Factsheet

Developer:
Not Dead Design
Based in Australia

Release date:
March 11 2020

Platforms:
Windows
iOS
Android

Website:
kanaquestgame.com

Available From:
$14.99 - Green Man Gaming
$14.99 - GamersGate

Description

A Kawaii Kana Match-Em Up. Kana Quest is a chill puzzle game that's all about matching up the sounds between Japanese letters (Kana). It also teaches you how to read Japanese. With incredibly deep puzzle mechanics, over 300 handcrafted levels, 13 stunning pixel art worlds and a whole bunch of adorable Kana to meet, your quest to learn Kana starts here!

History

I started making Kana Quest when I was tutoring a student who hated doing flash cards for their Hiragana and Katakana. So I thought about how would I go about making a game that would make that process less painful.

So I looked at a lot of the other educational Japanese games on the market and I found a lot of them were essentially pop quizzes with a bunch of pretty art. So I set myself the design goal of "A Japanese learning game that is fun enough as a game that you would play it without any interest in learning Japanese".

This led me to start iterating mechanics. And I hit on the unusual structure of Japanese letters. They almost always have a consonant, followed by a vowel sound. For example か is read as "ka". I used this quirk of Japanese to make the letters behave like domino tiles that the player has to connect up. Then I started putting a prototype together, and by the time I finished that first prototype I was living in Japan as an English teacher and I got some of my students to playtest the game to ensure that I was achieve the core design goal I set myself.

Features

• Learn Japanese, with no study or pop quizzes
• Chill puzzles to unwind to
• J-Pop inspired soundtrack
• Over 300 handcrafted levels
• 13 Stunning pixel art worlds

Kana Quest Credits

NotDeadDesign
Founder

Contact

Support
notdeaddesign@gmail.com

Homepage
kanaquestgame.com

Indie DB
indiedb.com/games/kana-quest

Twitter
twitter.com/kanaquest