next »

[Zizka]

Kana and vocabulary, not just kana. Vocabulary is actually more of a focus than kana but I don't how I could go straight to vocab without having kana in there.

[oahda]

Oh, okay. I guess one problem is most monosyllabic or short words are written in kanji rather than kana anyway...

Unless you start with some short loanwords written in katakana, I guess. But I wonder if basically transcribing English words to katakana is that interesting to someone playing a game in English in the first place. I suppose 'pan' itself is a good loanword, tho, since it's short and not an English one and ties into the game. But beyond that, not sure.

Or is your intention to write words in hiragana even if they are generally rather written in kanji, just to teach the system?

[Zorg]

I would love if the practice mode would be purely optional. Nobody likes tutorials, either. I'm not sure if i want to spend time in a boxing ring which is separated from the dungeon, i'd probably rather like to start exploring the dungeon from the start.

It's a nice addition to repeat vocabulary, but i guess most players will skip that part and will be frustrated if they lose the first battle. Maybe you could implement a friendly npc (sensei?) in the dungeon in some rooms who suggests some training, additionally to the main menu option.

[Zizka]

But I wonder if basically transcribing English words to katakana is that interesting to someone playing a game in English in the first place.

I think it is. They're a good step after the kanas, especially for English speakers. It allows them to use their own language to their advantage. I mean, they're not always identical to English words anyway and a good way to rack up some new words fairly quickly. It's also a constant katakana review at the same time.

I mean, I won't force them in, but I aim to include some of them, especially the popular ones. I certainly put them aside because they're loanwords (even though that's one aspect of Japanese I dislike myself but that's irrelevant).

Or is your intention to write words in hiragana even if they are generally rather written in kanji, just to teach the system?

No, no, I'll introduce kanji but as part of vocabulary words, not as "radicals" or abstract references (even though I'd like to).

I would love if the practice mode would be purely optional. Nobody likes tutorials, either. I'm not sure if i want to spend time in a boxing ring which is separated from the dungeon, i'd probably rather like to start exploring the dungeon from the start.

I wouldn't say no one likes tutorials. I mean, they need to be short and to the point but if done well they are nice alternative to reading a user manual. I want to get that information across one way or another.

The practice mode is optional but recommended.

It's a nice addition to repeat vocabulary, but i guess most players will skip that part and will be frustrated if they lose the first battle. Maybe you could implement a friendly npc (sensei?) in the dungeon in some rooms who suggests some training, additionally to the main menu option.

Well, I guess it depends on the person. I always play through tutorials when I play games, I never skip them but I don't know how representative of the majority.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean however. Are you saying that instead of warning to go in practice mode at the title screen we should have that warning in the dungeon itself? If that's the case, that seems counter-intuitive to me. I mean, that would involve players going into the dungeon just to be told they'd better leave and practice first. I would find that annoying if I were a new player.

Also, I don't really see the difference between giving a warning at the title screen or in the dungeon if it's the same warning.

[Zorg]

Just to be clear, the platforming was a suggestion from zorg, it's not something in-game at the moment. Since the dungeons are randomly generated, I'm not to keen on implementing this. It's not a bad idea but it probably won't happen. The reason is mostly because I would need to do this as well and I'm already swamped as it is already and level design is something I don't like (euphemism) and not good at. It's also not something I want to invest time in to improve at (time I'd rather spend improving art).

BUT zorg's suggestion does provide something I'd like to add: environment hazards in battle. Pushing your enemies off a ledge, into spikes or into a steam burst. That's something I find very appealing.

I'm totally aware of the immense amount of work which is needed to add jumping mechanics (honestly, i guess i'm underestimating it ). I'm just personally too keen of platforming. And i did not know about the practice mode at that time, which improves the learning. You should totally avoid feature creep! If you decide it does not improve the game or is too much work, drop it! You are right about the hazards, that part is the better part of the platforming idea. You probably should not add jumping at all.

