World building—Writing systems

I know many aspiring writers develop languages and/or writing systems for their worlds.

I believe that writing systems in the past have been influenced by the materials available:

The Babylonians used shaped reeds to press wedge-shaped lines into clay tablets to write.

The Egyptians used several forms of writing, fancy logograms that they carved into stone; and demotic and hieratic, which were used on papyrus sheets and were derived from their original hieroglyphic writing system.

Phoenician was originally written with straight lines, but I posit the reason it became more rounded over time is that the available writing materials evolved as well.  Phoenician is believed by some to be the origin of all writing systems used in the world today, with the exception of the Chinese scripts, and that covers a lot of writing systems.

Therefore, I decided to create some writing systems based on materials I made available to the cultures I was creating them for.  After I had the basic scripts, I tried “aging” one script so that there were several derivatives, the last of which ended up looking very little like the original, a la hieroglyphs to demotic.  I then took an angular printed script and created a plausible cursive version of it.  All this I did purely for fun, since creating ciphers has been a hobby of mine since junior high.  I’m quite fond of the angular printed script and its cursive version, because unless you see the portions of the printed script that were used to create the cursive, I think it would be impossible for the average layman to recognize them as being related, which is what I was aiming for.