Lingotopia is a language learning game about being lost in a city where you don't speak the language.

It will be released on PC/Mac/Linux in the second half of 2018 (if I meet the funding goal).

In Lingotopia you play a little girl shipwrecked on the shores of a strange island. In order to get back home you'll need to explore the island and talk to its inhabitants. Sadly, no one speaks your language! You'll have to learn words one at a time to decipher what these strange creatures are saying.

The game is currently translated in the following languages: Basque, Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Most of these translations are only partially complete, so the demo might be very short, depending on which language you chose. It should be enough for you to get a taste though!

There is no voice over in the game at the moment, that's one of the reasons I need this Kickstarter. If the Kickstarter succeeds voice overs will replace the synthesised audio in the demo.

The full version of the game will have these community translations and I'll ensure that Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, German and French will be completely translated. Apart from teaching people who can speak English other languages, you'll also be able to learn English in each of the chosen languages.

 There are a few ways to learn words in the game

• You can click on objects in the environment to learn the word for them.
• Whenever you talk to one of the city's inhabitants you'll be able to learn a word by guessing it from a list or by solving a riddle.
• The city's inhabitants will also comment on the weather as you walk past. So if you want to learn how to say "It's snowing" (for example), then this is the way to go.

By clicking on a tree, the player learns the word for it.

The pictures give you clues to guess the word in red. In this case, "bird".

Words you know will appear purple when talking to people in the game. By moving your mouse over these words you'll be able to see its translation. The more words you know, the more you'll understand and begin to feel at home in this strange city.

The words you know are purple and can be translated

By being continuously confronted with the language you'll also internalise the word order and keep the words you know fresh in your memory. The game can display both the romanised version of languages with different scripts as well as the native scripts.

I often feel bad for playing video games. They can take dozens of hours to complete and that's time I could've spent learning a valuable skill.

I also believe that games can be a great way to teach people various skills. I loathed the time I had to spend learning in school and would have been tremendously excited at the prospect of playing a game like Lingotopia.

I began searching for a game that allows me to learn a language while playing, thereby absolving my guilty conscience. To my surprise there were no games out there like Lingotopia. So I set out to create my own language learning game. A game set in a beautiful city, with an uplifting story, many unique characters to meet and hundreds of words to learn.

75% funded so far:    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1843347561/lingotopia-a-language-learning-game/description

I honestly like the idea and I think their are some polyglots on the site who would like it :).

I taught myself to read Japanese originally using Pokemon Black 2, and that worked great, but a game structured to speed up the process like this is a fantastic idea. Very interested

It's an interesting premise.

Meh. Learning games can be fun but with this many different languages I do not expect very sophisticated content or much of it. Learning 50 vocabs and 10 common sentences is not learning a language.

The idea is very cool and I like to see it. Like vivster though I fear it'll lack depth. A pure vocabulary trainer with limited content is not very sufficient. This game should involve creating whole sentences. Make riddles in the foreign language, so you need to understand the language to solve the riddle. Stuff like that.

Sure but he added a (rough) demo to the kickstarter: https://tristandahl.itch.io/lingotopia

The general idea seems to be +1000 words at first and that seems better what more expensive textbooks have.   With more polish and work this is certainly a workable game for learning and 20 bucks isn't that much of investment.