[Zorg]

Also, I don't really see the difference between giving a warning at the title screen or in the dungeon if it's the same warning.

Let's say i'll skip the practice mode in the main menu and enter the dungeon directly. I fight some enemies and sometimes sensei is standing around in a room and suggests to train a bit with him. Not in a "Go to the tutorial, rtfm!"-way. More in a "I can help you to improve your battle skills!"-way. I think that is different from a main menu button. After the training, i want to be teleported back to the same spot in the dungeon, of course. Later, he could suggest to repeat new kana.

[LobsterSundew]

I still see mentions pop up for my August 2013 guide that is now 3 years out-of-date. From my current perspective that guide is painfully lean. September 2013 was when I really began tracking not just the campaigns I was helping on and that has provided far more insights seeing how things go wrong. Finishing that guide would be a priority over setting up any form of consulting business. The current draft is over 500 pages. It was getting close to surpassing 400 back in February.

About the state of the game:

First, one of the fastest ways to eat up a project's funding is through constant reworking. A strong solid direction is often an important part of developing a product on budget and on time.

Second, with successfully crowdfunded projects there becomes the problem of people angered that a feature (which was proving to be detrimental to the design) was cut. A developer can get stuck with the promises made during the campaign. Back when the adventure game Dropsy was funded there was a system for painting clown faces on trees and other things that never made it into the final game. A project creator needs to be ready to commit to some of the biggest design decisions. Not promising specific features or systems can result in a project presentation that feels very vague. You would want to get the main systems nailed down before launching so that backers would know what they are pledging for. Radical changes later can produce a game that people didn't specifically pledge for.

Third, the project page text gets held back from being completed by the game's identity still being in-progress. What marketers call copy is important. It is hard to write up features and their benefits when the features aren't locked down. Making screenshots is also held back when the design keeps changing. It is a bottleneck in the process.

Getting future backers involved in the refining of the design could also help very much with the pre-launch marketing. There are threads on game development subreddits like Feedback Friday on /r/gamedev where players can get involved with providing feedback. You can start to know your future players better. Doing this could be more valuable than spending time on a first unsuccessful campaign and then succeeding with a reboot. The same time that would be used for an initial run would go into polishing and generating engagement with players. Remember that just 250 backers on the first day could make a strong chance you would reach the size of goal you're targeting.

About game design:

There may be useful inspirations from looking at the systems in Paper Mario RPG in addition to what Super Mario RPG did.

With the current build there was a selectable icon for the hot pepper, the title hot pepper and then the "like chewing lava" description. It may be possible to have enemies be weak to specific items with names that start with a particular phonetic sound as a means to add depth to combat. An enemy weak against "ほ" ("ho") could be weak against "hot peppers". The HUD/menu may need to have an option added to be able to use an item on an enemy. The first two characters for a item's title may need to be bold to make it easier to identify what the starting sound is. If an item can't be used against an enemy, instead of being consumed there would be a funny "That won't work" dialogue equivalent like many adventure games do when bashing inventory item combinations together.

Super Mario RPG had 1 to 3 characters in a party and enemy teams with potentially many targets and even multiple phases to encounters where new enemies could drop into a battle. So far it is just Pan versus a single enemy. Part of the depth of many traditional JRPGs is magic users strategically selecting between the option for a powerful attack that hits a single target versus a weak attack that strikes at the entire enemy team. A similar choice is should healers focus or spread out recovery spells. The game may feel much more dynamic if you explore having more allies or more enemies at the same time. Adding allies could require much more of a scope increase than adding more enemies because allies often need more abilities since they stay with the player for longer throughout the game. Adding more enemies can often reuse a particular enemy's assets like having a row of 3 identical looking hairdryers. If distance is to eventually be a part of the game's dynamics, then that means potential space to plant enemy sprites. Some battles may fill up all the available space with enemy sprites, while another encounter may be a single enemy with lots of open space on either side of him. Darkest Dungeon had distance matter in battles on a single horizontal-plane.

