A large white kanji — one of many Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system — blankets a computer screen. A player navigates a cartoon elephant to race across the kanji’s strokes. Its footsteps leave a thick trail of blue that spreads across the kanji, imprinting its shape in memory.
Martin Rincon, studio art senior, watches approvingly as the player pilots the latest draft of a game he is developing: KritterRun. In a past life, Rincon held jobs as a newspaper illustrator, a motion graphics designer and did marketing for some of the world’s most famous companies. But his passion for game design loomed larger.
“In my hubris, after marketing for Nintendo and Microsoft, I was like, ‘I could probably make a game. I’ll just make a game,’” Rincon said. “So that’s how the journey started.”
After dropping out of UT in 1992, Rincon launched a small marketing company called Martini Design. Rincon’s team whipped up a viral yet “simple, stupid little game” that involved blowing up a stadium in Seattle; he then received a call from Nintendo to develop the project. Even Microsoft brought on Rincon’s company.
“We were doing all this corporate stuff, and we were doing all this gaming stuff in one house,” Rincon said. “Nuts. Crazy times.”
Rincon began conceptualizing KritterRun in 2022, and he returned to UT two years later at his sister’s recommendation. Upon enrolling in Japanese classes, he decided to turn the game into something that could rival traditional language learning apps like Duolingo. He built a system where players must guide their character to the correct Japanese word or alphabet, after which it saves in their very own vocabulary list.
“Language apps are just old school because that’s how it’s been done for (the) last 2,000 years,” Rincon said. “Right now, with attention spans being like five seconds, you have to have something that’s more engaging.”
Rincon enlisted Katie Qin, an arts and entertainment technology senior, to do voice acting for the game. Qin recorded dozens of kanji and alphabets out of her closet, as well as heartfelt phrases like “You’re a genius!” depending on whether they select the right word.
“I was very shy at first,” Qin said. “But he did help me break out of my shell a little bit. … It was really fun doing some of the voice tidbits and exploring sound mixing.”
Hannah Lee, an undeclared sophomore, took two Japanese classes with Rincon. She helped him staff a booth at Kōmori Con, UT’s annual anime convention, on Friday, Feb. 7th, where attendees tested out the game. Lee said she’s watched Rincon strike a delicate balance to make language learning enjoyable.
“As his knowledge of Japanese has expanded, the game itself has taken a lot of different forms,” Lee said. “That’s been a thing with him when designing the game: trying to figure out how to make it fun, but also you’re actually learning something.”
Beyond the educational element, Lee said she finds it impressive how the former Nintendo marketer scraped together a professional game with limited support.
“When I think of big games, I always assume you need so (many) resources to pull that off,” Lee said. “But he just did it on his own, which I think is crazy.”
