Current version is 3.2.2.
Enhancements since v3.0--
1. Added audio that speaks each letter as it is selected. Hope this builds association between letter appearance and sound (i.e., the name of the letter--not all the ways it might be pronounced in combination, of course.)
2. Added random congratulatory audio messages when the player spells a complete word, e.g., "You spelled a complete word! You're so smart!" (Credit to voicegen.org for this audio: this new free text-to-speech service can add a bit of emotion to the audio!) I hope this further encourages players to try to spell out complete words.
Open issues and possible enhancements:
1. Biggest play-ability issue is that multiple touches are sometimes recorded when a letter is selected from the alphabet. This seems to happen mostly on IOS devices (specifically my iPad) and is very frustrating for young players. I have fiddled with various Unity settings and even with the touch setting son my iPad but haven't tracked down a fix. (And there may not be a fix since apparently IOS support for WebGL builds is incomplete.) Fortunately the #2 enhancement described above eliminated most of the problem as a side effect, since when a double-touch is recorded it most often results in an invalid string of letters and so the extra letters are removed invisibly to the player.
2. A second minor playability issue is that on my iPad the left-and right-most alphabet letters are cut off. Again, I have fiddled with various "viewport" type parameters in Unity and on ITCH, but so far no definite fix.
3. Also a little annoying is that various audio clips sometimes play over each other. This is apparently a pretty common problem among game developers using Unity, and I've see several offered solutions in Unity Forum posts. But the coding in the solutions I've read is beyond my very, very limited skill with C# and Unity. So for now I've just implemented a some crude but simple mitigations that take care of most of the audio-overlap occurrences.
4. Another longstanding issue is that the "Play again" function (after the Factory is complete) doesn't work. Haven't been able to track down what's causing a GameObject to disappear after a "Play again?" restart. (Fortunately just closing and relaunching the game works, and at this point we're not trying to persist any data between game sessions.)
As of now, the casual enhancement queue includes two ongoing tasks that are nice-to-haves but also open-ended, the- more-the-merrier items:
1.adding more words to the game dictionary (there are about 500 now.) Aside from just adding a word, each word needs a word icon, and audio for the word itself, and text and audio for a definition and two usage example sentences.
2. Various decorative things to enhance engagement with the very young kids who will be playing this game: better fireworks in the final scene, for example.
Major enhancements, which may or may not ever be undertaken, might be:
1. A second level of the game with slightly more challenging spelling and sentence-building tasks.
2. Implementing per-player persistence, so that a player can keep a record of their best efforts. (Of course keeping a record implies the creation of some sort of game achievement metrics, like gold stars or total words ever spelled.)
If you have any suggestions on how to fix the bugs or make the game more interesting and educationally effective, please leave a comment.
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