Love Without Barriers

Inspiration

I like to learn languages in my free time but have come across a stump in my progress. I watched a lot of videos on tips to progress and realized I need to focus more on my reading and listening skills. However, whenever I try to work on those skills I always find the content I come across to be too boringgg. When I try learning via video games, they are too advanced as they're written for native speakers. I want to play games that are around my learning level to help me engage in language immersion

What it does

Love Without Barriers is a short interactive visual novel game that immerses you in foreign conversation. The aim of the game is for target learners to practice their reading skills and comprehensible input to have successful blind dates

How we built it

I built the entire game with Figma, except for the character models (and food), they were drawn by me digitally with the drawing software Medibang and ibisPaint X. For the "choose your own adventure" style of the game, I used Figma's prototype feature to string every action and reaction together.

Challenges we ran into

There were a lot of slides I had to make, and organizing them took a lot longer than I thought it would be. After adding all the dialogue, some of it wouldn't pop up and one of the endings wouldn't show towards the end of one of the dates.

This initially was supposed to be exported to PowerPoint for animations, sound effects, and finishing touches, but creating such things proved difficult for me and it honestly ruined all of my previous fonts. Having to duplicate the entire second date and keeping track of which was what was on PowerPoint was also confusing at times.

By putting an emphasis on the structure of my game and making sure everything ran smoothly, the aesthetics suffered quite a bit. I wanted to create a logo and add sound effects and music, but it would've been far too much

The tutorial page was supposed to give details about certain aspects of the game, including a feature I never got around to adding: color-coded context clues. They were supposed to aid the player in knowing the key vocabulary and grammar to understand what their date is asking them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud that I was able to finish it on time! I honestly didn't believe I would make it with how many slides I had to create and polish. Although it might not be easy to catch, I'm proud of adding subtle hints about the dates' personalities even with their limited slides.

What we learned

I learned how to export a Figma presentation onto PowerPoint, how to utilize the prototype feature on Figma to make my "presentation" interactive, and how to get around weaknesses by using design and presentation software as a game engine

What's next for Love Without Barriers

Love Without Barriers' next step would be to add more language options and graduate from a slideshow to a real interactive visual novel.

Some features I would love to add to make it a full-fledged game:

• more diverse characters with distinctive personalities
• simple animations (characters sliding in and out of the frame, shaking in shock, love bar slowly rising instead of a jump cut, etc)
• a notepad you can use to jot down any vocab and/or grammar that you can pull up anytime during your gameplay
• sound effects and music to suit each mood
• different responses giving different amounts of points (instead of the base 50/0 in the demo) and different date outcomes based on how far the love bar progressed
• repeat dates for successful dates along with seeing their contacts be added onto your phone
• potentially picking a lover at the end of the game maybe...?

Built With

• figma