TODAY'S SAMPLES 

[hit END for downloadables; links below are to BANDCAMP]

Redid the basic sprites for KAY; he would be your friendly neighbourhood angry twink. He was far too football-headed and read less humanoid and more 'goblin' in the previous iteration. There's a few tweaks might be made; single-pixel details make a huge difference when you're drawing at 24px high, lol.

LV-05 might as well call him (JACK the ripper) ~ this endless deathly circus [INCOMPLETE]
B-03 you don't know JACK ~ I AM A PERFECT LOOP version
B-05 you don't know JACK battle 2 version [INCOMPLETE]

LANGUAGE is a GAME; so are CARDS; ergo, one could map to the other.

LANGUAGES and GAMES each obey structures restricted only by the concept of linear dictation; that is, thoughts are restricted by the fact that utterances and actions take place limited by linear time.

These two phenomena additionally operate on MUTUAL RULES. 

The basic assumption of spoken language is – at the moment I am speaking a truth that exists at the moment I utter it, in some fashion. 

The rules of a GAME vary in particularities, but there must be a level of mutual trust between PLAYERS as it takes place, the same as a conversation. If a GAME is played in solitude - the same exchange happens regardless, with a reflexive trust taking place; one is trusting one's self to obey, again, a set of RULES. 

MACHINES can also speak LANGUAGES dictated by more restrictive rules than human languages. A MACHINE can only reflect or mosaic ideas; it cannot generate novel nodes or modes of communication without a given dataset at outset. [Give the time-tech era of the SONGQUEST canon, this does hold as a true statement; the question of tech advancement and LLM existence is one that the narrative would, however, support thematically if not materially. As a linguist who has many programmer friends, I lean on the side of, "artificial intelligence is a misnomer".]

Stripped down, a given SPOKEN LANGUAGE could be divided into ‘cleaved’ components that rely on each other to formulate a whole.

PHONETICS, sounds that exist universally;

PHONOLOGY, the given sound-system of a language;

SYNTAX, ordering ideas;

MORPHOLOGY, shaping sounds into words;

SEMANTICS, concrete meanings;

PRAGMATICS, nuanced meanings

These differ by far from WRITTEN LANGUAGE; a level of artificiality must be maintained within a given writing system to convey ideas – again we are back at RULES.

Mathematics, another WRITTEN LANGUAGE, for example, has strict syntactical rules in order to communicate an ORDER OF OPERATIONS; not dissimilar to the nuanced mathematics involved in many CARD GAMES.

The key point here is the parallel nature of SYNTACTIC ORDER; that is to say, all of the above - LANGUAGES, GAMES, and MACHINES - are all contricted, eternally, by the linear nature of time. [That is to say, time as it is MEASURED, rather than how it is EXPERIENCED; these are two different things entirely]. 

In other words, and plainly: one thing happens before the rest. I, in short, am at, lmao, Square One effectively!

Where SONGQUEST’s thematic bones lie; that would be the specific question; the title alone implies at least a musicality to the game, and while particularly orchestrating the sound design around mathematical keys would be kind of neat I’m not writing fucking sheet music and doing that sort of math might end up sounding like garbage regardless, LMAO. So, in lieu of that – COLOUR is the easiest method of division – but that must be coupled with SYMBOLS so as not to alienate the colorblind. (Mind you, musically, it's within my skillset to be able to at least play w rhythm; see trax above.)

The other very relevant question is: what is fun to play? Play has many meanings to all people, but this would be in specific for myself. 

Paired with this is - what am I capable, reasonably, of achieving? I have no aspirations to push anything out the door; this is a growth process and not one of capital, lmao. Frankly speaking, the only limitation on what I have at the moment is what I am capable of learning; which is a pretty insane amount, all told. 

This log is an absolute mess, but the key ideas I am attempting to link is some kind of nebulous idea between mapping CARDS to TYPES OF WORD, more or less; hence the lists above. It could be an interesting hinge to give a particular 'hand' in a given card game a syntactical element explicitly, somehow at least aligning the gameplay with the simple idea of 'morphosyntactical alignment'. 

In short: word order. English is a strict Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) language; others, such as Spanish, are SVO; these three components, generally considered to be the fundaments of any given utterance, shift based on language/culture/ecoregion, more or less, with some languages at a point of accommodating a nearly free word-order. 

This simple idea might be fruitful; I want to go chase it. Have the loveliest of lovely days. 

~v-k-t