Game - Memorizing The Kanji - Treasure Hunt

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Introduction to Memorizing the Kanji

During the fall of 2009, me and two fellow designers studying Serious Games formed a team to present game prototypes to aid in memorizing Japanese Kanji. Kanji is a kind of alphabet that contains over 50.000 characters, 1.945 of which are used daily by the Japanese. It is essential to memorize each character if you're to stand any chance in reading a complete sentence, and so our client, Tobias Sehlberg, wanted games that would help students memorize them.

Tobias Sehlberg is working on finishing his first book (the first in a series of 9) on how to memorize Kanji, and is soon going to launch an interactive website that will contain lessons and games, all with the purpose of memorizing the 1.945 most common Kanji symbols. These are as many as Japanese children learn in grades 1 through 9.

Kobayashi Academy

Tobias contacted our University and not long after that, we were assigned to the task, as part of a project course. Fast forward a couple of months and a series of mini games collectively called Kobayashi Academy were finished, with varying depth of gameplay, but all with the same purpose: mask the repetition of Kanji through gameplay itself.

We quickly came to realize that memorization of Kanji was best done through repetition, like any vocabulary list, yet equally as tedious. To circumvent such a problem, we started integrating the repetition of Kanji into gameplay, requiring the player to repeat the Kanji in order to advance in the game.

These games, along with the book Memorizing the Kanji's association technique, is thought to produce some very satisfying results for students who want to study Japanese, but lack the motivation of endlessly repeating vocabulary lists. At the time of writing (2010-03-23), the games are undergoing several tests to determine what games are the most popular and which have the best learning effect.

Treasure Hunt

Since there's various potential legal issues, I'm just going to talk about one of the games which I developed during this time. Treasure Hunt has the player looking for treasure chests in a cave which needs to be dug out in order to reach them. To dig, the player touches a rock (tile-based) and a Kanji appears. The player then writes in the correct meaning and the rock is destroyed.

Many of our games were based on this simple mechanic: see Kanji, write meaning, but with varying gameplay depth. The easiest of which simply showed a Kanji on a blackboard and cycled through a list.

Treasure Hunt

This game is however one with a lot more for the player to do, besides repeating symbols: the player must navigate a character, dig through the cave, find the chests and finally enter a portal which only appears after all the chests have been collected, all within a set frame of time. The time limit is depicted as the cave eventually starting to shake and the screen fading to red and ultimately killing the player character.

The game features 50 Kanji symbols, 10 levels with 5 Kanji each. During the game the player can press and hold the enter key to view which words are in the level.

The levels themselves are randomized; cave rocks, treasure chests and the portal all appear in a random place each level to increase the variety. This is definitely courtesy of yours truly developing a better sense of programming and how programs can be written without redundant code.

The game can be a little hard in the beginning if you're not used to Kanji at all, since the game is supposed to be an aid in studying using the book and it's associations, but definitely not impossible for the moderately patient citizen.

So why not give it a try?