Niklas Jansson

Edutainment Prototype

Added 2022-06-16 11:19:39 +0000 UTC

So, the Not-Pokémon game I mentioned earlier is actually not much like Pokémon. I think the main appeal of Pokémon is probably not the battle mechanics, or the grind, but the idea of collecting/hoarding and levelling up/optimizing, the same kind of appeal present in MMOs.

A thought occurred to me. If a player puts up with boring grind, why not turn the grind into a useful association/memorization training game? In fact, having complicated combat decisions every turn will be very disruptive mentally so I'm thinking of having the monsters fight mostly on instinct, with occasional player encouragement/guide ("Do special move!" or "Super defense!"). Player guessing/matching success really needs to have more of an indirect nudging effect. Otherwise problems arise with levels, regional difficulty and such. Monsters are not caught, but summoned using a complicated Dropped Materials system, as this enables be to feature relevant and basic foreign words like "Red Sand, Clear Oil, Rainbow Crystal".

The game could be used to learn anything really, but at the moment my prototype only has a Japanese set (Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji). This old version linked below is fairly simple, containing just the guessing game and no other mechanics. I haven't had much time to work on it. I started the project in 2008 (Tower of Kana) and was in talks with Bandai-Namco about using the Druaga setting (where the hero Gil climbs a tower), but nothing came of it. Might call it Babelmon (Tower of Babel reference)... but I have some other names ready as well. It has taken a long time to figure out certain aspects but I think I've gotten close to a workable design.

Link:

www.androidarts.com/ToK-Himitsu/

Version:

Compiled on Windows 7 (unsure if 32-bit or 64-bit). I run/dev it on an Intel Mac myself. TTF font display issues on Linux (haven't tried Wine).

Bugs:

Unknown. Need all three files in the same game directory/folder. It uses a free font called mona.ttf that is loaded from the directory rather than OS... so I guess you don't need to have Japanese font support. BlitzMax handles the rendering.

Comes without warranty but let me know if there are any issues. The graphics are retain mode, i.e. no redraw each frame, only on changes, which are few in a turn based game. It saves CPU/GPU.

Controls:

Arrow keys to make the quick guesses.

G to change practice glyph group (random in this version). Some are a bit more difficult. The overall difficulty setting will affect mainly exp & drop chances I'm thinking.

Esc to quit. Or window X.

My prototype doesn't cover everything yet, like the small ッ indicating hard consonant, or ー being long vowel. Or words, or most Kanji (I've included just a small selection for testing). I've noticed that the brain cheats with words and just reads the first character so I need to solve that... probably by mixing new words faster into the pool of five, only giving the player a few chances with each.

The Katakana words below might look like nonsense now, but might be readable after a few sessions (5 hours total maybe?). Katakana is the most useful to learn as it's generally English loan words (Red = Reddo, etc) and common in games and tech. Old games avoid complicated Kanji characters for font/display reasons. Hiragana is the round characters.

Colours:

レッド

ブルー

グリーン

パープル

ピンク

イェロー

ブラック

Computer things:

スーパーファミコン

フロッピーディスク

コンピューターのマウス