Building Badanamu has been a real technical challenge, in large part because we are doing some things that are unique and new to this market. Which is why we have based Badanamu entirely on our own UnityPark Suite, a networking suite for developing multiplayer games.

With UnityPark Suite we’ve been able to make Badanamu in to a realtime 3D multiplayer game with voicechat that can be played on most Android and iOS devices. Multiplayer games are nothing new but 3D multiplayer games for mobile devices with full voice chat that can be used over 3G/4G-connections are few and far between. And we couldn’t have done any of it without UnityPark Suite and MuchDifferent Voice Chat.

We believe that this new form of multiplayer game will be the future of gaming and virtual worlds. And that UnityPark Suite and MuchDifferent Voice Chat will be a big part of that future.

Another cool technology that we’ve been using in the development of Badanamu is Near Field Communication or NFC. With NFC we can make toys that have preprogrammed electronic chips in them that interact with the game. If you for example buy a new Badanamu toy you will be able to pair it with your mobile and get a new character in your game. NFC has been around for a couple of years but as far as we know no one has ever used it the way we are, which you have to admit is pretty cool.

In yesterday’s post I mentioned briefly that we have a korean team working on Badanamu. That team is largely comprised of our partner company Calm Island, a visual effects studio called Visual Dart and also our very own daughter company in South Korea which is called MuchDifferent Korea.

This subsidiary company of MuchDifferent was started as part of our involvement in Badanamu and has become an integral part of the development of Badanamu. But MuchDifferent Korea, which currently has four employees, also does a lot of other things: It is our main sales force in Asia, which is a huge and growing market for game development and it is part of the continuing development of UnityPark Suite, our network suite for game development.

MuchDifferent Korea is also involved in one of our most interesting projects in Asia which is the teaching of courses on UnityPark Suite at a number of South Korean universities. The first courses will be taught this coming autumn and we are very proud and excited about this. And we will be announcing some cool challenges for the budding UnityPark Suite developer community in South Korea in the coming year.

MuchDifferent Korea is at the front line of our future in Asia and we are very happy that they are part of our team

But that’s not all for today, we will also be giving away a Badanamu USB memory stick today to a winner picked at random from the people who like this post on our facebook page. So head on over there right now and like this post and you might be the lucky winner!

So, what’s MuchDifferents part in all this? Well, we didn’t come up with the cute animals you’ve seen so far and we didn’t write the lovely learning songs you’ve heard. To understand our part we need a little more background on the Badanamu project.

As I’ve written before, the mind behind Badanamu is David Roberts. He started Calm Island with the express intent of improving the teaching of english to children in South Korea. To do this he dreamt up the world of Badanamu and with the help of teachers and visual artists at Calm Island, gave shape, color and life to Badanamu. But because of the highly ambitious technical solutions that power the world of Badanamu he also needed someone to develop the software behind Badanamu. And this is where MuchDifferent made a difference.

We became part of the project a little more than a year ago and were given the task of building not only the mobile clients for Android and iOS but also the servers that the multiplayer part of Badanamu will run on. More about that later on. Since then we’ve spent countless man hours and man nights developing Badanamu. In fact, for most of this time at least one of our developers has been in Seoul working closely with our korean team. And now, as we are approaching the launch of Badanamu, nearly half of our developers are in South korea.

In summary, we do mostly the stuff that you won’t see or hear (with some exceptions we’ll get to later) but the stuff that we do makes Badanamu possible and some ways truly unique. The way that Badanamu teaches language is indeed revolutionary but the way that Badanamu works behind the scenes is in some ways even more revolutionary and very exciting to us.

Now that you’ve met Bada and his friends, let’s talk a little more about Badanamu. Badanamu is many things but it is first and foremost a new way for children to learn a second language. Learning to speak a second language fluently is difficult if your education in this language is not begun at an early age. In fact, according to most research, the earlier you can get started the better.

The most important part of early language education is the recognition of phonemes, the very sounds that make up our spoken language. All phonemes are not part of all languages, some phonemes only appear in some languages and some languages have very few phonemes. And the phonemes that you don’t learn at an early age you might never be able to learn later on. In fact you might not even hear them or be able to distinguish between phonemes that to a native speaker are obviously different.

Which is why the main focus of Badanamu is on teaching children phonemes and exposing them to the sounds of the second language that they are trying to learn, at an early age. This leads us to the very core of the Badanamu project: Badanamu is a set of tools for teaching language to children in a way that is both intuitive and revolutionary. And, we hope, will provide them with a much better start in continuing their education.

Among these tools is a multiplayer 3D world where children and teachers can meet and interact with voice chat. Within this world there are lots of exercises and fun playthings to find and explore. We’ll show you this world in the days to come, it’s the centerpiece of Badanamu and something we are very proud of.

But for now, here’s an example of an exercise song that is part of Badanamu and which teaches children the different sounds that the letters of the alphabet make:

The world of Badanamu is filled with interesting characters, some of which you will get to know very well. Bada is the main playable character in the game of Badanamu and the character that we think most of our players will identify with. His species may be a little hard to figure out, we’ve had suggestions from some people that Bada might be a fox or a small bear, but truth be told it doesn’t really matter. Bada is Bada and so long as you find him as adorable as we do that’s all that matters.

But you might be interested to find out that Bada is actually based on a real animal called Bada. This Bada is a white pomeranian (a dog) that belongs to the owner of Calm Island, our partner company. His name is David Roberts and he is the mind and main driving force behind all of Badanamu. I’ll tell you more about him later. But for now, let me introduce you to some of Bada’s friends:

Meet the volcanos penguins Punk, Curly and Jass. As you might have guessed they live on a volcanic island called the Rainbow Volcano where they seem to spend most of their time doing extreme sports.

Next up is Mimi who is the real heart of the world of Badanamu. If you don’t believe me just listen to this song and try not to fall a little in love.

There are many other wonderful characters in the world Badanamu but I’m not going to spoil all of our surprises just yet!

World, meet Badanamu. Today we are very happy to introduce to you to MuchDifferents biggest project since the world record. It’s called Badanamu and it’s something we are very excited and proud to be a part of. We’ve put a lot of time and effort in to this project, together with our partner company Calm Island, and we think it’s going to be a bit of a revolution in the field of language learning for children.

Badanamu is a fully 3D world where children can learn, play and meet other children right on their mobile phones.  Within Badanamu they can attend classes held by teachers, do fun and challenging exercises and speak directly to their new friends. In order to accomplish this we’ve had to use some fairly unique and very high tech technology of our own which I will be telling you about later on.

We will be launching Badanamu in South Korea at the end of june and I will be blogging about it and MuchDifferent’s part in the project every day until then. Right here on this blog I’ll tell you all about the world of Badanamu, Bada and his friends, and the awesome technology that we are using to make the dream of Badanamu come true. We will also be posting links and updates to our twitter and facebook pages, so come join us on our trip to the lands of Badanamu.