Tatami Road - Japanese immersive language learning RPG game
A downloadable game for Windows and macOS
Tatami Road
たたみロード
はじめまして!
(English)
Hi, my name is Go and I am working with great enthusiasm in Tatami Road. What is this thing called Tatami Road? Well, first and foremost, it is an RPG, a role playing videogame, that uses storytelling techniques to boost the learning of Japanese language. If you are studying Japanese and are willing to improve your knowledge, this is the correct game. You can download a free demo to try out its mechanics. Also, you can visit my https://ko-fi.com/tatamiroad site for more details about the game (the original story) and me. Thanks for checking this game! Spread the voice! Leave a comment with ideas, likes and dont's, cheer up words or support this project in any way you can... I will be enourmously grateful.
Tatami Road tells the story of a japanese boy who loses his ability to talk his mother language and has to travel through the not so famous Tatami Road which connects this world with Bogo No Sekai (母語の世界), the land of Mother Language. It is said that there he will be able to recover his lost ability to speak Japanese.
Yes, the road is made of tatami!
Hope you enjoy this demo!
(This game requires a minimum knowledge of Japanese, such as reading Hiragana and Katakana, as well as the most basic -reaaally basic- grammars)
(Español)
Hola, yo soy Go y estoy trabajando con mucho entusiasmo en Tatami Road. ¿Qué es esta cosa llamada Tatami Road? Bueno, antes que nada es un RPG, un videojuego de rol, que aplica técnicas de storytelling para potenciar el aprendizaje del idioma japonés. Si estás estudiando japonés y buscás ejercitar tus conocimientos de forma entretenida, estás en el juego correcto. Puedes descargar un demo gratuito aquí mismo para probarlo. Además, puedes visitar mi https://ko-fi.com/tatamiroad para más información sobre el juego (su original historia) y sobre mí. Gracias por tomar un tiempo para mirar este videojuego! Hagan correr la voz! Agradezco cualquier tipo de apoyo! Comenten acerca de ideas, cosas que les hayan gustado y las que no, un mensaje de aliento o cualquier forma de apoyo a este proyecto será enormemente agradecido!
Tatami Road cuenta la historia de un joven japonés que perdió la capacidad de hablar su lengua materna y que debe viajar a través del no tan conocido Tatami Road, camino que conecta este mundo con Bogo No Sekai (母語の世界), el mundo de Madre Lengua. Se dice que allí podrá recuperar su capacidad para hablar japonés.
Sí, así es, el camino está hecho de tatami!
Espero que disfruten de este demo!
(Este juego requiere de un mínimo conocimiento inicial del idioma japonés, tal como poder leer Hiragana y Katakana, así como de un conocimiento básico -muy básico- de la gramática)
よろしくおねがいします!
Status | In development |
Platforms | Windows, macOS |
Publisher | |
Rating | Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (2 total ratings) |
Author | Go |
Genre | Role Playing |
Made with | RPG Maker |
Tags | Action RPG, Fantasy, idioma, japanese, japones, juego-de-rol, language, learning, Pixel Art, tatami |
Average session | Days or more |
Languages | English, Spanish; Latin America |
Inputs | Keyboard |
Links | Blog |
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Support!
Support this game at or above a special price point to receive something exclusive.
Copy of the game, your name in the credits!
Support this project since its early times and I will be eternally grateful to you! Plus, I will send you updates and final copy, and your full name will be displayed in the credits as one of my honorable supporters!
The characters "tourist" (観光客) will have your name.
In the story of the game there are tourists that help the character. Give your name to one of this "tourist" characters
Comments
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Is this game still in development? Is the project still live?
the project is dead, isn't it?
So I bought the game, but how do I access the full version, not the demo. I finished the demo and loved it, but I want to know when I can get the full version. Anyone know?
Sorry for my late reply. I am glad you have enjoyed the demo! Right now I am working to make the game web based. Soon I will let you know about times! Meanwhile, keep on studying! がんばって!
ありがとございます。
Here’s the first part of my play through! Love to see where this game is going:
An Itchio RPG for learning Japanese | Tatami Road p1
https://youtu.be/cEhUame-ABw
Hey! Just watched your play through! This was amazing! Thank you very much! I am really glad you enjoyed the game. Keeps up my enthusiasm ><
Just finished the demo. I was so surprised by how long it went on for, every time I was sure it would end there was still more, an incredibly generous demo (or maybe I'm just slow...)
