anki is already an addictive game to me.... [Gotta catch'em all kanjiman]

Hello,

thank you a lot for the input!

About the experience:
Actually you (usually) get more than 1 Experience Point for one card. It depens mainly on the age and ease of the card. A card which is answered for the first time actually gives you 10 experience points. I think on average it takes one day to reach the next level. I am looking for a way to make more level-ups without having to much work for creating all the ranks.

About items:
That's a great idea! I already thought about it a little, and I will probably also give some kind of currency for each answered card (e.g. 1 gold/answer). That could be used to buy items. Well, here are no limitations for imagination, and the possibilities a a bit overwhelming.

About German:
There will probably no German translation soon. And greetings from "central" Germany.  ;-)

About addiction:
If you are already addicted to Anki, that's great :-). But probably not everybody is. My goal is to take those heavily addictive characteristics from WoW, FarmVille and so on and use it for SRS. The average playing time of 15-year olds in WoW is about 4 hours a day. How much could one learn in that time? A lot!

About Anki's shared plugins:
Yes, as soon as the plugin is in a usable state :-)

About completing lists:
I think that would be really motivating! Especially if the goals are broken down further, like the RTK Chapters or different percentages completed of the JLTP levels. First I'll focus on general features which work on all kind of decks but later that would definitely be a nice feature.

About loosing XP:
I've considered this. I don't know if it's good a not. I am not trying to punish anybody for not doing his reviews but rather encourage him to do these. Maybe increased experience when cards are answered on the day they are due would do the trick. Same effect, but different "feeling" ;-)

Thanks for your comments, further input is highly appreciated of course! :-)

Last edited by Proxx (2010 October 14, 1:16 pm)

Cool stuff! I completely agree that it would be awesome to add some sort of a reward system (like experience) in Anki to make it feel like you are achieving something, since it's hard to quantify actual gains made in language acquisition. Animations and sounds I think would go a long to achieving this goal. Maybe after every "easy" you get a special victory dance or something

I think you should check out Progress Quest, they got the whole leveling/item/skill/story progression thing down pretty well. If you are going to do more stuff for this you should consider setting up a Google Code repository for it or something, so that people can easily contribute patches

Edit: I think it would also be interesting to set up a ladder where people can compete with each other for experience. This way you would always be motivated to do your reviews, otherwise you might just lose your rank!

Last edited by FooSoft (2010 October 14, 2:48 pm)

This is awesome!

Surely it should get harder to level up as you continue? If it only takes 1000 experience points each time, you'll run out of ranks pretty soon, right?

Items sounds like a cool idea, though I'm not sure what you would use them for...

This is probably over the top, but what I think would be really cool, would be if you could use your rank and character data in a proper full game. Someone mentioned minecraft, if you could somehow add resources and other rewards to a minecraft world, that would be awesome! You could do other games too. It's probably way to much work though...

Perhaps to motivate people to continue studying, you could make people slowly lose experience when they don't review for a while. Maybe when you fail a card too.

What would be cool too, is if you could have every time you get some experience, you get something pop up on the screen saying how much experienced you gained. A bit like Call of Duty when you get "+100" come onto the screen.

Competing with other people online would be cool too. Though I don't know what else you can do apart from leader boards... Maybe you could battle other players?

Okay, maybe some of these ideas are a bit too ambitious...

Great idea!

Here's how I would do it. Feel free to disregard this advice.

- Incremented levels (e.g. Level 1 = 100xp, Level 2 = 250xp, Level 3 = 500xp).

- Level-based bonuses. Your pictures are a good idea. It'd be cool if the pictures started out with noob culture like Naruto and geisha and then progressed into shamisen players and obscure 17th century poets.

- +1xp per incorrect answer, +2xp per correct answer, -1xp per due card (so that your level will gradually drain if you avoid reviews).

- Some kind of combo bonus (e.g. +10xp for five correct answers in a row).

I think anything more than this risks being counter-intuitive. Giving more xp for 'Easy' vs 'Good' or 'Hard' will only encourage inaccurate responses imo.

Anyway, fantastic idea, good luck developing it further.

So I thought about the ranks and levels and experience...
the possibilities of course are endless. Maybe later I can implement different "game modes", where you have different ranks and different settings.

But for now, I think I'll adjust my initial idea a little bit:
- With increasing experience, one will "conquer" Japaneses cities.
- in every conquered city, one can build (real existent) attractions, like parks, buildings, sights and so on. You'll earn money for every answered card and can use it to build something
- I'll make a webpage, where you can register your progress and share (and probably compare) it.
- I'll make a form, where people can suggest attractions which will be added to the system.
- If there is some need for it, I could still make some "conquerer" ranks, based on your level of experience.

