One of the things that caught my attention when I watched the video was the vertical writing that matches the vertical nature of the Xi'an. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the process of developing the language?

I'd like to say right out that the direction for the Xi'an to be a more vertically-centered people was one of the foundational ideas behind them that came straight from Chris Roberts himself. So his direction to Lore and to Britt was to develop a culture and a language that centered around the idea of verticality.

And the vertical, I mean, again, human language, humanoid language is essentially linear, right? So it can go from right to left or left to right or theoretically bottom to top, although that doesn't happen very often, and top to bottom. So we looked at, okay, how can we make it vertical, but also then have it play nicely on the interwebs, and how can it fit okay into most of our Roman alphabet based stuff that's going to be written horizontally. And the way to do that was to look at the model that the Koreans took when they created their alphabet many hundreds of years ago. And so it works in blocks that can go from left to right or from top to bottom. And theoretically, it could go from right to left, but that's not as common, again, on the internet and using the other mechanisms that everybody is enjoying now to use the language. So we did these blocks that every syllable fits into a block. And there was a model for this in human languages already. Certainly, if you're Korean and you're learning to read Xi'an, you're in the same boat that everybody else is, because the letters don't look anything like Korean letters. But the system, the idea is similar to the way Korean letters fit into syllable blocks.