My current project overview:

[Bustaballs]

Story concept:

You are an American high school student who recently transferred to a Japanese school as a result of your move due to your parents' business related issues. Everything seems fairly normal at first but you eventually begin to notice people around you becoming more and more confused during conversations. As the days go by, people use less and less words while speaking. Less than a month later, no one can write, read, speak, or understand anything outside of general body gestures and emotion. For some strange reason, you aren't affected. You begin your quest to search for the reason behind this as chaos surrounds the land.

You meet up with others like yourself and team up. Among them is an old man with a few answers. A horde of monsters led by an unknown force are stealing every letter and word from the Japanese and English languages. With some guidance from the old man, it's up to you and your new friends to learn the language of Japan in order to weaken and defeat the enemies who threaten the world as we know it.



Gameplay concept:

The game will play similar to traditional 8-16bit JRPG style. When monsters attack or defend, you will need identify various letters of the Japanese alphabets along with some simple words (initially in Romaji) in order to deflect, defend, or weaken monsters. Many different types of study games will be introduced in battle as you level up. Also, the time you are given to complete identify the letter or word will decrease as you level. The more difficult monsters become, the more letters and words will be introduced. Hopefully, toward the end of the game, you should be able to read each letter of the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets and read (not necessarily understand, just pronounce) them when written as words. You should also be able to understand enough words and sentence structure to speak very basic Japanese. Other misc things may be included, such as numbers in their kanji format.




Other notes:

Upon nearing end of the project, I may decide to continue the work on sequels for more advanced Japanese study. The source code will be released to other developers who would like to expand on the idea or convert it to other languages. Thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments.

[Juha Kämäräinen]

Good luck! Dont forget to send screenshots of this project :)