Awesome

About RuneSlayer

The general idea of RuneSlayer is to take the dopamine cycle/quick gratification/addiction forming mechanisms that are often employed in computer games (especially in the RPG genre) and use them for good, in the context of natural languages learning. In a more concrete terms it will look like this: your character will acquire "Runes" each representing a factoid in the data set you are learning. You will answer question about these Runes and for correct answers you will be rewarded with RP (Runic Points) and increase in the mastery of that Rune. The Runic Points are needed to attack enemies and perform other tasks (like maybe enchanting weapons, et c.) Once you master enough Runes you will be able to learn more and also get some skill points to make your character stronger.

The grand idea is to shorten the action-reward duration to increase motivation when studying. When you are learning a natural language The Reward (being fluent in that language) is very long time away and it's hard to use it to sustain the motivation to preform the necessary tasks to achieve it, that is repeated study sessions. Here you will have very short sessions (answering a handful of questions) that you can control the duration of (how much RP you need) and that you will need to do to almost immediately be granted a reward (progressing further in the game, your character becoming stronger, et c.).

Obviously I don't believe that you could introduce this game to someone who just wants to play a game and that he will accidentally learn a language. This is to be rather a tool for people who already are in the mind to learn a language and can use it as a crutch, to turn the pain of studying into pleasure of gaming (and maybe even a small addiction, like many a game tend to be)

Gameplay Screenshot

The graphics is currently put together from open art I've found around the web. Ideally I'd like to commission an artist to create art in a darker and more realistic style, but it is what is is for now. (Coincidentally if you'd like to hire/contract me, let me know, since I could use some currency now. I can program in Haskell and do other "computer things", I can also juggle, so you know, great value for your money).

Current version (0.1) is more of a demo, showcasing the vision of this a bit and there isn't really more then 5 minutes of gameplay there (and even that is a stretch). You start with 5 Runes (characters from hiragana a Japanese syllabary, as an example for now) there is a short tutorial, you can kill some enemies and get some items from chests distributed around the island, and that's it.

There is quite a bit of core things to do still, some major things need to be optimized, and so forth, but I feel like enough of the ground work is laid down now to showcase this. So here we are.

Setting things up

Currently I have only tested this on linux, and I still haven't setup CI to produce binaries yet, so you'll going to have to build it yourself.

First you'll going to have to install nix if you don't have it already:

$ curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

Then clone this repo & submodules:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/MaxOw/RuneSlayer

And build it with nix-build (when running this command for the first time, even with binary caches this will probably take a while so go make yourself some coffee / read some news).

$ nix-build
$ result/bin/RuneSlayer # to run it

Alternatively if you'd like to enter development environment:

$ nix-shell

Then:

$ cabal configure; cabal build
$ dist/build/RuneSlayer/RuneSlayer # to run it

License

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.