New Minigames Available in Coupling!
And plans to improve onboarding and bug fixing
Hello! Along with the pilot Guess Who?, there are three new Moments (minigames) to play: Cut the Red Wire, Blindspotting, and Cup Quiz.
For those who are new to Coupling, welcome! Thanks for getting past the rough and non-existent onboarding experience. The app is still in its infancy as a solo developer but has come a long way over the past year. We’re going to keep pushing it forward, so stick with it.
Some of you have reported some bugs and issues with Moments, so I’m rapidly investigating and ironing things out.
🚀 Updates on Coupling
⁉️ New Moment: Cup Quiz
Based off the Newlyweds Game, you’ll receive questions about each other. The goal is to try to guess what the other person will answer, and see how well you know each other.
The partner will also give their answers and guesses in the target language, which will be added to the learner’s vocabulary. Given the nature of the questions, these new words and phrases are very relevant to learn!
This is a beginner-level Moment, and I currently have it slated as the first Moment as it doesn’t require any speaking or prior knowledge. But you can learn a few basic important words out of it.
🖼️ New Moment: Blindspotting
A cooperative Moment. You and your partner will both receive slightly different pictures on your devices. Work together and communicate in the target language to spot the ten differences without peeking!
This Moment scales from beginner (e.g., learning how to say "table” or “chair”) to advanced (e.g., “What color is your doormat? Mine’s orange. How many have we spotted so far?”).
💣 New Moment: Cut the Red Wire
Another cooperative Moment. One of you is defusing a bomb and the other has the manual and instructions. You’ll need to communicate in the language to describe the bomb and relay instructions on which wire to cut. Then you’ll switch roles.
This one should scale well from beginner to advanced. Keep playing and see how fast you can get through it.
This is just the first level of the Moment; they’ll get progressively harder with more wires, colors, and instructions.
🟩 Appearance of New Cards
If you were new to SRS, it would feel difficult to be shown a word you’ve never seen before and then get asked what it meant.
New vocabulary will be now introduced before getting reviewed. While not as ultra-gamified as a multiple choice with images with dingy sounds, this gives you a chance to learn and get acquainted with the word or phrase before getting quizzed on it.
📋 Better Moment Tutorials
Moment tutorials are now easier to read and less tempting to ignore. They’re now a list of short steps rather than a wall of text. Ideally, it’d come with videos and animated images for each step, but I hope this is good enough.
🚀 Booster Packs Available in More Languages
Also, along with Cantonese and Chinese, verified booster pack vocabulary sets are now available for: Spanish, German, Vietnamese, Filipino, Korean, and French. Go to the Get Vocabulary section to browse them.
🎶 Prototyping Song Packs
I went off on a tangent prototyping a feature to learn through song lyrics and a rhythm game to pair along with it. You’d be able to add vocabulary from popular song lyrics, and we’d exclude non-conversational or weird words or phrases that songs often use. This came pretty far along, but I'm shelving this for now to try other things.
👐 What’s Next?
🛠️ Fixing Issues With Moments
There have been issues with getting Moments started or random bugs here or there. I’ll investigate and have those fixed ASAP.
💝 Kudos and Reward System
Getting partners onboard and engaging is still not quite in place. There’s some success through Moments, but there’s more we could do outside of those sessions.
Upon receiving daily and weekly progress reports, I’m planning a feature where partners can reply with kudos or praise to provide motivation. And set real-life rewards for achieving learning goals (streak length or vocabulary learned).
🏎️ Better Onboarding
A lot of people signed up this week. I’ve been scrambling to try to fix various issues, and my onboarding was put to shame. I hope some of you stick through it!
📹 Intro Video
People have mentioned they wanted to try Coupling or at least watch a video of it before taking the leap to sign up. Though anonymous login will be tricky given the need to invite a partner.
We’ll put an intro video on the homepage to start with.
🔀 New Vocabulary Ordering
The ordering of new vocabulary is random right now. If you’re new, your first words might be grandma, car, and eight.
I’ll try to order the first few sets of vocabulary in a more sane way for beginners. For specific languages, I will try to mix in vocabulary that’d contribute to the upcoming Moment.
🔁 Introduction to SRS
I’ll add a brief introduction to the learning system that uses spaced repetition. It’s a powerful and an efficient way of learning that may not be clear without some brief intro.
💪 Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced?
The Moments range in difficulty from beginner-level that don’t even require speaking (e.g., Cup Quiz) to Moments that can support intermediate-to-advanced users (e.g., Cut the Red Wire). I’d love a setting to specify which you are so you’ll get set up with a proper first Moment.
🧑🤝🧑 Gender?
This is a stretch goal, but due to the nature of many languages with masculinity and femininity and pronouns, setting a gender (or not) may be useful in certain languages such as Vietnamese so the pronouns of sentences can be appropriately set.
👍 Thanks for trying and supporting the project! General feedback is desperately welcome over at kevin@learncoupling.com