Vocab Volley teaches foreign language vocab through dodgeball-like 1v1 gameplay.
Format
Engine
Unity 3D
Team Size
Five
Development Time
Two weeks
Roles & Tasks
Technical Designer
Iterating On Core Gameplay To Promote Learning
Implementing UI
UI Designer
Designing Menus
Designing Split-Screen HUD
Design Goals
Go “beyond entertainment” and create a project that serves a purpose
Reinforce foreign language vocabulary in a new and exciting way that makes reviewing the words feel like play rather than work
Design Discussion
The idea with this project was to tackle something in the realm of Applied Games which in this case ended up being a Vocab-reinforcing game. The basic idea for gameplay is a dodgeball-style arena game where each player sees a word over their opponents head and they have to find that object in the world, pick it up, throw it at their opponent, and hit them to score points. The player with the highest score at the end of the game wins and both players get to see which words they were shown and, of the words they were shown, how many of them they successfully landed.
The decision to award points only on a successful hit was tied to us realizing a player who didn’t know the words would pretty easily be able to run around the environment picking up everything until they got a confirmation if we awarded points for only a pickup. We experimenting with deducting points for throwing the wrong item at your opponent but ultimately decided to simply award no points and warn the player that the item was wrong. Regardless of whether the item was right or wrong, whenever an item hits an opponent the player will hear the word read aloud so they might internalize which objects are which through auditory means as well as visual.
The earliest version of the loop had the words above opponents switching on a consistent timer and instantly switching on a successful correct hit. Ultimately this meant that players that didn’t act fast not only didn’t score points but were being dragged from word to word, increasingly getting frustrated while players that did know the word snowballed their advantage. That led us to changing to a more forgiving system that gives increasingly helpful hints over time (putting the word on the HUD instead of just above the player, putting exclamation points above the correct object in the world, putting the word in English on the HUD) if the player doesn’t successfully land the object and only switching the word on a successful hit. This new system allows players who know the words to succeed as they did before but gives players who don’t know the words as well a chance to get back in the game.
Stories
The method our programmer was using to generate the translations for our dictionary had a cap on how frequently it could pull new translations or how many translations it could get at all which meant I had to manually edit the JSON outputs with correct formatting to patch up any words that got left behind.
Our UI artist didn’t end up having enough time to make any of the UI assets she wanted to besides our title because we had so many 3D assets to be made so I had to make all of our UI myself using in engine techniques and assets I made.
