Race to Literacy - ICS4U0 Final Project

A brief description of my final project.

For my final project I partnered with Peter to create a game called “Race to Literacy” that would help young people and foreigners better understand the English language. The game was designed to be as simple and intuitive to play as possible - the only controls are the arrow keys and the “enter button”. The game also includes instructions with clear visuals to help the reader understand the story line.

The game is made up of 3 levels, each increasing in difficulty. The game was broken up into levels to allow the user to resume game play at whatever level they leave off at.

Why I Chose This

I decided to make a game that teaches the English language because I was once an ESL student myself and understand the difficulty in learning the English language. I also decided on this game topic because I felt that it was an underrepresented game market, as most games I could find online were either typing games or games that required a lot of preexisting English knowledge.

The final reason that I chose this topic was because the game is timeless. The English language is thousands of years old. Unlike my colleagues’ games about current events/TV shows, my game will be relevant for an eternity, or at least until humanity develops a new language.

Gameplay Components

The gameplay is made up of 3 key components:

Movement

The player can move both left & right and is able to jump over obstacles and holes in the ground. Falling through a hole in the ground will result in the loss of a life. Each level starts off with 3 lives - at zero lives the game will display a message to the user and restart the level.

Learning Encounters

The second key component of the gameplay would be when your character encounters a friendly character and engages in a slideshow style conversation with them, where they are taught common English terms that will appear at the next and final boss.

Combat

The final key component of our gameplay is when the character encounters an enemy and is forced into combat, where the player is forced into answering a series of multiple choice questions to defeat the enemy. Every wrong answer takes one of the 3 lives the main character starts with. At the end of every level is also a boss that puts together all the lessons learnt in that level into one big “battle”.

Technical Details

The game’s programming is made up of a JPanel that is repainted every 10ms as long as the KeyListener detects that a key is depressed. In this game the character only moves up and down - the background is what moves left and right.

All source code including an executable JAR file can be found on my GitHub page.

THANKS FOR READING