The memory game idea started out as a clone of the children’s game, “Memory”. This version evolved to be a bit more practical for training – first into I show you the tiles that will be flipped upside down, then ask you which tile has character “X” on it.
I’m planning to take the game another direction…I don’t like the way it plays now (it is relatively difficult in only English, which is my bar for “too difficult”. I’m undecided between two options:
#1) Show the player a few tiles to search for (maybe start with 3)…then hide them and flip over all the board tiles so you have to find them. It works on short-term memorization of the characters, sort of like remembering a phone number. I like it because I can scale it up fairly easily.
#2) Show the player a very large board with all the tiles and have them try to memorize all the positions of the tiles (maybe allow repeats). Then ask a series of questions where they try to find tiles – every time they get one right, it’s eliminated from the board and they play until they clear the whole board. When you miss a question, you get to see which character was underneath the tile you flipped. I like this because it’s a bit more of a game and because it works on different skills, but I don’t like that it requires a skill not all that useful for learning the language (large-scale memorization). I also think I personally would enjoy game mode 1 more.
I’m going to start with game mode 1…mainly because of that final reason. I think I’d enjoy it more, and I was my target audience when I started development. First I’m working on a pesky bug where the game errors out after a few rounds so…priorities!