Build · Learning game
Dojo Dash
My son is learning Japanese at school, all three writing systems, and needed practice. I'm two years into a daily Japanese streak myself, so I built him a game he'd actually ask to play.
The problem
Hiragana, katakana and kanji are all memory work, and memory work is boring when you're eight. I didn't need a better list. I needed a reason for him to come back to it on his own.
What I built
Two games in one file. In Katakana Blitz, you clear nine worlds against the clock and beat a boss at the end of each. In Kanji Rumble, every right answer powers up the animal players on a soccer team, and the match is the reward.
Progress saves on the tablet. There's no login, no server, and nothing to collect.
How it changed
- Apr 2026A plain kanji quizWhere it started.
- May 2026Two games, one hubBosses, power-ups and a leaderboard.
- Aug 2026The game got realSound, smarter soccer players, passing and substitutions. The game part got as much work as the learning part.
- Sep 2026His word listA second grade of kanji, and a word list simple enough that he adds new words from class himself.
What broke
I lost track of which version was real
Thirteen copies ended up in my Downloads folder, two of them byte-for-byte identical. Finding the actual latest one took a file-by-file comparison. Now there's one canonical file and a changelog.
A power-up that didn't do anything
"Double" shipped as a placeholder and didn't double anything until a later version fixed it.
I tested touch on a laptop
Most of the playing happens on a tablet. Emulating a screen size isn't the same as a kid's thumbs.
A game that becomes drill stops working.The rule every feature gets judged against. If he stops asking to play, I stop building and ask him why.
What I learned
The bigger lesson was his, not mine. When he types a word from class into the list and it shows up in his game ten seconds later, he learns that software is something you change, not something you're handed. That's the whole point of AI for most people, and he got it at eight.
He makes the creative calls: the animals, the bosses, what the next world looks like. I do the plumbing.