About This Site My name is Owen Dwyer and I work for a university in Anhui province in Central China. This is hobby site that I do in my days off. All the games and content on this site were made by me except for the audio which was voiced by a Canadian guy I met in Xi’an. I like to make these games because it is fun and challenging. While I could probably try my hand at making non-educational, general fun games, doing so is really difficult and you have to be pretty good for a game to get any serious play. Making games for learning English is much more niche and so the games do not have to be as entertaining or attractive for people to play them. People who make general games you play in your browser or on your device are extremely talented and typically these games are made by a team of people who have specialized talents. Of those about three thousand actually load and play a game. These numbers have been quite stable for the last two years, although the number of visitors usuallyfalls considerably over the summer and then spikes around September time when students go back to school.  The adverts on the home page are from Yahoo. They do not make much money, but they more than cover the server and site registration costs. The site gets about five thousand unique visitors each day with about half that number on weekends. The aim of this site is provide a place for students to practice English in an engaging and fun way. A lot of other similar site are more geared towards providing teachers with resources to give to their students, but the intention this site is to be a resource that language learners can use independently. With that in mind I have tried to tailor things more towards students by using less text based instructions and easier to follow interfaces. The main page for example only has a brief summary of each game and the games themselves are quite easy to figure out and interact with. However, it is necessary to have some text descriptions and longertext articles to that search engines can better index the site appropriately. The games are aimed at a relatively low level of English with pretty much all the content being around elementary level. A lot of the vocabulary content would probably even be more like introductory or pre-elementary level. The reason for this is simply that it is a lot easier to make games that use simple content than it is to make ones that use difficult abstract concepts. Things like colors or food are easily to represent with an image whereas the something like “multi-culturalism” would be much more difficult. This site has been around since about 2010 with all the games initially being flash based. Recently though, I have started to replace all the flash content with javascript versions. Using javascript is actually more difficult and time consuming that flash, however, more and more people are using the web on phones and tablets that do not have flash enabled and so this is a necessary change. Last timeI checked, something like half the visitors to this site were using an Android or iOS device. Using javascript is made easier by using the CreateJS framework which I highly recommend. This framework is basically a bunch of code resources that makes it easier to do things with javascript. I quite like to receive feedback and always try to reply to any emails sent through the contact page.