A small online game for memorizing characters is seeking testers...

[weavhelper]

Hi,

Sorry to bother everybody. We are a small studio and have

designed a small online game to help people memorize Chinese

characters after one year's work. We think memorizing characters

is boring. Playing a game to memorize characters is much

more interesting, and playing a game together with friends

may be even better.

However, since we are all Chinese, we do not know if this

game works. We would like to seek for volunteers to test this

game, so we can make it better and better for everybody.

The details and download link is at:

http://weaverolg.co.uk/learnchinese/main-en.htm

Sorry again to bother everybody, may you have a nice day!

[dsrguru]

That sounds like a very good idea. People learn best when they are engaged, and a well-designed game is both entertaining and addicting, so people won't give up halfway through. I've heard of RPGs for learning Japanese kanji (here and here), but I've never seen one for Chinese hanzi. 祝你好运！

[stephanhodges]

Some small points while the game is downloading:

The downloader message line (where it shows the amount downloaded) is too small to read on a high resolution screen. Also, the download window does not have a minimize button.

There are several typos on your web site. They do not detract from your meaning. I only mention them because you asked for feedback.

a) Hanyu Pinyin not "Pingyin"

B) Many small grammar mistakes. Don't know if you want someone to go through and suggest better wording. So, skipping that.

c) Your use of "role" where I would normally expect "character" (meaning the person in the game) is an interesting dilemma, since you are already using "character" to refer to the hanzi characters. Perhaps it's just me, but "role" cannot be used in this way. A role does not "move", etc. Other words you could use are "persona" or "your persona", "person", "chosen image", etc. Or, you could just use "hanzi" for "chinese character"

At one place, you say there is "40" hours of trial play time. At another location, you say it will be "30" hours. I think you should fix this so that both say the same thing.

You really need to allow Hanzi characters for role names. It's a game to study Chinese, after all, and something is just missing (in my opinion) if it doesn't let you put in your Chinese name!

Of course, everything must be Unicode.

I understand this is in final prototyping stage. Above are just comments, not complaints!

Do you plan on having any multi-player options?

[stephanhodges]

Couple more issues / problems

Your form does not go back far enough for correct year of birth.

When you list the names of the roles to choose, put a (F) or (M) after the name

The "Introduce Role" links go to Chinese pages. Additionally, the link always jumps to the top of the page, instead of to the selected role character. You should add tags and position directly to the selected character/role.

Clicking on the bottom left corner of the small inset map causes an access violation on my Vista computer.

[stephanhodges]

One last issue, which seems to make the game unplayable right now.

Although it is very difficult to read the messages in Chinese, because they disappear very quickly (as a beginner, I read much slower!), the main problem is the "attacking" character blocks.

They all seem to be labeled with unreadable numbers and squares. Since I am using an English Windows Vista machine, perhaps your game isn't writing the messages in Unicode, but rather a local Chinese code page?

[weavhelper]

Thanks you very much for your response and carefully testing, we are much moved:)

1.We have corrected our website to remove incorrect spelling "Pingyin". As for trial account, there are 40 hours, and you can always register a new trial account if that is not enough . We also corrected some grammar error by Microsoft Word ... I think we will need some new member with better English for better wording...

2.We just discovered a bug in game server and just fixed it urgently--which will stop the character game after someone is logged out, and Chinese messages will be generated because the character game ended. Now the game server is restarted, and the game should be ready to play. If you see a player named Sunwing, it is me checking the server

3. Because we hope that novices at Chinese can also play this game, we make the game in pure English. And, well, our game system is not Unicode-based, because it was designed only for Chinese (both simplified and traditional) players at beginning in 2000, and we had never imaged that one day this game will be used for such "international" purpose...

Well, in the future, we can still upgrade this game to display Chinese for your computers, just like Chinese on the box in game. As for dialog, we will test some method to see if you can enter Chinese. It is indeed a big joke if a Chinese learning game can not input Chinese

As for other errors or comments, we will try to see if we can fix them in the following days and upgrade the game...

4. We have thought about multi-player games and other interesting games to help people memorize characters. For example, you may need to type the Pinyin of some word to cast some spells so you can fight monsters, just like Harry Porter. Well, we think that may be hard for novices because they can not recognize words quick enough. So we choose current game style, although it is not so exciting, everyone can play it at his own speed. In the future we may design some new games for advanced players

Well, we are sorry for that, because this game is some kind of "experiment", we can

just "borrow" game engine, data and server from projects that was totally irrelevant from

Chinese learning. So we cannot make everything well at beginning. However we will still

try to make things better and better. We just hope this game can help some people memorizing and reviewing Chinese characters, for it is indeed the most difficult part of learning Chinese. I did memorize some Japanese alphebet by this game of a different version

Thanks again for your great help

[weavhelper]

(More)

1.For several players logged into game before, we apology for the game server error. The server is ready now

2.We suggest a better URL if above URL does not work:

http://www.weaverolg.co.uk/learnchinese/main-en.htm

[jslee]

This looks interesting, I'm going to have a look