Game Prototype

I tried building a game around drilling signs to see if it could be any fun.

Forgive the programmer’s art; its only a prototype. The player controls the characters on the right to fight the characters on the left. There are six stages and it can be downloaded here (for Windows).

To play, one clicks on “Sign Magic” when it lights up. Then you’re shown a grid of spells like this:

The blue column are the “easy” spells. The yellow is “medium” and the red is “hard”. The white column mixes all three, and the black column is hard with no partial credit. (Definition of “easy” and “hard” below.)

After you choose a spell, you’re shown an English word and three buttons (for three signs). You choose which sign goes with the word!

It gives you three words (you must choose three signs) and then the spell is cast. The strength depends on how well you scored in the signing mini-game. Again, the black column gives no partial credit.

The definition of “easy” and “hard” here is of course subjective. In this version, the difficulty level of each sign-word pair was decided with the assumption that the player is not a native speaker of ASL.

There are only three hundred words configured in the dictionary.

I may, later this week, expand it to the full 1500 words and reassess the “difficulty” of each sign-word pair for deaf students learning English.

A few side notes if you wish to try playing it.

• I forgot to add a pause button. You can pause it by opening the “Sign Magic” menu; when its open, the game waits for you.
• If you do not know the signs, you can complete the game using exclusively the blue (easy) column. It will adjust to you. It will just give a smaller score at the end.

I do not know if we will make anything more like this. This is just a prototype to see if its any fun or not, and to see if it actually works for study purposes.

This prototype was written in three days in just 2700 lines of Java code!

-Joe Cooper

Comments

[Nicolas Fauvet]

Woa, this is a great educational tool.
I like to know that deaf people are not forgotten.
When my child is able to play video games, I would like him to play with this one :)
Keep on.