I have a problem. I can’t seem to commit to a single thing at a time. I have several articles for read.cash, Medium, and (hopefully soon) Publish0X. I’m also working on two novels simultaneously and have a series in the back of my head to write. I also have three different games bouncing around in my head, and I’ve done some preliminary work on creating some graphics and coding the menu.

Unfortunately, a massive financial setback has set some of those projects to the side, and my focus right now is on raising money for my dog’s surgery and, depending on what the vet finds, get her started on an experimental treatment. It’s expensive, but it’s my dog. I may even have to set up fundraising for her, which sucks, but whatever needs to happen just needs to happen, I guess.

In the meantime, as I sit here fidgeting that I don’t have the resources I need to get access to all the papers I need to access and replace my drawing tablet, I’m thinking of yet another game. One that will take a lot of time to complete, but if I’m successful, I can start an amazing series.

The Backstory, or How Animal Crossing Gave Birth to an Idea

I was tutoring someone studying Japanese and he was looking for some good games to get immersion practice in. I’m a fan of using native material to learn from, so the first thing that came to my mind was Animal Crossing. Not the new one, as this was quite a while ago, but the Nintendo DS version. The Nintendo DS was region-free, allowing you to play games from all over the world without fiddling with your console’s language settings.

It was the polyglot’s dream console! Unless you’re a PC gamer, of course.

Animal Crossing seemed like a perfect fit. After all, it features all kinds of everyday stuff: furniture, tools, rugs, carpeting, mortgage payments (ugh), fish, insects, homes, and even dinosaur fossils!

Most of the quests are fetch quests, too, with characters saying things like, “I lent X my fishing rod two weeks ago and he hasn’t given it back yet! Would you please get it back for me!”

These types of sentence patterns are very useful for learners, and a lot of intuitive language acquisition stems from getting used to sentence patterns. This is why sentence mining is so popular among polyglots.

Unfortunately, my student quickly grew tired of it. Not because of the game’s repetitive nature, but because there’s so much slang that it took him forever to parse through the dialogue! Booting up the game myself for a refresher proved him right. For anyone just hitting that B1 or below stage of language learning (and I know that Japanese doesn’t use the CEFR scale), this game is a nightmare!

The characters in shounen anime don’t use as much slang as these characters! Even if you set it to the easiest mode of using only kana and no kanji (Chinese characters that the Japanese adopted), the slang is overpowering.

There had to be a way to fix this!

An Idea Plants its Seeds

I was remembering this incident and suddenly was hit with an idea to start work on a game like Animal Crossing but for learners. This started as an Animal Crossing knock-off in my head where you just live in a town, interacting with others, and the game adjusts its language difficulty the more you play.

I kind of changed my mind on that.

My programming skills are probably not enough to complete such a game. Nintendo’s game has calendars with holidays programmed in, moves along in real-time, and would, in general, require a team of people, not just me and some native speakers I could bribe to record lines for me.

As such, I decided on a different path. I’m thinking of an RPG-style game, kind of like the Steam game Learn Hiragana to Survive, except it covers all levels of the JLPT. It will cover writing hiragana, katakana, and all the necessary kanji. It’ll also cover all necessary vocabulary and grammar.

As you progress through the game, which will be a full-blown story with a combat system and everything, the characters you meet will speak with progressing difficulty. The player has the opportunity to click on words in the dialogue box to see their meaning within the context of the sentence to avoid information overload. There will also be an option to get a full breakdown of the grammar if needed.

If you want to practice your listening comprehension, you can even turn the text off!

The tricky part will be getting native speakers to proofread and provide their voices to virtually every character.

If Successful, What Does This Mean?

If this is successful, I could easily make such games for a variety of languages. I could do anything from modern-day German to Babylonian, and I could also help save endangered languages, such as Onondaga, an Iroquois language.

Let me know what you think in the comments!