I am trying to recall if I saw a mechanic in an educational baseball game/minigame about learning to type on a keyboard. The pitcher throws the ball and as the batter makes contact between ball and bat there is a slowdown to the flow of time. This slowdown lasts for a predetermined window of time (The window of time could be extended according to character level or a stat). What happens is a word appears, the player types it and then the next word appears. For every word correctly typed during the slowdown window, the ball will eventually be hit farther when the slowdown time ends. Something similar could be a recharge minigame where a kana card is drawn, the player inputs an answer and then the repeat while there is still time. The player tries to get correctly through as many kana cards as possible before the time limit hits. If an input is incorrect then there is no increase from that card and the next chance is given. Some special cards may be unskippable and the player would either finally answer correctly or run out of time. It is comparable to how some quick-time events are to get through as many prompts as possible within a window of time to determine the final damage output. This type of gameplay that forces the player to rush may be better left for later levels, while early levels would provide the player more than adequate time to think of what response to type.

If the player inputs a wrong answer for a card, then one version of a minigame may have that card reshuffled into back into the deck to come up again later.

There is also the possibility of having more than one energy recharging minigame that would depend on the level environment.

The two cards being drawn at once mentioned in reply #597 in this thread could be a promising route to explore. A player might not know one of the cards, but be able to determine the rest of the cards to proceed. If a player gets two cards the player doesn't know, then that player would be sent back to an earlier checkpoint to relearn the newest material. For a hard difficulty level there would be two cards presented at the same time as described, but for an easier difficulty level there could be more cards like 3 or 4.

About within Kickstarter:

Early on Sunday morning there was the launch of a multiplayer arena FPS called Diabotical. It is scheduled to run until Thursday September 1st and is already ranked in the top spot in popularity because the project creators history with e-sports and Twitch. It was shared on many subreddit. There are 45 different £300 tiers. Many campaigns don't even have 45 different reward tiers.

Learn Japanses To Survive! Katakana War has had very consistent performance after entering its trough phase.
http://i.imgur.com/eOQmtAj.png
This is the project creators second campaign. The first successful campaign was for hiragana and released on Steam back in February. There is still more than 300 out of 1000 slots available for its $4AUD early-bird tier, so the $6AUD tier keeps seeing relatively few backers.

A tabletop project licensing the Armored Core IP from From Software has smashed its minimum funding goal. There was also a Dark Souls tabletop project earlier this year that raised over £3,700,000.

Prey For The Gods in 2nd place ends in 5 days. Glitched has surged up to 3rd place after a good /r/earthbound thread followed by some additional subreddit posts. Learn Japaneses To Survive! Katakana War is in 4th. The rest of the top 20 is seeing a bunch of shuffling in rankings. There are some old campaigns in their last 48 hours and some recent launches like Lonely Star gaining some traction.

In the 20th to 40th popularity ranking range the category isn't doing very well. July has been a poor month as expected. August is also expected to be poor. Super Toaster X may do much better if it aims for a late-August or September launch after using the extra time for feedback and refinement on its new design direction.

[Zizka]

Guess what?

0.37 is ready for testing! Feedback at this point in time would be determinant as we're trying to wrap up on the core mechanics of the game! Please test and let us know!

Link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bhxw7c872tbwll3/Super%20Toaster%20X%20v.%2037%20Windows.zip?dl=0

[Lex the Abstract]

We also have an OS X build:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/q29oton07teq06h/Super%20Toaster%20X%20v.%2037%20OS%20X.zip?dl=0

I don't know why Zizka keeps forgetting those...

[JobLeonard]

No love for Linux?

[Lex the Abstract]

I can try doing a Linux build and posting it, but nobody has asked for it yet!

I also found a bug while working today that should break the slime/hell dryer demo combat scenes.  Basically we've decided to do per-room card displays for guessed cards since it'll give us more flexibility for the backgrounds.  And being me I forgot to make them for the actual demo fights...  :D

I'll be updating them and post again once it's fixed.

