Writing System – Shivallon's Conlanging Space

An attempt at stylizing Ryka: The “Curvy Ryka” script

October 24, 2023 Shivallon Comments 0 Comment

While I really love the general structure of my Ryka script and how it works, the characters look unpolished and still quite “proto-like”. There is no common aesthetic to most of the consonant glyphs, and many still closely resemble the pictograms they are based on. When writing a sentence, the result often looks a little messy, and some combinations of characters and diacritics are really hard to write due to the diverse shapes. Most natural scripts have evolved into a…

New script, new luck – designing a Balconian font

April 27, 2022 Shivallon Comments 0 Comment

After a longer break from active conlanging caused by my transition from university to working life, the first project I would like to tackle is yet another font – this time for a script with the working title “Balconian”. I originally created this script in 2017 for the Balconian Ric language (also a working title), a close relative to Ryka. Balconian Ric was supposed to be spoken on a group of water-based islands whose inhabitants continued to speak Ryka after…

Designing a font for Ryka, an abugida script with heavy use of ligatures

January 5, 2020 Shivallon Comments 0 Comment

When I had fleshed out the writing system of my Ryka language, like probably any other conlanger out there, I wanted to create a font for it so that I could actually type texts in my language’s script. While designing the glyphs themselves was an artistic challenge on its own (and the result is far from perfect), the real hassle began when I was trying to install and use my font. So here’s the story of how I managed to…