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[tristydee]

HI!


(this image is more recent, but I just wanted to give a better impression of the game)

I'd like to tell you about Lingotopia, a language learning game. The idea of the game is that you play a little girl lost in a strange, fantastical city full of anthropomorphic animals who speak a real language (French, Spanish, Japanese etc). By playing the game you learn words one at a time and can begin to find your way around this strange city and perhaps even find a way home.



I've released a tiny little first version of the game which doesn't yet contain the city, just a dialogue mini game and a few words to learn. If you'd be interested in playing that, then here's the link:  https://tristandahl.itch.io/lingotopia. My plan is to release little demos like this every few months, so that I can build up a small community around the game as early as possible.

If you play the game and have any feedback please let me know. I'm going to work on adding more words to learn with another type of minigame for the next version, where the rabbit below will also make an appearance.



I also have a google sheets document where lovely people such as yourself can add translation for text that will be in the next demo. Any help with this would be hugely appreciated.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YKL_lKNgJKWTVng1KtZtaCMfIyu_Ljjf51MMGBdS_7A/edit?usp=sharing. The demo on itch has 13 languages, and if I could expand upon that (or even just match it) for subsequent versions of the game it would be amazing.

That's it for today, thanks for reading!

[tristydee]

I've uploaded a new version of the game. It's identical for most of the languages I'm afraid. But if you're interested in learning German or Dutch there are now more characters to meet and words to learn.

https://tristandahl.itch.io/lingotopia

Here's a lovely deer you'll be able to meet


I added analytics to this verison of the game, so soon I'll be able to tell what languages people are choosing and how far they make it in the game. I can recommend Amplitude for this, as unlike Unity Analytics for example, one can also send analytics from webGL builds.

The next step for me is to build a city where you'll walk around and meet these animals. I plan on using Houdini for that, as they're procedural tools should make that much easier and quicker to do than other 3d tools.

Okay, thanks for reading!

[odedro987]

I'm definitely gonna watch this devlog, I adore any attempt at language learning/teaching.
It sounds really cool! I'm gonna try it for sure.

[tristydee]

Awesome, I hope you have fun. And if you've got any feedback feel free to shoot it my way

[Tuba]

That's a cool concept. Added a portuguese column to your document.

One thing worries me though. In some cases there are no clear equivalent words in different languages. Like, there are things expressed as an adjective in a language that can be expressed as a verb in other. Or one word becoming multiple words.
For instance, the verb "to be" can be translated as both "ser" or "estar" in portuguese, depending on the context. If you're talking about being something like "I am a mailman", you would use "ser" (Eu sou um carteiro) and if you're talking about being somewhere (I am on the street), you would use "estar" (Eu estou na rua).

Also, "little girl" can be translated to portuguese as "pequena garota" (pequena = little, garota = girl), but we usually don't use adjectives like that, we usually change to word to it's diminutive or augmentative (not sure if that's even a thing in english), so instead of "pequena garota" it's more common to use "garotinha" which means the same thing.

Could be tricky to develop a system to watch out for these cases, but I really like concept and hope you're successful with it. Good luck!

[tristydee]

Awesome! Thanks so much for translating! I'll upload another build with Portuguese ASAP! Yay! 

Thanks for pointing that issue out. It's not a problem if there's no direct equivalent for a word. The way the system works at the moment is that it looks through every word in a sentence and sees if there's a translation for that word. So if the word I marked in red in the google sheet isn't included in the translation, it's no problem, and the game will try to choose a different word.
Right now the list of words that can be translated is quite small, but once there are more words that can be translated, then it should be fine. The fallback at the moment is just to allow you to proceed to the next dialogue if there's no word to learn.
I've added an explanation to the google drives document to make it clear that it's not a problem if the translation doesn't include the red word.

I hope that makes sense! Thanks again!

[valrus]

Looks neat!

Another piece of inspiration might be RezWorld, the Cherokee Nation's language-learning game where you go around a mixture of a fantastic and mundane world using Cherokee to accomplish your goals.

If you've never done them, Linguistic Olympiad puzzles might be a good inspiration (ioling.org, nacloweb.org, etc.), especially the ones where you're given a language you've never heard of before and work your way up, using pure logic, to being able to construct complete sentences.

For languages with which I'm already roughly familiar, this isn't too difficult, but it would be very difficult for languages where I'm a complete novice.  Something where there's more evidence about what the entire sentence means would help.  (Like I can guess that "tori" means "bird" in Japanese here, but that sentence as a whole is entirely opaque to me.  It'd be nice to be able to drill down and get more information about other words, whether that's through hint pictures, being able to buy translations, having a word bank in English where I can drag words to their Japanese counterparts, etc.)

