The sound system is a little different than English; it could be moreso. While I want the syntax to be very different from English (strongly head-final, with ergative-absolutive split), I don’t want the sound system to be maximally different from English – but I could go a little farther.
Strict CVC, with a few CV exceptions, feels artificially simplistic
Flesh out Old Shókë lexicon
Iterate on Old Shókë example sentences, with low to medium syntactic complexity
Then develop Middle Shókë
Then develop New Shókë
Maybe develop one or more cousin languages which split off from Shókë at some point in time