icons on Match originally turned grey when pressed; decided that people needed to see what they had actually selected to opted for a kind of glow.
Icons
Lookin’ at icons for the app screen
colours
every icon originally had a different colour, but for consistency’s sake I repeated the first five in the end
Further Aesthetic Development
As found on my desktop?
Kanji colour
Also I forgot to add: looking at using black for the kanji backgrounds, as it seems cleaner than grey and fits better with whatever system I will end up using for kanji levels – makes things clearer and definitely helps if silver is used. I also kind of liek the white, but I think black is best.
Kanji Leveling
One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is how to keep people coming back. With languages (or anything that requires memorisation) engaging with something once or twice helps you learn it for a short time but if you don’t continue to review this thing you’ll eventually forget it, no matter how well you once knew it. So I not only want people to complete the levels, but to come back and replay them later on. I’m starting to implement little things that aid this habit, like the use of a star rating; people want to get all three stars, so they play the game until they have them. But once they do, that tends to be it; there’s no more fun to be found in playing that level.
One important thing I want to add in is kanji levels, where kanji levels up or down depending on how many time it has been selected correctly or incorrectly. This also gives the user a good indication of how well they have learnt each kanji. These are an attempt to fix up some sort of system relating to this:
Updated Aesthetics
Working with Android
Is a pain in the ass. Well, when it comes to designing for multiple screen sizes, that is. This is the most important thing from the article, though:
Sound effects collection for later review
Short Term Memory
So, I figured it was probably a good time to start looking into this because I completely overlooked it as I went on my merry way creating games. The research that was originally done into short term memory suggests that adults can retain knowledge of an average of seven bits of information for the short term, or between five and nine. It has been suggested, though, that more recently people are only capable of retaining four or five new ‘informative things’.
I took this test and turns out if I focus enough I can recall ten letters after seeing them briefly (for the last lot I hadn’t even finished reading the letters before they left the screen) the results of which are in this chart:
In any case, it may pay to shrink my kanji amount down to four per level for better retention, because users are having to learn the symbol, the meaning and the pronunciation all at once. This may actually be helpful in the long run though, as remembering information is easier the more you have to connect it to.
Short term memory can be extended through repetition or rehearsal, which is what my game is built on. Overall level sets will still be in ordered sets of twenty.
HEX kanji 