Krayfish Entertainment sees the release of its first educational game, a shoot-em-up themed around solving math problems on the fly. Play it here!
About:
Despite initial appearances, this was surprisingly never actually a class project I had to do back during the days of middle and high school, but in fact something I created fairly recently when I was looking for a way to further diversify the game library on the site.
While Droplet had some minor educational elements about science, Krayfish Math is full on edutainment, covering basic arithmetic as well as throwing in powers and modulus all whiling playing like a shoot-em-up. The idea would be to train yourself to solve problems on the spot without having to resort to counting with your fingers. And the fact that the stages are randomly generated means you can’t just memorize the answers. It will be a different experience each time you play.
While the early stages are pretty easy, the game gets increasingly challenging the further you progress. You can even adjust the difficulty which controls the number range which these problems spawn.
Funnily, there’s an interesting story to how I came up with the gameplay for Krayfish Math. After some long hours of designing the alogirthms for Light World’s battle system, I ended up falling asleep so that I could clear my mind. And then, during that nap, I had a dream about an algorithm that would generate random math problems. Shortly after waking up, I went ahead and created a quick .mfa file and put together a prototype within minutes after waking up. So more or less, this game is a bit of a diversion, but it’s also an experiment to see how far I can take the random number generation idea.
I’m definitely looking to do a sequel to this game to perhaps encompassing algebra and calculus, but it would have to be in another medium. But for now, if you’re looking to build your mental math skills, nail those multiplication tables or if you just like to do math for fun, go try this out!