Hi everyone! We have a BIG update rolling out. We are partnering with the Finnish companies Fun Academy and Finest Future to help teach migrants in Finland and around the world.
Restyling:
1. New main character:
This update will introduce Maco, a tech-genius alien who loves to tinker. Maco will keep the current jetpack movement controls, so the change will be mostly cosmetic.
I know many have grown used to our little green alien, so we have also made a beta channel called originalgreenaliennostalgia, which we will keep up. He is also hidden in the new version of the game as a playable easter egg (look for pictures of the green alien, click and hold) :)
The most exciting thing about this change is that we'll be having a cast of 4 aliens coming to the game from our new education partner Fun Academy. This opens up the potential for multiplayer in the future (we have some cool ideas here!).
2. Sentences minigames!
Yes, we'll finally start teaching more than just words in Earthlingo. Getting this right has been a focus for us for the last 8 months.https://youtu.be/Sbs10beHoKg
We introduce sentences in a mini-game or quest, then throw you into a battle to test your retention. We prototyped a crazy number of ideas before hitting on this simple approach that is both fun and effective.
We're initially rolling this out on iOS and Android for 21 languages as an in app purchase, with Windows coming soon. Funds from this will help pay for development and translation work to expand sentences and improve the core game.
We're targeting alignment with the CEFF A1 level for all languages by the end of this year (and we're not stopping there!).
3. Full story with ongoing events:
As you play through the game and learn more words the evil robots will abduct humans! You have to travel to their spaceship and battle them to save your friends.
Once rescued, the humans become playable characters in battles.
Add 20 words in the Town level to check it out! There are 3 humans to save in each level.
4. Cel shading:
Colours will pop a lot more in this update, as can be seen in the teaser above. I used to play the cel shaded game Jet Set Radio Future a lot as a kid, so I've wanted to do this for years! It was a lot of work, but I hope you'll agree that the result was worth it!
5. New UI:
Gone are the days of the plan grey UI. We've worked together with Fun Academy to improve the look and feel dramatically.
6. More detailed humans:
The blocky style humans were fun, but they did give Earthlingo a very generic look and didn't match the polygon count for the rest of the world. New humans will be a bit more detailed and will be able to show different facial expressions.
I hope everyone enjoys the improvements, we've been hard at work trying to finish of the story and improve the look of the game.