



[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]

For Immediate Release* Tsukuba, Japan – July 2nd, 2012 – Independent game developer Rob Howland is excited to unveil the demo and Kickstarter Campaign for SanJiten (short for Sanjigenjiten ), an innovative game that teaches players a foreign language through immersion and entertainment. Howland began his game as a two-year research project at the University of Tsukuba's - Entertainment Computing Laboratory. His research focused on the educational impact of video games; the resulting research paper was published by the Information of Processing Society of Japan. SanJiten is an interactive 3D language learning adventure game. Players can freely explore beautiful interactive environments, each filled with hundreds of selectable objects. Players can learn words at their own pace, adding them one by one to their Vocab List. Players can also challenge themselves in unlockable mini-games like Time Attack mode, helping to improve their vocabulary. There are even plans for an in-depth story told through manga-style cutscenes with replayable dialogue, including interactive subtitles with individual word look-up functionality. “We believe our game will have an enormous worldwide impact on both the serious games community and the language education community,” says game creator Rob Howland. “ SanJiten has been designed with the new ‘gamer generation’ in mind, and is part of an attempt to really show the world that video games have some serious potential to bring about real change in the way we learn and acquire new information.” The ongoing Kickstarter campaign will allow the ambitious project to reach its full potential. Supporters can look forward to a fully finished version of the game by late this year, as well as an assortment of other incentives for helping the project reach its goal. Current supported languages are Japanese, Chinese, English and Spanish, but there are plans to add Korean, French, Italian, German, Bulgarian, and Esperanto. A playable demo of SanJiten is available here for PC & Mac in conjunction with the Kickstarter Campaign. There are also 2 screenshots and a new trailer, the trailer can be viewed via the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1MvELvdH0 SanJiten’s Kickstarter campaign can be found via the following link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1220951156/sanjiten The SanJiten presskit can be downloaded HERE. For more information about SanJiten , visit the game's site ( http://sanjigenjiten.com/) or visit their Facebook Page. ### About Rob Howland Rob Howland is a research student living in Japan with his fantastically artistic girlfriend Emily Olmstead. You can learn more about Rob by visiting his homepage. You can see more of Emily’s work at her site here. SOURCE: Rob Howland ###