Game - Memorizing The Kanji - Treasure Hunt

Download here.

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?

Game - TRAUMA

TRAUMA can be downloaded here:
TRAUMA.exe

TRAUMA is my degree project, and is all about messing with your head. The player wakes up to find himself captured by a man who goes by the name of Xandex. He offers to let the player escape alive, if s/he can complete Xandex's games and achieve a high enough score (75) . The game has two different endings, depending on if the player achieves a score of 75+ or not.

The project was about experimenting with gameplay mechanics and visual illusions and trying to fuse the two together. The illusions were to play either a central or a peripheral role in the challenge, making the game harder because of their existence. What's interesting about visual illusions is that it is your brain who makes things "move" and whatnot. The illusions include no animation at all, so part of the challenge is for the player to "unthink" the illusion in order to gain more points and thus escape alive.

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TRAUMA is divided into four separate mini games, each with its own unique illusion. I'm going to explain what I had in mind with each game:

Game 1:
A "moving" labyrinth and unpredictable enemies. The pattern of the labyrinth makes it move in a wave-like pattern and so my thought was to challenge player navigation. The goal of the game is to gather treasure chests that pop up randomly around the labyrinth to get more score. Due to their small size and the max2 cap, players are required to search for the chests, making the illusion come to life even more. Enemies are spawned at every third chest pickup.

I deemed the experiment successful, as the illusion had a direct impact on the challenge.

Game 2:
A familiar grid with white dots. Black dots seem to appear inside the white dots when viewed in the peripheral view. How appropriate then that the goal of this game is to click on black dots in order to gain more score. They pop up randomly inside the white dots, and so players have to tell the illusory ones apart from the real ones.

I deemed the experiment successful, as the illusion had a direct impact on the challenge.

Game 3:
Rotating circles inside a room covered with spikes. The goal is to fly around and gather the "black spheres" inside these rotating circles. At every third sphere pickup a flying enemy is spawned. The rotating illusion was meant to disturb the player's sense of distance, making it a challenge to see past the illusion in order to avoid enemies.

I deemed the experiment not successful, as the illusion did not have direct impact on the challenge. The disturbance of the player's sense of distance was not convincing and many who played it reported that the illusion was only distracting in a general way.

Game 4:
A spiral that is not a spiral. The illusion is a set of circles that give off the impression that it's a spiral. The player rotates around a "layer" and can change both direction and layers. Enemies spawn at random, as well as chests. The challenge in this game is to not misjudge the layer the enemies and the player is, which can sometimes lead to devastating results since players, and myself, constantly mistake enemies to be headed for collision, when in fact they are on another layer.

I deemed the experiment successful, as the illusion had a direct impact on the challenge. Game 4 is also the one I feel is the best example of how one can implement illusions into the challenge.

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In conclusion, my experimentation with illusions and gameplay was successful and very educational. In my report I wrote that "it works well and is an untapped genre to the casual gaming market. It is important to analyze how the illusions are perceived and how they feel, rather than studying what happens in the brain. There is indeed potential for developers to study and learn to create their own illusions for games like this. (...) The illusions invite to something that players are not used to, namely a challenge that's not programmed; it's their own inability to manage the illusion."
(Translated, as the paper was written in Swedish.)


Game 1 and 3 uses illusions "Dongurakokko" and "Rotating Snake" respectively, created by Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. I am ever so thankful for his permission to use his illusions in my game, and I urge you to take a trip to his page, where he has tons of these mind-bending illusions!
Akiyoshi's Illusion Pages

Game - Awesome Fighters

Available here.

Awesome Fighters, despite its corny name, was actually pretty good, as far as gameplay goes. This was the second game I participated in making, in the second Game Project. With a bigger team with bigger knowledge we set out to make the best game the school had ever seen, and outshine all the other teams with our unmatched gameplay.

My role in this project was that of a general designer this time around, concentrating on the actual gameplay and overall usability. I was involved a lot in the pre-production with the game's lead designer, Peter Ilves. We sat down long before the course had officially commenced in order to get a head start. Basic mechanics, fighting classes and skills were violently discussed and designed with paper and pencils.

What made this game so successful was our emphasis on game testing. Our team of designers would spend the better part of some days just tweaking the gameplay to get it to feel just right. At the end of the project we had a lot of visitors from the other developing teams who wanted to play "just one more game". Good times.

The game is available for download on it's official webpage, however it's only ensured to run on the schools computers with pretty high specs. The copy I have at home has my computer on its knees.

Visit the webpage for more information!

Lead designer Peter Ilves is now Lead Designer for Bloodline Champions, a game considered to be the "next" stage of Awesome Fighters. Be sure to check it out!

Game - Boiler

The main menu

Boiler was the first "real" game I ever participated in making and it was the first Game Project in my education as a game designer. It's a strategy game that only utilizes one button per player, thus enabling up to eight players to battle it out. Each player has a cursor that moves randomly around the battlefield. If a player wishes to deploy a unit, s/he simply presses his/her button and the cursor stops for deployment. There are eight different units to choose from, and they are placed using a simple Morse-code of three signals, meaning there are eight different combinations of these signals.

The Battlefield

I took the main role as producer for the game, managing the project as a whole an organizing meetings. I also had the role of designer and illustrator, collaborating with my teammates to bring out the best of the original idea. I also did the (horrible) character portraits and designed the intro movie. I also did a lot of the sound effects. It was a small project, so everybody pitched in where they could be useful, whether it was in graphics or in programming.

The game was awarded with an Honorary Mention at Swedish Game Awards 2007.

The game is available for download here (three parts due to site restrictions):
Part01
Part02
Part03