Prerelease patch 0.15

This update is all about giving you better insight into your learning progress, along with some under-the-hood animation improvements Lerp objects smooth as butter.

Kana statistic tracking

Individual kana tracking was partly implemented back in version 0.13, where we started recording how often each kana was seen, guessed wrong, or guessed correctly.

With this update, the progress menu has been expanded with a new UI element that shows these statistics per kana. When you select a kana, you can now see how many times you’ve encountered it, how often you guessed it wrong, and how often you guessed it correctly. This has been a frequently requested feature, and it’s great to finally get it into the game.

We’ve also refined what counts as a “Seen” kana. Previously, a kana was marked as seen as soon as its card was pulled from the deck. Now, it only counts once the card flip animation has progressed far enough for the front of the card to start showing.

It’s also worth noting that you can guess the same card wrong more than once. Because of this, the total number of correct and wrong guesses doesn’t necessarily add up to the seen count. Additionally, it’s possible to quit a game while a card is visible on screen, meaning it was seen but never guessed.

This system gives much better insight into your learning, but there’s still room for more advanced statistics. In the future, we’d like to add features such as tracking your most recent guesses, reset options, and more detailed statistics.

Our Kana tracking showing 'A'.

smoother lerping animations

This update also includes improvements to animation smoothness of some game objects.

We use a lot of lerping (linear interpolation) for things like Card widths and Card/Text object movement. While lerping is great, tuning it to feel smooth without stuttering, snapping at the end, or causing anti-aliasing issues is always a fun challenge.

For some animations, a new approach is being tested that behaves better under fluctuating frame rates. Especially for simpler animations, things should now feel noticeably smoother.

Movement animations now use a new routine that combines both lerping and linear animation techniques, and the overall look and feel has improved a lot as a result.

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