[Lex the Abstract]

New build: Version 0.038 alpha.  Fixed the issues with things not being assigned.

Windows: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0php8wyrsfkzzxv/Super_Toaster_X_v._38_Windows.zip?dl=0

OS X:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/1zcct5x7a75dv2n/Super_Toaster_X_v._38_OS_X.zip?dl=0

[LobsterSundew]

About Linux:

I use Linux Mint 17.1 on my main machine.

Linux gamers like myself have significant influence on Kickstarter. Crowdfunding was a means to get more games on the platform. Linux gamers can also spread news quickly by aggregating around places like /r/linux_gaming and Gaming on Linux.

Having Linux as a stretch goal and not included in the minimum funding goal is a huge turn-off in the community. You have to understand that Linux gamers often had to wait longer to play a game (often months). It was often the projects with Linux as a stretch goal that did this. Sometimes a beta is later revealed it will be Windows-only. I remember the wait for Shovel Knight's port. Some games still haven't delivered ports for platforms other than Windows after promising multiple platforms. Some games like Godus don't look like they will ever bother to make Linux ports.

Unity3D has been making Linux porting easier over the years.

Having a playable Linux demo during the campaign can be a very good for building trust.

About within Kickstarter:

Diabotical is working towards stretch goals, but its performance has significantly declined. Many campaigns are ending over the next 9 days. Sausage Sports Club, Close Your and Vulpine have had decent launches. Most of the other projects are falling apart soon after arriving. Gloom and Fox n Forests are desperately trying to make their goals.

That Armored Core project lost the use of that IP. It is now Mech Command RTS and its Kicktraq graphs are a painful sight for how many backers left.

Those suspected troll pledges from back on July 23rd disappeared on August 10th. Some campaigns ended with them intact, so I suspect those devs received far less than they expected. I saw multiple active small projects pulled just beneath their minimum funding goals as a result. Many lost significant chunks of what they had raised. In hindsight I found another round of potential trolling happened on August 6th and those same pledges also disappeared on August 10th. Campaigns that launched after August 7th didn't suffer the same disappearances of large pledges.

August 2016 so far looks like a massacre for decent looking small projects. That may change in the last half of the month, but so far its bad. The waves of low-effort campaigns lacking pitch videos, project page body images or even pitch video audio have been buffeting the newest projects section. A drop in quality combined with a lack of big campaigns to draw traffic makes projects much more dependent on traffic from outside of Kickstarter right now, but No Man's Sky and bans in Overwatch are soaking up lots of the press.

[Zizka]

Having Linux as a stretch goal and not included in the minimum funding goal is a huge turn-off in the community. You have to understand that Linux gamers often had to wait longer to play a game (often months). It was often the projects with Linux as a stretch goal that did this. Sometimes a beta is later revealed it will be Windows-only. I remember the wait for Shovel Knight's port. Some games still haven't delivered ports for platforms other than Windows after promising multiple platforms. Some games like Godus don't look like they will ever bother to make Linux ports.

Since I know nothing about Linux, I don't know how complex it would be to port the game on it. I'd like to have it though! I'll check with Jeff if it's something which doable and keep you updated.


 New Gameplay Mechanic: Looking for input

I've been pondering about the typing aspect of the game and progressively turned off by it. Here's why:

1. It cuts us off from porting to many platforms.
2. Some people type slower/faster than others which influences gameplay balance.
3. You might accidentally make a typo and confirm your selection.
4. Makes things more complex than I'd like.
5. Alternate spellings

So I've been talking with Jeff of getting rid of it entirely and replacing it with a gamepad-friendly version. I'll explain:

Basically, instead of typing a character, players would select one (the right one) out of 4 randomly displayed. The cards would be displayed in a cross, like the buttons of a controller. The player would simply press A, B, X or Y to select the card which is the good answer.

I find this would streamline things further and make the game more approachable. I can also see how that would be a fun alternative for tablets where you could just touch the card as opposed to type which is sometimes difficult on phones and tablets (to me anyway).

