The more modest goal is to optimize learning arithmetic. The ultimate goal is to optimize learning practical knowledge to the greatest possible extent. I know this is ambitious, but I think I solved the most difficult problems involved already.
You can play a short demo on the website, though I warn it won’t be fun or effective at this early stage.
Hm. I couldn’t start the game. I tried Chrome and Librewolf. It’s stuck on the welcome screen. Looks interesting though!
It works for me. The only thing I can think of is it might be dropping touch inputs since I never tested the web version with a touchscreen device. Are you using touch inputs?
I’m on a laptop. Arch, btw.
I went here: https://superpractica.org/play/online/
I can get past the godot loading screen. I see “Super Practica”, “Play topics”, “Info”, etc. But clicking doesn’t work. Keyboard input doesn’t work.
My next guess is that it’s only taking left mouse clicks and you might have some setup giving it right mouse clicks or something. It’s expected that keyboard input doesn’t work. If you want to do more thorough playtesting and debugging with downloading some executable builds you can make an account and post in this chat. But either way I’ll make buttons take all clicks for the next release and it might solve the issue.
Thanks for the feedback!
In my experience, game and learning don’t go together. Either it’s a game or it’s a learning tool. Calling it a game will deter anyone actually looking for a game. But I’ll try it you never know.
Yeah right off the bat:
- the menu is confusing, too much layers and clicks to get to the first level and I wasn’t even sure I was getting somewhere or what I was even doing
- once in a level I had no clue what was expected of me at first, I had to go to the “debug” to get some information, and even that wasn’t enough, I had to randomly figure out the rest
- drag and dropping units / blocks over and over is not engaging whatsoever
- it would be nice to be able to skip to more advanced topics if basic addition through grid counting isn’t something you need 25+ levels to understand
I quit after 6 levels. I would recommend to work on UI/UX. A tutorial would be nice too. And maybe don’t lock everything so the player have to do every single level to get to the next topic (I don’t even know if it’s the case, but 6 levels was too much already). Maybe open a few topics at the same time, with some progression required to get more?
Finally, I wouldn’t call that a game. I would be interested to get to more advanced topics to start learning or challenging myself, but when I want to play a game I wouldn’t go for that. From what I’ve seen of “learning games” those past 3 decades, they’re not fun, they’re not really games, they only pretend to to either attract parents to buy for their kids, or to lure people who like games (usually disappointing). Or they’re not really about learning, they’re games pretending to be educative. The making of a good game, and the making of a good learning tool, may be fundamentally too different to be compatible, or people are just bad at mixing them, save maybe rare exceptions.
That’s the problem with sharing incomplete games. No matter how many disclaimers you put up, players will assume that you must be an incompetent designer, rather than that you didn’t implement everything you were planning yet. That’s not against you personally, I likely would do the same if I didn’t have this experience. It’s just inevitable I guess. Maybe I should have recommended watching the gameplay video first, which amounts to a tutorial. But then I would get less valuable information of how precisely players suffer as they play.
All levels are unlocked from the beginning. (There’s the assumption that I must be incompetent.)
For anyone actually learning a topic for the first time, the gradual progression is necessary. In fact, I cut it short to not bore players with the demo too much. But I still needed to demonstrate an effective progression.
Of course if you’re playing something that teaches you what you already know then it’s not going to be fun or interesting. If you already know basic addition, then not learning anything of value and not having fun is the expected outcome. If you give this demo to young children, it might make them cry, but at least they will learn a little bit of addition. It’s just unfortunate that I have to begin with basic addition because mathematics is built on other mathematics, mostly going back to counting and addition.
From what I’ve seen of “learning games” those past 3 decades, they’re not fun, they’re not really games, they only pretend to to either attract parents to buy for their kids, or to lure people who like games (usually disappointing). Or they’re not really about learning, they’re games pretending to be educative.
I agree with this except for the part that they’re not really games. Of course they’re games, just worthless games. And of course all games are learning games, because you have to learn to play the games you play to play them. So what’s called a learning game is a game that you supposedly learn something other than the game you play by playing, which is nonsense, hence their worthlessness.
The making of a good game, and the making of a good learning tool, may be fundamentally too different to be compatible, or people are just bad at mixing them, save maybe rare exceptions.
But good games are of course good learning tools for learning to play themselves. With this insight, you can begin to understand how far simply mechanizing mathematics can go toward learning mathematics efficiently. (Read my book for more!)
FYI, for me as a designer, talking about your experience is helpful, but advice isn’t. (This goes against frequently heard calls for “constructive criticism”. Regular criticism is preferable to me.) Thanks for the feedback to the extent it recounted your experience!
Can’t start the game either, but after reading how you deal with feedback, I’d rather not even try harder…
Thanks for the feedback!
Is there a better way to deal with feedback that I’m not aware of? I’m not sure what the criticism is intended to be here. Not trying harder is a fine and rational decision, so I don’t see the problem.
