Flashcard Clash Development Update 2

Here's the next development update for Flashcard Clash, a fun game to help study Japanese. Not a lot to publicly show this week, as there's been a bit of backend database tinkering, but i'll get ot that in a bit.

Review Counts

The big change this week was actually pretty simple, changing the 'reviews remaining' counter to show the actual number of answers the player needs to give before they are done.

Some backstory is needed for this. Cards in Flashcard Clash can have multiple 'sides' or questions to them, for example a vocabulary card could have 4:

• VOCABULARY MEANING -> 猫 -> cat
• VOCABULARY READING -> 猫 -> ねこ
• VOCABULARY MEANING -> ねこ -> cat
• VOCABULARY READING -> cat -> ねこ

I think this gives a deeper understanding as it requires the player to pull out the knowledge in different ways,

• What is the meaning of this vocabulary?
• What is the reading of this vocabulary?
• If you heard this vocabulary, would you know the meaning?
• Could you produce this vocabulary in a conversation?

So the player will need to answer those four sides correctly before that card is considered completed. Now coming back to the reviews remaining counter, since it was based off cards remaining, it would only tick down sporadically, about once every four questions.

This leads to a bit of ambiguity in how much work actually remains for the day, which can be slightly disheartening. Now that the counter has been changed to show the number of individual answers remaining, it ticks down with each answer, giving in indication of progress every time, which feels better.

Vocabulary Cards
Following up on the new way I’m storing and handling vocab cards from last week, I do not like how the final result is in game.

Currently a vocabulary card in a deck will accept any possible answer, eg: the game might accept お父さん or とーちゃん or ちち for the word "father". Which is all well and good in that you won't get a card wrong if you gave the wrong word that meant the same thing. The bad part is that it was intended for you to learn a specific word, for example in Yotsubato learning とーちゃん for father, and you can skip around that giving a different answer. Which means you'll pass the card and think you've learnt it, but then not be able to read it in the manga since you studied the wrong answer.
I think the correct way to go from here is have a card only cover a specific reading and meaning of a vocabulary. And if you answer with a different reading or meaning, the game can say "that's not the answer we're looking for" and let you correct it and carry on.

But before I do that, I need to update the editor so I can more easily create vocabulary and eventually be able to select what meanings/readings I want for a card.

That's it! That's what happened this week!