Probability of drawing any already learned word is much lower – 1 of 50 to be exact. Whenever the player gives a correct answer, a word is marked as learned (take a look at the visualization). How does it work? Do we have any? The idea is quite simple. Once in a while we are being ask about word-selecting algorithm. Testing was fun, because it was our first big HTML5 game and it was our first ever game testing on different mobile devices. On server side we were using PHP and MySQL.įor more details about components that we used, check our humans.txt. A lot of JavaScript, heavy use of canvas and SVG, CSS transitions and transforms. This part took about 60-70% of all time we've spent on making Ba Ba Dum. You can learn more about this process on the Mr Dum Dum page. We did some sample prints, marked things that had to be changed, and went back to the editor.Īfter a few months of making constant changes and asking our typographic friends for revision and advice, we ended up with Mr Dum Dum, an OpenType font with two styles (one for regular shape and one for bulky shadow). Then we drew more precise shapes using font editor software. At the end we also added 1500 simplified Chinese characters.Īs usually, we started with simple and fast sketches. It would have to contain all of the Latin letters with all diacritic characters, all Cyrillic and Greek characters, and Japanese Hiragana and Katakana characters. This means that if we can’t find any existing font that fits our specific idea, we have to create it.įor Ba Ba Dum we needed a narrow, sans serif, rounded and heavy letters with a very wide range of languages to support. Very often we precisely know what we need. We drew literally thousands of drawings before we picked the final 1500.įor most of our books we usually design dedicated typefaces. In the game we are assigning colours dynamically to the black and white SVG image using JavaScript. When we wanted to adjust some of the colour sets, the images themselves were not changed at all. That’s why we could store all images in a black and white version and simply assign colour id to each word in the game. To change a colour you just have to type different value in the “fill” attribute. Vector images are not only scalable and lightweight, but are also very easy to manipulate. We’ve already used this technique in Bubole. We traced all of them in Adobe Illustrator and saved all images as separate black and white SVG files. Usually there is not much of a choice, but this time the images could be easily represented as vector graphics. We didn’t want to use bitmaps, because we would have to store different sizes for different devices (small ones for phones and large ones for desktop computers). We used Photoshop to remove midtones from the scanned images. After pressing thumb down, user would be prompted to write a comment explaining why he or she thinks this word is incorrect and to propose correct version.Īll of the images used in the game were drawn on a thin layout paper and black uniPin and Tria markers.
#Ba dum dum dum song verification#
So in the verification section of the app user would see rows with images, translation and thumb up and thumb down icon. Technically any Ba Ba Dum user could be given access to this tool, so it had to be as simple and easy to use as possible.
#Ba dum dum dum song professional#
The important thing was to match translation with an image (not with a Polish or English word) and to use obvious, common words.Īfter the professional translation was finished we imported it to the database and we asked 2–4 people to verify the translation. Each row had image of the word with an English and Polish version placed in an adjacent column. The translation was done in an Excel file. The first translation was always done by a native speaking language teacher or professional translator. Additionally, we added the ability to manage users and one extremely important feature – the ability for players to verify translation and for us to read their suggestions and quickly apply them if necessary. To make our life easier we created a web-app where we could do all those things. A way to add images, change their colours, group them by category, theme, or any other tags. We needed a tool for adding, removing and changing words.