- Support for more romaji inputs
- Skip mode: made the mode quicker to complete
- Skip mode: added warning
- Skip mode: prevented the player from disabling challenge mode by skipping backwards
- Added more words and JLPT N level data in preparation for JLPT mode
- Added text to handwriting mode to clarify its purpose
- Edit: I forgot the most important thing! The little You Can Kana guy's eyes now follow your mouse during handwriting mode.
More detail:
1. Support for more input methods
A few cases were found where typing romaji would not count as a correct answer even if it was a valid input, I've addressed these.
The romaji 'nna' can be used to answer 'っな', 'んんあ', or 'んな'.
The japanese 'っち' or 'ッチ' can be written as 'tti', 'tchi', or 'cchi'
2. Skip mode improvements
I've received some comments that skip mode takes too long. I'm considering making skip mode completely skippable, but for now, I'm just taking steps to make it a bit quicker.
The way skip mode works is that it tries to put every character into one of three buckets:
1. Known (has been answered correctly)
2. Possibly difficult (has been answered incorrectly)
3. Definitely difficult (has been answered incorrectly on its own)
If you answer the word 'ひらがな' incorrectly as 'hirakana', I don't want the game to assume you don't know ひ, ら, or な. So at this point, all four characters drop into bucket 2. They are then answered individually, at which point they can either drop into bucket 3, if wrong, or bucket 1, if correct.
The problem was that if the player is not 100% accurate, they can end up with some characters constantly rotating between bucket 1 and 2. I've now made it so if a character is answered correctly at least once, it counts as 'known' for the purposes of the test, preventing these loops.
I also heard from some players who accidentally skipped backwards after completing skip mode so I've added some warnings to hopefully prevent this from happening.
By skipping backwards it was also possible to disable challenge mode. Oops. I've fixed this as well.
3. More words
In preparation for JLPT mode I've added more JLPT vocab to the game and tagged them with their N levels. Stay tuned for more news on this!
4. Handwriting
I've added some text to this mode to clarify its purpose: to teach stroke order. Most players will be drawing on a mouse, which is not really a substitute for real handwriting practise. This is why I decided to make the controls here as generous as possible, as it was never really meant to be testing drawing accuracy.
This is something quite a few people mentioned in reviews so I thought I would just address it here. I have plans to revisit the control scheme here to offer multiple options, which will include a stricter option as well as the option to skip handwriting completely.
