Hey everybody!
I'm currently working on a game called gaijiN5 that you might be interested in! It's a Visual MUD game to teach Japanese by immersion using various memory and psychology tricks to make it stick.
It's currently in it's Kickstarter phase right now, but funding is vital to setting up a team rather than making it a one man show(which I'll still do if I have to cause I think the idea is great). I was hesitant on evangelising to forums as I see a lot of subpar projects do, but I can't think of any better way to get the word out about it(I'd love to hear suggestions).
Also I figure by reaching out, I can answer any questions you have in your own environment!

I'm sure when it is completed you will find it to be a very efficient and fast way of learning!
If you want to know more about the game, you can check it out at http://www.gaijiN5.com

After reading the huge wall of text that is the description of this game, it actually sounds really, really cool.
But there are a few things that concern me. It sounds like a lot of the funding is just for the purpose of you taking a trip to japan for some of the necessary work. Giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming this isn't an elaborate scheme to just get you a free trip to Japan... have you ever even been to Japan before? Are you fluent in Japanese? What is your personal level of Japanese knowledge and why do you think you are qualified to make this game?
Also the pricing seems absurdly high for the final release when it comes out.

To be honest, even though the game itself sounds really cool, I think this kickstarter really has no chance of raising that much money. The subset of people who want to learn Japanese, who would do it by playing a game, who would spend a hundred bucks for a subscription to just the N5 level, AND who will donate to a kickstarter project is probably just... not very many people at all.

The game sounds interesting from the description...the examples of terrible Japanese throughout the page don't fill me with confidence though.

I'm assuming you (OP) wrote the Japanese on the kickstarter page, but the in-game dialogue is being done by a Japanese person/more advanced speaker? In that case though, I have to doubt your ability to fully understand, and therefore take responsibility for as project leader, such an important part of this language-immersion game when you write Japanese such as "今日に日本語が習う".

That, and the pricing seems ridiculous as mentioned above.

EDIT: The more I look at this, the more it looks like a scam or just a terribly planned project....

This was probably the worst place to advertise your Kickstarter, I'm sorry to say. I am probably going to echo most of the incoming sentiments; I'll just bring up the reason for the cost amount.

It is ridiculous to ask that much for others to fund your trip to Japan just so you can authenticate information, and also maintain creative freedom over photos of scenery, and the like. You do not *need* to go to Japan for this even if you want to. If it was that important, you would probably find more success if you had a proof of concept creation available. If that convinces people of the necessity, then you should be able to make the necessary updates to your product after your funded trip. Your reasons for going to Japan directly are *nice* for polishing the final product, but not *required*.

As for the other half of the money... Asking people to pay for you to eat? While I don't agree with how many times Kickstarter has just become a site for pre-ordering products, it really should not be a charity for your livelihood. It should be a charity for strictly your project. I suppose this is really just my opinion though, because in the end whatever Kickstarter says is okay is okay.

Sorry to rain on your parade like that. I just cannot get behind the motivation for the costs incurred. I have no opinion on the actual content; either way it would be a less problematic issue in my opinion.

The most constructive thing I could say is no matter how good your Kickstarter pitch could have been, you will probably find more success if you had put the Kickstarter our after you get your alpha product (proof of concept) released. Prove that you can get a very basic version of it to work, and you'll convince more people.

Since the others have already talked about the Japanese aspect of things...

"Midterm memory"?
You talk about using "psychology and memory tricks" in your title/subtitle, but do you have any knowledge of psychology?

"it shares an alphabet with Chinese which is the most spoken language in the world"
Do you know what an alphabet is? Are you aware that "Chinese" is not a language?

Zarxrax Wrote:The subset of people who want to learn Japanese, who would do it by playing a game, who would spend a hundred bucks for a subscription to just the N5 level, AND who will donate to a kickstarter project is probably just... not very many people at all.

Explain Rosetta Stone.

Anyway, as others have suggested, you should have had the alpha prepared before launching the Kickstarter. You don't cite any qualifications you have for being a game developer, and so contributors would feel more reassured if they had something more than just screenshots.

On a related note, the project description states the concept in rich detail, but has little to say about the execution other than "I'm going to Japan to explore Tokyo and take photos for the backgrounds." If you were an experienced game dev with a successful release or two, people would probably give you the benefit of the doubt, but you're not (at least based on the the info you gave) and so you need to establish credibility.

You're asking for a lot of money for the final release, and so customers are going to expect a polished product. They want to know that the game will have good artistic direction, an interesting narrative, fun gameplay, and so on. Story excerpts, concept art, and gameplay demos would do a good job of showing this.

Your concept is great, but you need to do more work to show people that you're not just an overly ambitious, inexperienced developer and that this game can actually be released by Q2 of next year.

As others have pointed out, you have made many beginner-level mistakes such as
お早う->おはいよう instead of おはよう (and I don't think I've seen it in Kanji form; same goes for 今日は->こんにちは)
美味しいそう instead of 美味しそう
and as such I cannot trust you to make a game that teaches Japanese unless you plan to have someone else do all of the Japanese script.
Another thing I didn't like was the obnoxious 'Asian' font that is seemingly used to make everything look Chinese/Japanese (ex. in restaurants). This is just a nitpick of mine, but I think I'm not the only one who will be turned off by this.

Sorry for my personal opinion but $30.000.......?! And the going to Japan thing........

As other users says you have to give a lot more or change you strategy, otherwise it sounds like "donate me a huge bag of money so I can make a nice long trip to Japan".

For reference: a game with a similar budget goal

I've long thought of a game in which language acquisition was the primary objective. Thought it'd be cool to implement voice recognition as part of this imaginary game, with progressively harder objectives that require you to learn common phrases, grammar, collocations, etc., greyed out areas of the map would be inaccessible until tackling simpler social settings where you'd have to ask and answer questions vocally, have the slang and colloquialisms in the game continually updated by interested Japanese etc. etc. etc.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/297...f-gameplay

Then I found out some guy was doing something just like this. Except he doesn't do the voice input thing, or make language acquisition the main element of the game.

Animosophy Wrote:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/297...f-gameplay

That looks great.

I admire your enthusiasm and I've often thought a lot about ideas like this myself but...

You need to communicate your ideas in much less words and with better grammar and spelling. I read the whole thing and it's still not totally clear to me what exactly your idea is, why it's a great idea or why you need 30k to execute it. It also seems your enthusiasm springs from the idea's direct appeal to yourself but you evidently haven't considered its appeal to *other* people in terms of the story, gameplay etc.

Surely you could just make the game (or a demo scenario) with stand-in graphic assets that could be swapped out later at a cost much less than 30k. At any rate, covering N1 wouldn't require anywhere near as much content as later jlpt levels.

Quote:Funding Unsuccessful.

I'm afraid I'll have to agree with one of the previous posters, this was perhaps the wrong place to post about this project. For future reference, might I suggest posting it on Benny Lewis's (Fluent in Japanese in 3 months guy) forum?

I'll be brutally honest: I oppose this project simply because of the stereotypical chop-socky Chinese-style English font you used throughout the page. There is one thing I hate more than Comic Sans. And this is it.