Hebrew Breakout – my plans

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#1

I teach Biblical Hebrew and I’d like to adapt the Block Breaker game to teach some Hebrew vocabulary. Here’s what I’m thinking at the moment. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

What I’m thinking is a level could start in the normal format something like the following:

HebrewBreakout_desert01
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Then on the first ball hit, the player will hear an audio file of a Hebrew word and the block will scale up 2x and display an icon representing that word.

HebrewBreakout_desert01b
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On the second ball hit, the player will hear the Hebrew word for the second time, and the icon will change from the image to the word written in Hebrew.

HebrewBreakout_desert01c
HebrewBreakout_desert01c1216×910 585 KB

On the third ball hit, the player will hear the Hebrew word for the third time, then as the block disappears the English gloss will appear - maybe I can make it animated from small to large or something. A puff of smoke would be great too! (I have no idea how to do this yet lol).

HebrewBreakout_desert01h
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HebrewBreakout_desert01i
HebrewBreakout_desert01i840×613 263 KB

HebrewBreakout_desert01j
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Here are some issues I’m thinking about.

OVER ALL FILE SIZE:
I’ve got 486 words, each having an icon image, a word image, and an audio file. What I’m thinking is my blocks will be prefabs. Each of the images are 256x256 pixel 32bit pngs with transparent background. In Windows Explorer they are averaging between 4-8 KB. The transparent pngs allow me to overlay them on top of the block prefabs. The audio files are 50-70 KB each - again that’s in Windows Explorer. I’m not sure what Unity does to these files by way of compression.

SCALING AND STATIC COLLIDERS:
I was reading in the Unity docs and they talk about not changing the size of static colliders. Right now I’m scaling the blocks 2x on the first ball hit so I may run into some issues there.

FONTS AND WORLD SPACE:
I’m sure this can be done but in my quick experimentation I was having trouble getting the text in Canvas (the English gloss) to line up with the blocks in World Space. The “Earth, Land” images above I faked with GIMP. :slight_smile:

I’m quite excited about this project. I think there’s a lot of potential in gamifying learning. With 486 words divided up into 39 chapters I’ve got lots of room to make lots of levels and it should be a fun way for Hebrew learners to get exposed to some new vocabulary - at least for those who like Breakout!

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

I just realized I put the wrong English gloss for אדם, Adam (which is man, humankind). Here are a couple of the other icons, including “Earth, Land”.

HebrewBreakout_desert02
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HebrewBreakout_desert03
HebrewBreakout_desert031215×910 575 KB

1 Like
#2

instead of using scaling, consider instantiating a new prefabed block of the size you want and destroying the previous one. In addition to avoiding the issue of scaling colliders, this will also allow for you to do things like randomizing the word placement and even expand the list of words in the future.

This looks like a fun way to learn Hebrew, which I’ve considered doing in the past. I’ll look forward to seeing how it goes and playing the game! Please feel free to give me a shout when you’re ready for some testing :slight_smile:

#3

So I take it from this that I could run into issues with scaling the block prefabs. Regarding instantiating a new block, I’d rather not build my levels programmatically but perhaps I can just write something just to destroy and instantiate a new block when the ball hits it. In a couple of lessons Rick will be dealing with swapping out prefabs - that may take care of the problem actually.

#4

You’ve considered learning Hebrew in the past or making a game to learn Hebrew. :slight_smile:

#5

Learning Hebrew

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