Small note: The construction "What word or phrase do you think means X?" is a bit awkward in English when the question runs in the language-X-to-English direction.  "What do you think X means?", "What word or phrase does X translate to?", or "How would you say X in English?" might be better here.

[tristydee]

Thanks so much for the references valrus! I'll be sure to check them out!

I don't mind the game being very difficult initially, as I think that's fitting to the motive of the game 'being lost in a strange city where you don't speak the language'. Did you notice that you can mouse over words you know to get a translation? So, hopefully after one's played for an hour or two a good portion of the words in a sentence would have a translation on mouse over. But if I get the impression that this isn't enough, then once the game's a bit longer I'll have to come up with a different solution

And thanks for the English correction, living in Germany for the past few years hasn't done my English any favours

[tristydee]

I've worked on implementing the city to the game in the last couple of weeks. One can now walk around and talk to the NPCs in order to learn new words and receive 'quests'.



 An additional method of learning words I've added is that by clicking on certain objects when walking around (windows, trees etc) you'll learn that word. So if you're learning German and click on a tree you'll see a popup with the word 'Baum'.

The next step is to make the game prettier, I've started learning to use Houdini because it allows one to create buildings procedurally and has a plugin for Unity. So I can create one building in Houdini and then have various instances of that building in Unity with different window shapes, varying amount of floors and so on.

[Zireael]

What languages do you support so far?

[tristydee]

Hey Zireael,

as I speak German that's the one language I can assure is up to date. Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish are the other languages with quite a bit of text translated at the moment.
Then there are a few other languages that only have partial translations at the moment.

You can see which in the picture below.

[tristydee]

It's been a long time since I've last posted... and in that time I've completely redone the art style!

It's amazing what a bit of art direction can do...
The characters have also been redone by a friend of mine. I think the geometric art style suits the low poly look of the city and should help bring the 2d and 3d art styles together.

There's a new demo of the game on itch.io, you can explore one small part of the city, talk with four lovely creatures and learn a dozen words in several languages.
It'd be great if you gave it a try! And I'm looking forward to any feedback you have.

https://tristandahl.itch.io/lingotopia

[oahda]

eesti is the beesti!

and so are languages \ø/

Good idea!

Might edit some of the sheets if that's okay, and if they are still relevant? I see a few that bother me somewhat.

[tristydee]

thanks! And yeah, everything on the google sheets is still relevant. So if you think there's anything that should be improved in your language then go for it! Thanks so much!

[Manuel Magalhães]

This looks great! I would recommend mentioning the languages' dialect in the game, due to different words (like "trem" in Brazilian Portuguese vs. "comboio" in European Portuguese) and different conotations (for example, the different meaning of "rapariga" between PT-EU and PT-BR).

[tristydee]

Thanks Manuel! That's a good tip. To be honest I don't even know which Portuguese dialect I'm using in the game... but I'll figure it out (if you don't tell me first  ) and include it in the next update

[Manuel Magalhães]

From the Google Spreadsheet document, it's Brazilian Portuguese.

[tristydee]

Okay, thanks Manuel! I'll add that in the next update.

Just uploaded a linux build now, also updated the game with Finnish and Norwegian, which some wonderful people added to the translations!

https://tristandahl.itch.io/lingotopia



When I released the last demo a week ago I sent out a little press release to a dozen or so websites. This was a good reminder of how hard it is to get press attention these days. The only website to mention the game was warpdoor (and they only do pic+link). When I was a student a few years ago it seemed easier to get RPS to write about my games. But this is at least a good reminder that I need to put some effort into the game's twitter and to try and build up a following that way.
https://twitter.com/LingotopiaGame

[tristydee]

I've been working on the art a little bit more and thought I'd show you some before and after shots.

After reworking the water:

and before:

After initially trying and failing to get a material to reflect the buildings on the other side of the river, I stumbled upon this tweet by Oskar Stalberg: https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/851489860561063937. So right now I'm using two river meshes (one with a moving texture and one semi transparent one) and then I duplicated and flipped the meshes on the other side of the river.


In the demo available on itch ( https://tristandahl.itch.io/lingotopia), one can click on the menu in game to bring up a screen that has links to the game's twitter, fb page and mailing list. Apart from feedback and getting more translations, getting people to subscribe to the mailing list etc was one of my main goals in releasing demos of the game this early. I got the idea from the very succesful Mini Metro (which has always had a webgl demo of the game available on their website).
From the 80 or so downloads I've gotten in the last two weeks, four people have subscribed to the mailing list. Both 80 and 4 are very small numbers, but hopefully, as the game becomes prettier and bigger, both of those numbers will increase. I'm quite happy that anyone has signed up at all to be honest.
(I'm going to put the mailing list here for good measure http://eepurl.com/cv--31

That's it for today! Thanks for reading!

[TheWanderingBen]

Neat idea! Posting to follow. Good luck!