Kana practice video game

[Aikeru]

I want to write a game to teach hiragana/katakana. Not having them memorized myself, I would like someone to help me by making a small drawing of each of the kana and the kana with the little o and " marks so that I can put them into my game as sprites.
I have already made a similar game for teaching vocabulary, and will basically building off of the same concept.

If you're willing to do this simple task (and hey, maybe a little other artistry on the side ) then please e-mail me at m_snead@sbcglobal.net.

The first game was called "Shoot Word". Basically summed up, four words are presented on the screen, picked randomly out of the game's given dictionary, and the player must shoot the correct word. As the game progresses, the words begin to move, and even fight back, and penalties are given for picking the wrong word. Graphics, background music, and sound effects were all included.

In the new game, I want to add alot of fun/exciting features (like internet play, which I have experience with in other projects) and make the game's system versatile enough to be added on to conveniently (perhaps bridging into teaching kanji as well). It's not a difficult game to write, and I really plan on doing it, I just want to make SURE my kana here are correct. >.<

Any kind of help is appreciated. Thanks.

[chronoluminaire]

Well, there are handy charts at http://www.tokyowithkids.com/fyi/katakana_chart.html and http://www.tokyowithkids.com/fyi/hiragana_chart.html : that's what I learned my kana from. You also might want to check out Slime Forest Adventure, as I believe that has a similar concept, and it's worth being aware what's out there so you know what's going to be original and what's not. I wish you best of luck with your game writing!

[PyTom]

It seems to me that rather than having a person do all that drawing, it would be possible to simply extract the characters from a font.

Hackity... Hackity... Done.

You can see the characters I created at:

http://www.bishoujo.us/tmp/charchart/

The characters are indexed by their unicode code point, in hex. Tables giving the character names for different code points are at:

http://www.unicode.org/charts/

Points that aren't in the font or in unicode are rendered as squares... I didn't bother trying to filter them out. The program I used to create the characters is also in that directory.

Please note that to me Hiragana and Katakana are little more than squiggles... so I have no idea how accurately or completely these characters have been rendered. I have no skill with natural languages other than English, unfortunately.

[papillon]

Get JWPce.

It was the most helpful tool I found in doing my hex-hacking of japanese games. It has basically all the things you want built into it - a complete table of hiragana, katakana, and kanji with all the unicode, JIS, and Shift-JIS codes, a brush-stroke search tool (Which doesn't always work, but *sometimes* I can identify a shape in a kanji and manage to look it up by radical), a basic built-in dictionary...

[Jerails]

*Looks at all this*

Wow...I didn't know finding katakana and hiragana on the net would be so...search-oriented. I mean...I just installed the japanese keyboard set onto my computer, so whenever I'm feeling Japanese I can let loose.

Now, if you were looking for pictures of the hiragana and katakana, then I'll just step back and let you guys get to work on that.