The Making of The Hetch Cipher

One of the very first things we created for The Founder's Game was the cipher seen in the promotion of the project! A hell of a lot of thought was put into how I made the glyphs to work as a cipher that made sense as a writing system. Let me take you through it!

Ran and I first got this idea while chatting about Osgood Perkin's Longlegs last summer. For those who haven't seen it, Longlegs had a really sick substitution cipher they used throughout the early promotion and teasers of the film that really stuck with us. Plus, all the fun stuff that Alex Hirsch was putting out for Gravity Falls' 10-Year anniversary last summer, which is a huge inspiration for the team to begin with.

The initial concept for the cipher that Ran sketched out looked like this, which we had agreed was a good start, but not to the depth I was envisioning. I did research into substitution cipher systems and took notes on the things I thought they did well and did my best to apply those notes into our cipher.

I started with the base glyph you see on the left, which was our Hetch for Founder's Game, and tried to think of every variation of the symbol I could get down, pointing in each direction. Alongside this, I came up with a list of rules to build shapes off of, to work within the guidelines of the symbol while still maintaining the shape of the hetch underneath it. The rules were as follows;

• All Glyphs must fit within the base hetch symbol of the language only by rotating or realigning them. The base symbol is never stretched or modified beyond the existing lines and circle.

• A line can not be cut in half in a place that it does not meet another point, (i.e. a line can end at the intersection of two lines of the hetch, but a line can not be trimmed in half.

• Each glyph should be clearly different from each other to avoid debate or confusion of which letter it is representing.

• Each glyph should be easy to handwrite, and therefore still recognizable with less precision.

I continued to build of the original idea until I got to this full set of glyphs, which totalled to 89 symbols. From there, I began to narrow down the glyphs into the ones that that applied best to the rules above, prioritizing those easy to write by hand and easily distinguishable from each other. Which turned into the final substitution cipher set you see here!

From here, I did a lot of handwriting tests, writing out passages in this cipher in notebooks to test its legibility on paper. I had pages and pages of just glyphs in my sketchbooks that unfortunately I don't have pictures of, but If I find them I'll be sure to include them in an update below.

From there, I built out the font in a great software called Font Forge for the sake of easily being able to type it out in our project files, and that's how we made the cipher! The inclusion of a space glyph was a last-minute one, which we added in really just to throw you guys off, haha, but it didn't seem to work since you guys solved it so much faster than we anticipated!

The original plan was to release letters in groups of 2 or 3 weekly throughout the chapters of The Founders Game, to have the letter solved the week before chapter 8, but you guys were way ahead of us and solved it in 5 hours!! Despite our plans being foiled, it was a great show of community effort that we were really so proud of that we didn't really mind.

That concludes this BTS post! Thank you so much for reading, and please let us know what else you'd love to know more about from the making of Generation Loss! See you all next week for our November newsletter!