The advantage with cities and attractions is
- it's a well-defined data set.
- there are a lot of things to add, so it doesn't get boring soon.
- it's easy to get pictures without copyright problems
- one can learn about Japan (and as everybody can suggest attractions, maybe some insider tips?)
- there is a clear goal: "conquer all cities"
- there is a never ending goal: "buy all attractions"

Focusing on cities lets me concentrate on the development of AnkiWarrior without having to worry about different ranks. As soon as it works, it shouldn't be difficult to define other kinds of goals.

It'll probably take some time until the next update. I have to write the php code, collect cities and initial attractions, and implement the changes. I'll let you know about my progress.

Further ideas and comments are of course highly appreciated!

Yes this does sound awesome!

The "Conquer all Japan" makes me think of Age of Empires 2 or Command and Conquer! In addition perhaps you could have your own avatar where you can purchase weapons (with your acquired gold) and armour. I guess when you "equip" it the image can overlap? Making your own unique "Anki Warrior". haha i don't know xD. Now that i think about it, when i played WoW, especially End-game world of warcraft (level 80 or whatever) seemed to be so addictive because i kinda turned into a "perfectionist" and wanted to get the best items their were... and it took so long to get to level 80 and put all that effort in i was not going to accept 'mediocrity' ^^. I think mabey layering it out so that once you have climbed that mountain and reached the highest level rank there needs to be just something a little special and extra. Some nice cherries to pick!

bombpersons wrote:

Perhaps to motivate people to continue studying, you could make people slowly lose experience when they don't review for a while. Maybe when you fail a card too.

When i read this i  did agree at first, but now that i think about it i don't think you should be punished for failing a card. Thats like loosing exp for dying! I think that would get a bit annoying. Plus i think khatz said failure should be embraced! Doesn't Khatz say failure is the mother of success/planting the seeds of success and should not be feared ^^? However, i do agree about losing experience when they dont review, as consistency in reps is what the SRS is about.

Last edited by djban1310 (2010 October 15, 7:35 am)

Okay, so this whole concept of buying attractions in Japanese cities really reminds me of Momotetsu ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9TEj-W2Tt0 ). Maybe you can draw some inspiration from it.. like you might want to include a few villains that try to destroy your cities (Godzilla or something).
As long as there's a fancy exp bar I'm in.

Proxx wrote:

So I thought about the ranks and levels and experience...
the possibilities of course are endless. Maybe later I can implement different "game modes", where you have different ranks and different settings.

But for now, I think I'll adjust my initial idea a little bit:
- With increasing experience, one will "conquer" Japaneses cities.
- in every conquered city, one can build (real existent) attractions, like parks, buildings, sights and so on. You'll earn money for every answered card and can use it to build something
- I'll make a webpage, where you can register your progress and share (and probably compare) it.
- I'll make a form, where people can suggest attractions which will be added to the system.
- If there is some need for it, I could still make some "conquerer" ranks, based on your level of experience.

The advantage with cities and attractions is
- it's a well-defined data set.
- there are a lot of things to add, so it doesn't get boring soon.
- it's easy to get pictures without copyright problems
- one can learn about Japan (and as everybody can suggest attractions, maybe some insider tips?)
- there is a clear goal: "conquer all cities"
- there is a never ending goal: "buy all attractions"

Focusing on cities lets me concentrate on the development of AnkiWarrior without having to worry about different ranks. As soon as it works, it shouldn't be difficult to define other kinds of goals.

It'll probably take some time until the next update. I have to write the php code, collect cities and initial attractions, and implement the changes. I'll let you know about my progress.

Further ideas and comments are of course highly appreciated!

great idea i would be on your site all day

For the ranks, I think each rank could have multiple levels. This gives you a small goal (levels) and a large goal (ranks).
For instance, the lowest rank might have 5 levels. Then when you lvl up again, you go to the new rank. Then that rank might need 10 levels before you get the next rank, and so on.

hereticalrants wrote:

Don't base anything off of kanji, remember that Anki has lots of uses other than just Japanese!

At the risk of gratuitous complexity (and more work) ....

The plugin could be a framework with its own sub-plugins where users with little programming experience could still create "reward packs" or "themes" and share them.  Urm, make it a feature for version 2.0, heh.

Last edited by hornlo (2010 October 16, 7:20 am)

Might want to apply some of these: http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5- … ed_p2.html