So what do you think? Aye or nay?

I'll reply to the KS stuff below, since some people would rather skip that info.


Kickstarter Comments:

Those suspected troll pledges from back on July 23rd disappeared on August 10th. Some campaigns ended with them intact, so I suspect those devs received far less than they expected. I saw multiple active small projects pulled just beneath their minimum funding goals as a result. Many lost significant chunks of what they had raised. In hindsight I found another round of potential trolling happened on August 6th and those same pledges also disappeared on August 10th. Campaigns that launched after August 7th didn't suffer the same disappearances of large pledges.

That's concerning. Hopefully we won't be the targets of such trolls.

First, one of the fastest ways to eat up a project's funding is through constant reworking. A strong solid direction is often an important part of developing a product on budget and on time.

Yes! Which is why we're using the pre-ks phase as a testing ground for what works and what doesn't. Once we get funded, I'd rather stick to the core mechanics.

With the current build there was a selectable icon for the hot pepper, the title hot pepper and then the "like chewing lava" description. It may be possible to have enemies be weak to specific items with names that start with a particular phonetic sound as a means to add depth to combat. An enemy weak against "ほ" ("ho") could be weak against "hot peppers". The HUD/menu may need to have an option added to be able to use an item on an enemy. The first two characters for a item's title may need to be bold to make it easier to identify what the starting sound is. If an item can't be used against an enemy, instead of being consumed there would be a funny "That won't work" dialogue equivalent like many adventure games do when bashing inventory item combinations together.

Using items on enemies is an idea to consider. At the moment it's focused on food so that might be a bit contrived to have them affect enemies but it's doable. I'd just need to figure out new items and add them in. We've talked about this with Jeff and the inventory system is the next thing we'd like to tackle.

The game may feel much more dynamic if you explore having more allies or more enemies at the same time. Adding allies could require much more of a scope increase than adding more enemies because allies often need more abilities since they stay with the player for longer throughout the game. Adding more enemies can often reuse a particular enemy's assets like having a row of 3 identical looking hairdryers. If distance is to eventually be a part of the game's dynamics, then that means potential space to plant enemy sprites. Some battles may fill up all the available space with enemy sprites, while another encounter may be a single enemy with lots of open space on either side of him. Darkest Dungeon had distance matter in battles on a single horizontal-plane.

Having many foes at once is already something I'd like to have in the game.

Having allies is also something I was thinking of... as a stretch goal. Mario RPG (some of them) had minor allies but some games also focused on just Mario so I'd think it's doable. One stretch goal would be to have minions sort of like in Mario RPG:



Distance is already part of the game mechanic *but* it's not good enough yet (which is why we need feedback from players  ).

The player tries to get correctly through as many kana cards as possible before the time limit hits.

It is already the case  .

In the 20th to 40th popularity ranking range the category isn't doing very well. July has been a poor month as expected. August is also expected to be poor. Super Toaster X may do much better if it aims for a late-August or September launch after using the extra time for feedback and refinement on its new design direction.

Which is what we'll probably aim for. I'm crossing my fingers on player input however during that time. It's getting hard for me to get a fresh look on things since I'm so involved.

[Lex the Abstract]

About Linux:

I use Linux Mint 17.1 on my main machine.

Linux gamers like myself have significant influence on Kickstarter. Crowdfunding was a means to get more games on the platform. Linux gamers can also spread news quickly by aggregating around places like /r/linux_gaming and Gaming on Linux.

Having Linux as a stretch goal and not included in the minimum funding goal is a huge turn-off in the community. You have to understand that Linux gamers often had to wait longer to play a game (often months). It was often the projects with Linux as a stretch goal that did this. Sometimes a beta is later revealed it will be Windows-only. I remember the wait for Shovel Knight's port. Some games still haven't delivered ports for platforms other than Windows after promising multiple platforms. Some games like Godus don't look like they will ever bother to make Linux ports.

Unity3D has been making Linux porting easier over the years.

