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Play to Learn:

• letter sounds and names
• how to write letters and numbers
• uppercase and lowercase letters
• manuscript handwriting style
• to count from 1 to 10
• fine motor skills
• eye-hand coordination
• the foundation of literacy and numeracy

Website: letterschool.com

App Store link: LetterSchool on the App Store

LetterSchool is a game for children between 4 and 6 years old to let them learn all about the letters of the alphabet. Not just how they sound, which words go with them, but also how to actually write them. Apps for this age group are often created quite simple, but to me it seemed like a fun idea to go a few steps further in terms of gaming experience. I wanted things to be super responsive, and animations to run buttery smooth. I ended up writing an OpenGL-based 3D game engine entirely from scratch. Consequently, development time was pretty long, but I think the result is well worth it.

Although the game engine is fully 3D-capable, the 3D aspect isn’t used very much (most notably, when the characters call you when you stay idle in the menu screen). This is because the target audience has a hard enough time already with learning letters in 2 dimensions…

There’s also a huge toolset built around this product. There’s a particle editor, animation curves editor, material and textures editor and a few specialized editors for all the font-related stuff (there’s even a font metrics editor), all built from zero. And then there are tools to facilitate the production of different language versions (that will have to contain different fonts too). This is the US-English version, but scheduled next are Spanish, French, German, GB-English and Dutch. More languages may follow.

I’m indebted to the great people here on gamedev.net for the wealth of information on the various game programming topics that I needed information on (and found, pretty much always here). Thanks everyone.