Chinese Storekeeper's Journey

Memorize the mandarin names of countless items lining your shelves and race against the clock to fulfill each customer's order. The faster you serve, the higher your score climbs. Learn by doing.

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Inspiration

My main source of inspiration came from a mini-game within the video game "Noun Town." I was motivated to transform the shopkeeper mini-game from Noun Town into a standalone experience.

What it does

It teaches you chinese vocabulary in a fun and immersive way. The player can pick up "learn items" to get infromation about their translation in mandarin chinese. Customers request items and the player has to throw the correct learn item at them. Each correct answer increases the score and there is a time limit.

How we built it

I uses Unity3D and the https://github.com/picoxr/MicroWar Project provided by pico as a base. This way I could use existing implementation for controller interaction and hand tracking.

Challenges we ran into

  • Acquiring High-Quality Chinese Audio: One of my initial obstacles was obtaining quality audio samples of spoken Chinese. Fortunately, I discovered a website that offers free, properly licensed, generated audio: https://ttsmp3.com/text-to-speech/Chinese%20Mandarin/.

  • Managing Customer Behavior: I needed to make sure customers queued up and left once their orders were fulfilled. To address this, I utilized Unity's navmesh agent.

  • Hand Tracking and Object Throwing: Initially, I encountered difficulties with hand tracking for throwing objects. To enhance the user experience and reduce player frustration, I automated the throwing process. Now, players only need to pick up an item and release it, and it will be thrown automatically, eliminating the need for complex throwing calculations. Picking up objects works by using a pinch gesture, as this was provided by the micro war example

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am happy with the design of the game. In my testing the game had a very good framerate. I enjoyed playing the game and learned some new words myself. In my view the game project has a very neat architecture that allows for an easy way of adding new learn items and levels. The learn items are scriptable objects.

What we learned

  • Starting with an existing projects can give you important insights in game design. It also speeds up development by a lot.

  • Organizing your project is very important.

What's next for Chinese Storekeeper's Journey

  • Expanding to More Levels: I intend to introduce additional levels to provide players with more challenges and learning opportunities.

  • Enhanced Customer Dialog: Currently, customers only request products by name. I aim to improve their dialogues by introducing complete sentences, enhancing the learning experience. This, however, will require teaching these new sentences to the player in advance.

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