Hilangro is an exploration of a game mechanic that may or may not eventually turn into a game. The idea is as follows:

• There is a fictional family of languages, with a very limited vocabulary (a few dozen words). The root language is called Theic (the language of the gods), and all other languages are derived from it (directly or through other languages).
• The languages have regular sound correspondences, similar to the way that real language families (for example, Indo-European languages) have sound correspondences.
• The specific vocabularies of each language and some of the sound correspondence rules are randomized on every playthrough.
• As a player, you learn how the words sound in modern languages, infer the sound correspondence rules, use them to understand how words sounded in older languages, and are eventually able to reconstruct the entire family.

Is this fun to play? Are there more than 100 people on this planet for whom this would be fun to play? I don't know. That's why I'm building a gameplay prototype as a simple Web application, and if it turns out sufficiently playable, then I'm going to build upon this further (the next idea is to build a magic system where spells are composed of words in these fictional languages, and the older words you use, the more powerful the spell is).

I'm live streaming the entire development of this project. I'm using IntelliJ IDEA and Kotlin, and I try to give a lot of tips for using these technologies while I stream. Please stop by and watch!