Welcome to the first development log of Hayaku, attempt number six! (I explain why it’s the sixth attempt in my post on the history of Hayaku.)
Half the game jam time is past, and while the project is nowhere near releasable, it’s playable and in much better shape than it has ever been over the past six years. To start, check out this video of me playing:
For this first leg of the jam, I focused on implementing the core game loop that you see in the video: getting some questions scheduled and showing hints, progressing through the full deck and up- and de-ranking correctly and incorrectly answered questions, and finally, making the tap-slide control according to spec. Godot made achieving all of this straightforward, except one instance where the UI is slightly off-center and I didn’t find a way to make it align naturally — however I already came up with a way to do it through minimal coding.
What you see in the video is basically it, that’s the whole game. You will spend 99% of your time on this gameplay screen. Every part of it will be improved, but you will still open it, start the game and then keep going through the questions. Originally designed to be mobile-first, it can work on the desktop in horizontal mode, but it is really meant to be played in short bursts while you’re waiting for something else.
Last week I brought it to a local gamedev meetup in the same state you see in the video and got favorable responses. As I explained multiple times during the meetup, the goal of the game is to make you comfortable reading Japanese (kana and later kanji) so you start reading faster over time.
This is an aspect of learning Japanese that most learning resources gloss over. You are supposed to learn to automatically read kana “naturally”, but I experienced a long period where I was shaky and that hindered my ability to learn kanji because there was this moment or two of hesitation. In language learning, it’s much better to learn very few things very well — they will be committed to long-term memory and you will never forget them, and that will be your permanent foundation you can slowly expand.
To round up the meetup demo, I added one question that showcases the later stages of Hayaku. Here you are already past romaji questions, where you learn kana, and on to kanji:
Godot’s grown-up text layout engine lets me fully implement my idea to highlight the matching parts of phrases to help you make sense of them. At the same time, my simple ruby text (or “furigana” if it’s specific to Japanese) implementation shows you the reading of the kanji.
You don’t need to “win” in Hayaku and you shouldn’t be afraid to “lose”. If you get a question wrong, it simply shows you the correct answer and moves on to the next question. The question that you got wrong is de-ranked and will be shown again. To “progress” (get new questions) you need to get all the previous questions right. It’s simple but effective, a variation of spaced repetition.
I really hope I get to release the game this time. The next meetup is early in September, see you then in the next devlog!