Kotoba Quest

Kotoba Quest is an edutainment type game that tries to teach you Japanese by making you structure sentences yourself. The idea I had was to make a combination of Pokemon and Duolingo. Where you walk around in a world and interact with objects and NPCs and come across Japanese dialogue. New words you encounter become entries in your compendium (or A.W.O.O.) much like how Pokemon entries fill your Pokedex. Interacting with NPCs and objects should open a prompt to allow you to build sentences in Japanese much like Duolingo. 

This project became my Masters Thesis Project, my vision for this game was a lot more ambitious. It's more of a proof of concept but I think the idea would make for a really cool game with more resources put into it. 

Controls
WASD - Movement
Space or E - Interact
Esc or Q - Open A.W.O.O.
Mouse to navigate Dialogue

Behind the thoughts

The house with Mom was the first part I built, followed by the town and convenient store. I then thought it's impossible for players to learn Japanese from just interacting with the Mom who already speaks Japanese. So I made the basement level which is supposed to be a dream space in which the player repetitively picks up keys and opens doors. A phrase which is then finally very useful once you get to the Mom quest when you need to pick up keys around the house with her. 

But then from testing it became quite apparent that people have difficulty understanding my dialogue system. So another tutorial was in order, that's when I made the animal sanctuary in full English so people can play around until they knew what all the buttons did before I throw any Japanese at them. 

I started out thinking this would be a game for Japanese learners who already know some Japanese and this game could be used to practice certain sentence structures and grammar. A quest all about あげる、くれる、もらう interested me greatly cause that's a difficult lesson (for me at least) and a gameplay loop where you repeatedly used it would be helpful to learn it I figured. But I got a lot more enthusiasm for the game when I made the game for people of all Japanese proficiency levels, start all the way at the beginning basically. 

Tho there are some things this game definitely doesn't do such as teach Hiragana and Katakana, I kinda drew a line there. I put tables for both into the AWOO if people want to give it a stab and learn this way. But all the vocab used is also in the AWOO so I think someone with no Furigana skills at all can navigate the game, maybe with some difficulty tho. 

I was also struggling and brainstorming a lot about if I should include Kanji in the game. Writing Japanese without Kanji creates a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity. It's just not nice to read, I had to add spaces between words and particles and to make it even clearer I started color coding all the word types, so that nouns are red, particles are yellow, verbs are blue and so on. I hope that helps people. 

But ye, this is the kind of game I would love to play made by a AAA studio.
I see it as the future of education. I'm quite disappointed that we had games for so long yet a game like this hardly exists, that's why I made this my thesis. This genre needs a proper jump start, I'm sure there's a lot of interest in this area. Imagine playing a VR game where you can learn through complete immersion. Would be so cool.