Hallowspeak Update 40

Alright everyone! Back from the holidays, and my final year of high school is already absolutely shanking me, but I still have a bit of time every now and again for Hallowspeak!

The biggest order of business right now though is to get the website back running smoothly. Back in July, the whole website was just refusing to open for a lot of people, and so one of our resident programmers, Soren, went to take a look.

A few days later, they had managed to get everything back online! However, a few things did get lost, that being the website styling and a bunch of images from across the site. So that’s what we’re trying to get back as of right now.

After this boring dirty work, though, we do actually have some exciting news about the website, thanks to Zerronyx on the server for looking through Hallowspeak without any prior knowledge, and giving super useful feedback on everything!!

Across the time that the website has been up, we’ve had countless people follow the link on the contact page to the Shellword Ordeal discord server to talk with the Team. They join the server, head over to the Hallowspeak development channel, and ask if they can see the current progress of the project.

But unfortunately, we’ve always had to disappoint them a little, since Hallowspeak’s working document isn’t publicly available, but instead they can ask to see any part of the project as it is now. This is for a number of reasons, mainly that the document right now is full of work-in-progress analyses, tentative theories, and bits and pieces that will likely become obsolete once we find a theory that better explains what we see in game. 

Hallowspeak is a growing, changing thing, and so we always felt like letting our working document be public would be a dangerous idea: we don’t want people to try and learn Hallowspeak, or make something of their own featuring it, only for all their effort to be nullified as we change and improve parts of the language.

But we completely understand how much of a gut-punch coming to the server and hearing that would be. For a long while now, people on the Shellwood Ordeal discord server have been free to request to see the current Hallowspeak dictionary. But still, it kinda sucks to not have anything of the sort already on the website. That’s why we’re going to be adding Hallowspeak’s dictionary onto the website, which will be updated every time we find a new word!

There’s also another idea I’ve been holding on to for a while, that’s more in the brainstorming phase right now. A Hallowspeak timeline page! As of right now, we’re not entirely sure on the details of it, but we’re thinking a timeline of all the key events, discoveries, new members, and anything else interesting would be pretty cool to have!

That’s all for now, everyone! Hopefully the next update will have some more progress on the language!