A Brief Introduction

Influent is a language learning game aimed at inspiring people around the world to pick up a new language by making vocabulary acquisition and proper pronunciation a fun and rewarding experience. Players explore an interactive 3D environment filled with hundreds of selectable, collectible objects scattered throughout. Each object has a name, and sometimes even a description or action word attached, allowing players to assemble Nouns, Adjectives, and Verbs into vocabulary lists that can be practiced and mastered in a high-flying Seek and Destroy mode. It’s a blast!

tl;dr Influent is a language learning game that offers a more free-form, sandbox-style approach where the player chooses what to learn.

Development History

Influent was developed by Rob Howland initially as part of a Japanese Government-sponsored research project at the Entertainment Computing Laboratory, part of the University of Tsukuba located in Ibaraki, Japan. This resulted in a research paper being published by the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), which can be viewed in its entirety here. Further development was made possible by a successful Kickstarter campaign and the game was released on PC in 2014.

The game’s full credits including the native speakers that assisted with translating and localizing the game into all available language packs can be found on the Credits page.

Platforms