SGA Extensions
What I have done with the venerable Standard Galactic Alphabet.
In 1991, the infant id Software released Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars. Like many games of the day, it featured at least one little puzzle of the sort that rewarded willingness to keep pen and paper handy: Tom Hall's Standard Galactic Alphabet, generally referred to as SGA. For the sheer geek factor, I had something of a tryst with this simple cipher, and like probably very few people indeed, wrote a bunch of semi-private notes in it, including large parts of my stuff on Danizok.
SGA is particularly unwieldly; particularly the characters with large numbers of dots. However, it is quite easy to pick up, owing to its creation: several of the letters are mutilated English ones1, or carry some pattern between them based on English phonology (C is a broken S, for example, and J is a three-segmented bar where I is two.) It's not that sophisticated, and vulnerable to the most basic attacks of cryptanalysis, but it can get the job done fairly well for a few words that you don't want to be plainly legible to someone looking over your shoulder.
However, that unwieldliness becomes a serious problem the moment you try to write anything longer. "R", "P", and "F" all have four separate strokes; and "W", "U", "V", "H", "L" and "J" have three. Slurring the strokes quickly becomes necessary in order to achieve any efficiency.
So with a few years under my belt both writing very neat and tidy SGA, and with a few scripts designed experimentally, I decided to take my hand at a ductus for this silly writing system, largely because I already knew it better than any other artificial writing system. The result I call nqSGA (not quite), and it lends itself very readily to a wide variety of ligatures and cursive connexions that can often make it more efficient than most Latin handwriting.
Footnotes
1 try writing "EXIT", which appeared on a sign in the first level of Marooned on Mars—most people could read it without help, although that was aided a great deal by a slight variation in the original font; 5 pixels tall and 3 pixels wide, with the dot in the E placed at mid-line to be less similar to a C and more clearly an E.
