Kanji Majyo

designdevgames

Learning Kanji with chainsaws and witches

This was my solo project for Dr. Sinzinger’s CS4397 Intro to Game Development course. The goal is to defeat enemies using your mastery of Kanji (Japanese Characters). Gameplay goes like this: you are presented with a word, say “ichi”, you then draw the characer in the center space (it helps to have a Wacom tablet for this). If you get it right, you have the option to “continue” or “push”. If you press “continue” you go on to the next character, but if you “push” you have to type in a word (in romaji) that uses that character, so jyuuichi (eleven) would work. You get double points for this, you can then push further, by doing this you have to write the word you used in Kanji on the board, for every character in the word you get two points toward damage to the enemy character. For the boss battle you will have to push a lot since he has 40 hit-points. I did the programming, scanning, and initial character designs. Jessi Barr took the character designs and inked them, which helped a lot in the scanning process. The final program was written in entirely in Java, with an early prototype using C++ w/SDL.

The Dojo

You could train in the Dojo while learning the characters.

Battle with Dr. Von Chainsaw

You then battle a series of bosses with your Kanji-magic