I have been working on Language Arcade on and off so far here in 2021. I was first working on the chalo engine template to implement things I want in every game - options menu, dyslexic font, other toggles - and I've started working on the game project itself.

Language support

For the time being, I'm using Google Translate as a TEMPORARY SOLUTION for language support - mostly so I can ensure the fonts are loading and displaying. Once I'm further in development, I will hire people to do proper translations for each language, and I will probably do the Esperanto language file myself (possibly hiring someone for QAing my work).

Animal vocab game

I've been first working on the vocabulary minigame, which was present in the original game (Fantazio de Esperanto). For the time being, the player avatar is a nondescript rabbit, but eventually I'm planning on having multiple profiles and a character creator. The vocabulary game part is working, but not yet very polished. I need to do more spritework (I'd like to have animated sprites) and a nicer background, and I need sound effects and spoken audio for the target language lines.

I also have a statistics object in the code but not yet displayed anywhere. Once you're done playing a vocab game, it will show you a summary screen of how well you did - what words you missed, maybe other stats like time / average time to answer, correct ratio, etc.

More minigames later

I want to get the animal game polished up and "done" in a way where I can show off what I have in mind. And, in particular, to help me study Hindi (though I don't know how much I'll need to speak about specific animals, but it's a start). I plan on working on vocab minigames first, which are basically around building vocabulary for nouns - animals, foods, places, stuff by category. I want to also put in a sounds minigame to help the player practice the sounds of the language (such as if the language uses a different writing system) but I'm not sure what I'll have yet. I'd like to also eventually have games like the roguelike I had in a later version which just shows different phrases in the target language but is still a simple game to have fun with.

Stress and work

I work a lot, and I'm hoping if I prepare my classes just-so, I can avoid most of the class prep I do each semester. Keep the same exercises each semester, just tweak the docs to clarify things as they come up. I feel like I work a lot. I want to work on game development more, but it's also very easy for me to feel down on myself about it and to get frustrated at not remembering things after some time away from a project and the codebase. It's something I'm working on.

In my mind, in the future I'd like to work on more educational games - math games, creativity games, etc., like stuff I grew up on in the 90s. But I also know I don't have all that much spare time to work on this stuff. Right now I just want to work on this one a bit at a time.