

In any case, right now I want to focus on designing monsters, and part of that is coming up with names for them. As far as design goes, I want to consciously distance myself from Pokémon's design sensibilities, and to start with:

• Instead of "balancing cool and cute", I want to come up with designs that are "both ethereal and powerful"
• I want some other system for naming, different from puns, words smashed together, or just the name or sound of an animal

For the latter, I'm currently trying out "create a naming conlang", which feels like maybe a decision not made from an objective assessment of multiple alternatives, but oh well.

Here is my basic plan for attempting this:

• Get a list of root words that seem relevant for coming up with names.
• Add roots relevant to Fair Fights.
• Pick a source language so I can be kind of lazy about coming up with roots.
• Apply an Ostamer-style cipher to the source language so the derivations aren't blatantly obvious.
• Look for patterns in the limited set of roots I'll choose, and try to regularize according to those patterns.
• Come up with morphological derivation rules that take advantage of those patterns, as well as paradigms for conjugation and declension.
• A few rounds of sound change.

All of these steps, except the last three, are either done or straightforward. I'm not sure about the third-from-the last or the second-from-the-last; we'll have to see. The last one could be a pain, because I'm not sure what the best way is to apply sound changes. I'm aware of a few different software packages where I'm not sure how to pick between them, and just doing everything manually is a possibility that I can keep in mind, but I kind of don't want to.

Anyway, I'll get to that once I'm done with the rest. Maybe it'll get me something I like, maybe it won't, but hopefully I'll be able to use what I learn in other projects. For now, I'm going to wind down.

Good night.