I love the approach this game has to teaching so much, I've been studying Japanese with duolingo for about a year and while it's a very useful app for practice, I felt like it never really taught me grammar rules properly. This game does a really great job of pacing learning and practice, with easy to understand explanations spaced between lots of chances to practice what you've learnt. The story is immediately a really interesting one, I think it's very common for language games to place you as an outsider looking in, so it's a refreshing angle to play as someone trying to regain their own language, not learn a new one. It's a very sad concept to lose your native tongue, but a hopeful journey to learn it all again, so it has a kinda bittersweet hopeful feeling, and grounding the lessons you're learning in a personal narrative like this is a great way to help you remember what you're learning, I think giving an emotional context to something is a great memory tool.
I did run into a few problems with the game, both with glitches and design.
I played it in English, and in quite a few places the text that was supposed to be in English was in Spanish instead. For the most part, I was able to figure out what it was asking of me fairly easily based on context, but it did cause some confusion sometimes. I'm unsure if this is just the English translation being incomplete or a glitch confusing the two builds of the game or something.
I also had a game breaking bug where, when I was exploring the first outdoor section, I walked past some cones on the right, accidentally walked into an out of bounds area and couldn't get back into the world. Luckily I had saved fairly recently so I could just reload an old save, and I'm not sure whether that's a replicable glitch or a rare occurrence.
In terms of design, when I started up I was a bit unsure where to look when I was asked to check my books, it took me a while to get my head around the interface of the phone, that may just be me, but maybe a clearer explanation could be helpful. I also had difficulty knowing how I was meant to space my sentences when typing questions/answers. I've only ever typed Japanese without spaces, so I sometimes found it a bit tricky knowing whether I was supposed to write, for example, "ポケットの 中に" or "ポケットの中に". I do get that encouraging people to use spaces before they start learning kanji will make it easier for them to break up the different parts of the sentence in their head, but maybe allowing them to enter both options with and without spaces/in kanji or in hiragana could help reduce some frustration of not knowing what you're doing wrong. The most difficulty I had was with when you had to ask how to say a word in English, e.g "「たたみろーど」は えいごで なんと いいますか。" The problem I had was it took me ages to realise I was supposed to include the「」and spent ages thinking I had done something wrong with how I spaced the rest of the sentence. Maybe either allowing people to type the answer both with or without the「」could make this a bit easier, or maybe explaining at some point that you need to use them?
The only other problem I had is I thought having to redo the quiz in the library if you got even one answer wrong was a bit harsh, especially cause most of the mistakes I made were with spacing not with the grammar itself. Everything else worked for me I think, and I hope they're problems that were either specific to me or can be easily fixed.
I'm really excited to see where this project goes, I think it's an incredibly helpful resource and it's already helped me to get a much better understanding of grammar, so I'd love to see what happens when it moves onto some more complex sentence structures, as well as whether Morita and Tanaka will be able to regain their language.
Wishing you all the luck with development, and hoping you manage to get some more eyes on this really cool game!
Carinam、thank you very much for this interesting and constructive comment. I took note of many things you said and for sure will be present in my mind while developing the game. I am sorry for any bug encountered during gameplay. Bugs is one of the reasons I want to migrate into web based development. In this way I will have much more control over the code. Lets keep in touch!
Sorry for the late reply! I'm so happy that it was helpful~
And no need to apologise, bugs are unavoidable part of development, especially on a small scale indie project where you don't have access to QA testing
Love your game so far! I've played it for like an hour an 15 minutes, on my way to the library. I'll post my review here once I edit it.
hi! I tried to open it on max but I got this error:
The application “Game” can’t be opened.
Is it still possible to play? Looking forward to it!
Hi! Sorry for this late reply. This is a peculiar season, isn't it? It should be possible to still play! But what do you mean by "open it on max".
sorry! I meant on my mac computer.
maxgraze, thanks for your reply... I will try to replicate this error and let you know once I found out how to solve the issue.
On the other hand, now I am working on making the game web based. But this will take me some. Stay tuned!
I like your game btw
Hey! Thanks for checking it out!
I used RPGMMV and lots of great plugins that are around there.
so you didnt code for this project?
i thought rpgmaker was a codeless way to do it
You can script and make your own plugins or modify (if available) other's plugins
yo!