CREATION'S PROFILE

How about onomatopoeias? Those are rather self-explanatory regardless of the language.

Like POW! for the attack command, KAZAM! for the magic command, BOOM! for a fire spell, KABOOM! for a more powerful fire spell, you get my drift.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. They are different depending on the country. There's no such thing as neutral text. As soon as you use one word, then it becomes biased like tardis said.

Numbers are fine in my book as they are present in English, French, Spanish and Italian and are thus neutral.

@Flame: Yes, I agree with you.

They have letters in France, you know.

I don't get this either.

As far as I'm concerned, text is impossible in such a contest. If someone wants to handle this contest with text, no problem, but I won't be involved in it as it would crush and burn in French communities, I'm 90% certain of that.

We can't justify the use of a certain language because then other communities are put at a disadvantage.

@YDS:

No. I didn't read that we can't have text in it. I can't participate. D:

Aw come on now, why not try to adapt your idea in a different way? You approach each game with such creativity, I don't see why this challenge would be any different. Anyway, it's your choice but I for one certainly would have liked to see what you would have come up with.

It's impossible to have text if you do something with other cultures. Not everyone speaks English (or is interested in speaking English). There's really no reason why a language should be chosen over another one. Besides, people who have bad English would find their project depreciated because their writing would suffer.

What about things like item descriptions or names, or skill descriptions, or battles ("Bob attacks slime!") etc...?

gotta be creative man

think outside the text

icons! {bob's head sprite} {sword} {monster's headsprite} {!}

Yeah, among other things. Sounds and music can also be used to convey meaning (sad music...)

I mean, it wouldn't be fun if we brainstormed all the ways to do this before the contest. Part of the challenge is to convey meaning without text. There are loads of short films without a single word who still manage to convey meanings.

It doesn't have to be a typical RPG either. An adventure game would be fine in my book.

If YDS is leaving though, we're back to square one.

But... how did you intend to have dialogue without text?

I've watched the trailers on youtube (you might want to use the youtube tags so that people can watch everything directly from RMN) and I thought your game looked... awesome.

Everything is pretty much appealing and the writing is superb. My only gripe is with the whole "getting drunk" thing which I think is a bit cliché but that's just nitpicking.

Something along the lines of: "International Valentine's Day Contest" or something more catchy?

The priorities just now:
*Get a banner
*Determine the voting system
*Write out a first draft one of the rules
*Translate the rules in each one of the target languages: French/German/Spanish/Italian
*Promote in other communities