Having a playable Linux demo during the campaign can be a very good for building trust.

All very good to know!  I am hesitant to release anything we can't at least run ourselves first.  So, I got out an old copy of Ubuntu 14.04LT from the last time I built a computer, and installed it on an old USB drive.  I have to say, Linux is pretty cool in some ways.

I went with Windows because I just couldn't stand the lack of games on Linux.  I imagined that other people who cared about a lot about games would do the same, I guess I was wrong.

Then I spent a while learning about packages, multi-architecture support and how 64 bit packages don't work with 32 bit software.  All of which makes perfect sense, but I never really found directly spelled out anywhere.  (So yeah, a bit less cool in other ways, especially when you don't know anything about it)

After all that, Super Toaster is working better on Linux than I had feared- the only immediately apparent issue was with render textures not working.  I got a bit fancy with the map display, and I'll be un-fancifying it since it'll be more efficient to render directly to the screen, and I should have been doing it that way all along...

So, yeah, it seems quite easy to port to Linux with Unity3D.

Regarding the render textures:  I imagine that the proprietary graphics packages would support them, but I'm intentionally using the mesa lt utopic graphics package, since I thought it would be a good idea to target the builds to the generic ones.  Please correct me if I'm wrong!

[Zizka]

Devlog 88

Progression systems are an inherent part of rpg games. So the question was, how to stand out from the rest and take advantage from our own, original gameplay elements.

Following a discussion with Jeff, we decided to drop Experience Points altogether because of just how cliché it was. Let me explain what I decided instead:

Basically, each individual card can be "Mastered". Every time you guess a card right, your Master Meter goes up. Once you've guessed the card right enough for the meter to fill up, you gain a star:



Once the card has been mastered, there's little incentive to sticking with it as it won't provide any more stars in the future (which are essentially Skill Points).

Stars can then be invested in the game's skill tree which I revamped. Colored tiles have been purchased while blue ones have yet to be acquired.



Some tiles are locks. Notice that the lock there requires two stars to unlock. So it's considering whether to go for easier minor rewards or stock up and unlock tiles to access to better rewards.

For those who haven't tried it yet, here's a download for the latest build:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ygtdbgdd4injuz6/Super%20Toaster%200.038.2.zip?dl=0

At this time, feedback is very important! Feel free to rip the game apart, any feedback is good feedback in my book.

Download rate remains low for the most part but I'm confident things will pick up once we get more coverage.

Enjoy and keep eating those crusts.

[JobLeonard]

I'm all for dropping XP.

If you want to amp up the learning aspect, allow for losing stars by surprise tests to see if people still remember mastered cards

[io3 creations]

The file name is Super Toaster v. 015 Windows.zip
It works on a system that contains one of those words.

I knew the Zip drives would be back one day!
My second guess was one of those smart Toasters  that is hooked up to the internet.

Well... I feel like I'm reading a devlog for a different game in a way, because none of the educational aspects come up. Shouldn't the challenge in the gameplay come from the learning aspect of the game? To grossly oversimplify, the rest is just an interactive game sauce to make memorization more palatable. Or a bit less insulting: it serves to support the learning experience.

For the last few months that I've been checking out this devlog, I agree that it seems like it is more about creating a "game" with an educational aspect tagged on rather than vice versa.  Much like Typing of the Dead kept the same gameplay content from House of the Dead and simply replaced the shooting game mechanic with typing.  However, in that case, creating the typing version was simpler since all the other game content was already done.  While Super Toaster focuses only on the learning version, the game content also needs to be created.  It may be just my preference but if I was putting that much effort into the game content, then I would create both educational and game versions.  But that's just me.

Basically, instead of typing a character, players would select one (the right one) out of 4 randomly displayed. The cards would be displayed in a cross, like the buttons of a controller. The player would simply press A, B, X or Y to select the card which is the good answer.

I find this would streamline things further and make the game more approachable. I can also see how that would be a fun alternative for tablets where you could just touch the card as opposed to type which is sometimes difficult on phones and tablets (to me anyway).

