What is This?

HALITO TOMATO is basically a digital, playable Native American Choctaw-to-Japanese dictionary AND a Choctaw-to-the-Rest-of-the-World dictionary.

HALITO TOMATO also serves as a simple digital museum blended with game elements.

My hope is that HALITO TOMATO will help keep the  Choctaw language alive by making it accessible to the world.

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How to Play

This is a preview version of an experimental game about an unusual topic. It will naturally seem strange at first, but there are three main things in the game:

• Explore & discover
• Collect tomatoes
• Learn cool stuff

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About

HALITO! That means "hello" in the Choctaw language!

As a kid, I kept hearing, "We can't lose our language!" and "Enroll to learn the Choctaw language!" But because I grew up so far from the tribe, it was always an "I'll learn it later in life" thing for me.

Now is later, so I decided in 2024 to finally learn the Choctaw language. But I come from a translation background, meaning the ordinary language learning methods feel infinitely slow and clunky. So I did things my own way: I sat on the couch for months and read Choctaw dictionaries while listening to music.

I also like to make small video games to help teach me new topics - that's how HALITO TOMATO was born.

I've included many signs + notes in the game itself, so please visit the inside of my game for more details!

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Why is there Japanese everywhere?

I found it difficult to study Choctaw in English, for multiple reasons. Luckily, I know other languages, so I simply used Japanese as my study base instead. This way, rather than write out "holisso aiitimanumpuli" in English every time I wanted to say "to read", I could just write 読, which is a basic Japanese (and Chinese) character for "reading". 

I then went through a kanji dictionary and applied this method whenever it made sense. Without realizing it, I had started to build my own personal Japanese-to-Choctaw dictionary. What's more, some of the Japanese-to-Choctaw connections fit strangely well together.

For example, the Japanese kanji character 油 is pronounced "abura" and means "oil / grease / fat". The equivalent word in Choctaw is "bila".

Upon noticing how "abura" and "bila" feel so similar (especially with common Japanese-related phonetic misalignments), I checked other languages and noticed that Hawaiian's word is "'aila" and the Irish word is "bealaigh". Somehow, these four words felt loosely connected to me, as if they had "drifted" apart from each other at some point in time.

On top of that, because the Japanese language has brought so much light into my life for decades, I also wanted to make a Choctaw language-learning game that Japanese players could play alongside me as I learned the language too, as a way to repay the favor. This is why HALITO TOMATO has so much Japanese text everywhere.

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What is the Word Lab?

At first, I noticed that many Choctaw words resembled Japanese words. But then I started to notice that other Choctaw words resembled English words, Spanish words, Irish words, Ancient Greek words, Latin words, Ancient Egyptian words, Sanskrit words, Ainu words, and more.

At this point, I had NO idea what I was even looking at anymore. What IS this language? How is Choctaw THIS similar to completely unrelated languages on the other side of the planet? How is Choctaw THIS similar to distant languages from thousands of years ago? Where did my ancestors come from? Where did THEIR ancestors come from?

I was lost, so I asked some friends for advice. I then switched my focus again - this time I would compare the Choctaw language with the rest of the world's languages. So I went through dictionaries, web sites, and my own memories to build a giant pile of words to sort through later. For this, I developed my Word Lab to condense everything down to something similar to the famous Rosetta Stone.

Currently, I have about 466 entries in the Word Lab. If you click on an individual word of an individual language, you can change its color. By grouping sets of words into separate colors, you can start to organize the unorganized pile of words.

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What's the Point?

As it is, this game is basically a digital, playable Choctaw-to-Japanese AND a Choctaw-to-the-rest-of-the-world dictionary. HALITO TOMATO also serves as a simple digital museum. My hope is that the Choctaw language and culture will become more "open" to the rest of the world through both games and words.

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Current Development Issues

This is just a simple preview version of the game - I intend to add some more features, better controls, and such. But for now, some issues are present:

• Most of the museum text is placeholder text while I work on my "voice / style" for the game
• As such, the Japanese translations of my placeholder text are also placeholders - for now I've used automated translations via ChatGPT - I do have a particular human translator in mind for final translations later, however.

• Mouse sensitivity too high
• Controller support is not good yet
• Bugs
• Incomplete content
• Missing features
• Font issues with right-to-left languages
• Font issues with Sanskrit & Hindi-based scripts

This preview version will contain  many issues. The final version will probably contain many issues too. I don't think a "perfect" version of the game is even possible. But the most important thing to note is that the preview version doesn't include details that other Choctaws will already know by default. The final version will include more details for others' reference.