First off, thank you for downloading my game! I put a lot of effort into it so means a lot to me that you’re trying it out!
The purpose of this game is to have the students make stronger connections between letters and the sounds they make.
Split the class into two teams. Say a word. Give them the amount of letters the word is. Have the students guess at how that word is spelled. Each student writes it down on their own piece of paper, this hopefully gets the students who don't usually speak engaged. Afterwords count all their papers and add one point to that team for each right answer.
In game use kirby and dedede eating the cake as a rough timer: it takes them about 30 seconds to finish. Afterwards click on one of their icons to determine a winner for that round. then click on one of the doors at the end for the winner overall.
For elementary schoolers I try to stick with words that don't have any special sound rules like "ch", "ie", "or", and so on, words like "lamp" or "frantic" that have simple alphabetic sounds.
Although that does remove a lot of the words you may want to use, so sometimes I will give them a word like "lunch" and just show them the "ch" at the end. This is all assuming they haven't learned these phonetic structures yet, if they have, go ham.
The game itself goes into greater deal in the "how to play" section and the two teachers only sections in the beginning.
The game it's essentially played with only the black board and the students' papers/ tablets. I was playing the game before I made the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint most helps to increase student interest and engagement and serve as a timer/ way to show a winner.
I did not make any of the sprites or artwork or sounds myself. I at most edited some of other people's designs. I will credit them below once I find them.
Version 1.1
-Drastically reduced file size
-Kirby and Dedede now lose health upon defeat
Yikes... I might have to put an upper limit on file upload sizes, since the bandwidth bill comes to my credit card every month.
Do you think 20 MB or 25 MB is a reasonable upper limit? Most activities, and especially the popular activities, can squeeze under that.
Ok, first of all, it looks super neat. However, I'm unclear as to how your game works. Is it everyone from both team try to write down the word on a piece of paper? If so how do you decide which team won the cake (cause I see you can click on one of the character)? Seems like going around checking if each students wrote it correctly and counting how much for each team is a bit too long, but there are not enough slides to have everyone participate if it's a one on one battle going on...
I would also find a way to make the life bar lose a life when you click on the opposite character.
I think 25mb is a bit low, I'd like a 100mb limit at the very least. Maybe higher file sizes could be a patreon perk. As for the dessert dash, I took a look through those files, and there is an obnoxiously large 29 minute .Wav file in there that can be converted to .mp3 either in Foobar or Audacity. There are plenty of tutorials for both.
40-50 MB sounds like a decent compromise at the moment, but I'd have to run an analysis on the average size of attachments and how much each download costs. Unfortunately the hosting costs have been increasing in proportion to the yen losing value against USD, so over the next few months I'll need to start doing more to bring that under control. There'll probably be more controls on both the upload and download end.
Thanks for the feedback, I was going to put in a life bar loss, but I put in the life bar pretty late in development lol and was just trying to finish it quickly as I had a couple people asking to see it. I'll cut the music file down. Yeah, I have each student write down the word and I have them show their paper so I can count them easily. I mostly wanted everyone to participate is why, takes a bit about 30 seconds to count them all in my case
Hmm I tried cutting down the file in Audacity and tried converting it to an mp3 as well. Strangely enough it made the file larger. I've been trying various ways to optimize it but approximately 90% of that bulk is from the main gameplay slide. I have a version where there is only one slide and it's a gameplay slide. It's still about 330mb. If you can find any optimization methods, I'm all ears.
This game is great, especially for special needs classes who need a little extra "fun" in their funnel.
Wow. Blown away by how great this looks. Thanks for the hard work.