So what do you think? Aye or nay?

I agree that displaying a few cards that the players could select from is better option.  While in some respect as multi sensory/behavioral experience, typing could help with reinforcing learning in other ways, it's better to change it for the reasons mentioned.     From a learning perspective, having multiple options to choose from could help with eliminating incorrect answers thus providing more ways to engage the brain and could create more associations that is beneficial for learning.  Perhaps initially, to make it easier, only two cards could be shown and then later on show more. 

One other aspect that could help learning and could be easily implemented since there are only a limited number of kana characters, is adding sound to the characters.  If the player selects the wrong character then a generic "fail" type sound could be played but if the correct character is selected, then that character sound would be spoken.   It might be trickier to apply for full words but may be possible since intonations doesn't change much and the sounds that aren't covered by kana characters could be added.  I've heard quite a few synthesized languages over the years and their quality is getting better and better but getting/licensing such system might not be beyond the scope of the project.


On a similar topic, I got the sense that the trainer jellyfish(?) character talking in a gibberish language reminded me more of other soft spoken Asian languages rather than Japanese that has a "harder" pronunciation - e.g. k, d sounds especially when doubled.  In that respect, I would prefer to have no speaking.

[Zizka]

On a similar topic, I got the sense that the trainer jellyfish(?) character talking in a gibberish language reminded me more of other soft spoken Asian languages rather than Japanese that has a "harder" pronunciation - e.g. k, d sounds especially when doubled.  In that respect, I would prefer to have no speaking.

The speech has been removed.

I agree that displaying a few cards that the players could select from is better option.  While in some respect as multi sensory/behavioral experience, typing could help with reinforcing learning in other ways, it's better to change it for the reasons mentioned.     From a learning perspective, having multiple options to choose from could help with eliminating incorrect answers thus providing more ways to engage the brain and could create more associations that is beneficial for learning.  Perhaps initially, to make it easier, only two cards could be shown and then later on show more. 

Speaking of which, we talked about that during the meeting today and it's our objective to have this done for the end of the week. Here's a mockup I did to give Jeff a better of what I wanted:

One other aspect that could help learning and could be easily implemented since there are only a limited number of kana characters, is adding sound to the characters.  If the player selects the wrong character then a generic "fail" type sound could be played but if the correct character is selected, then that character sound would be spoken.   It might be trickier to apply for full words but may be possible since intonations doesn't change much and the sounds that aren't covered by kana characters could be added.  I've heard quite a few synthesized languages over the years and their quality is getting better and better but getting/licensing such system might not be beyond the scope of the project.

Getting sound support isn't in the cards at this point in time. Japanese isn't a hard language to pronounce compared to Chinese and I find it fairly accessible to beginner pronunciation-wise. I can also see how having the cards being said all the time might get on people's nerves (I know it would get on mine but I'm easily annoyed).

For the last few months that I've been checking out this devlog, I agree that it seems like it is more about creating a "game" with an educational aspect tagged on rather than vice versa.  Much like Typing of the Dead kept the same gameplay content from House of the Dead and simply replaced the shooting game mechanic with typing.  However, in that case, creating the typing version was simpler since all the other game content was already done.  While Super Toaster focuses only on the learning version, the game content also needs to be created.  It may be just my preference but if I was putting that much effort into the game content, then I would create both educational and game versions.  But that's just me.

I think it might be a bit early to have a good idea about the project as a whole so far. I think once XP system is added (next week) and the inventory system (soon after), we'll get a better, whole picture of what the game is about.

Working on the trailer for Greenlight this week by the way, as an extra bit of news.

[Zorg]

That last mockup is very cool. Transferring that selection cross from the attack/defense machanic to the card guessing mechanic is consequent and a clever move.

You could apply the same technique to the initial attack/defense selection. UP: attack cross, DOWN: defense cross.

Ideally you will be able to control the whole game with 4 arrows (or ABXY or swipe in 4 directions).