Many of the polished games here on Match the Memory have been created by me, for the simple reason that I know how to use the site best and that I understand what’s needed to make an interesting and good-looking concentration game.  Because I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a. “I’m a Mormon“), a lot of the games that I’ve made have been for my own use in the LDS Church.  I’d like to share some of those games with you.

LDS Apostles

The second game ever created on Match the Memory (after my own sample game) was the LDS Apostles game.  It features the current First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve, and has a fun song that pops up after you win.  (Anytime there is a new member of the First Presidency or the Quorum of the Twelve, I will update this game.)  Every time that General Conference rolls around, I promote this game on Twitter, because it can help children familiarize themselves with the apostles before or during conference sessions.  For years, I’ve brought the printed version of this game to my Primary classes the week before General Conference, and the kids always like it.

Utah Temples

A few months later, I created the Utah Temples and Venezuela Maracaibo Mission games.  The first shows several LDS temples throughout the state of Utah, while the second features some of the experiences I had on my mission in Venezuela between 2000 and 2002.

LDS Presidents

I also made a Presidents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints game during that same time.  It helps with memorization of the Church’s prophets, from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young on down to Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson.  (And beyond — in the case of President Monson’s passing, it will be updated with his eventual successors.)  There’s also a cute YouTube video of a little girl singing the “Latter-day Prophets” song.

Priesthood Holders

Several months later, I got to teach a Primary lesson about the power of the priesthood.  (Elijah Uses the Priesthood, from the Primary 6 lesson manual.)  The book suggests, “Ask the children to name some brethren they know who hold the priesthood…. Discuss with the children how each of these people could or does use the priesthood to bless their lives.”  I made a game called Priesthood Holders that lists several offices (e.g. Bishop or Missionary) and people (e.g. Father or Brother) and, when each match is found, asks how that person could use the priesthood.  I took my laptop to class and we played the game and talked about each person’s use of the priesthood.

Keep Christ in Christmas

At Christmastime that year, I made a game called Keep Christ in Christmas.  It has religious paintings and tells the story of Jesus Christ’s birth using the scriptures from the New Testament.  For example, on the Good Tidings of Great Joy picture, the match pop-up has the corresponding scriptures from Luke 2 about the angels visiting the shepherds in the fields.

Book of Mormon People

This year, I got to teach the first lesson in the Primary 4 manual about the Book of Mormon and how we received it to a class of 11-year-olds.  I decided that I’d create a matching game that highlights some of the major people in the Book of Mormon (and the latter-day coming-forth of the Book of Mormon), using the paintings from the Church’s Gospel Art Picture Kit.  I called it Book of Mormon People.  Each match shares the abbreviated story from the picture and links to the full story on the Church’s site.  There’s also a cool video about the Book of Mormon that pops up when you finish the game.  When I told the kids in the class that we were going to play a game, one boy asked rather skeptically, “Does it involve technology?” and I told him, “Yes, it does,” and whipped out my iPad to play the game.  He was impressed.  They really enjoyed playing, and would have done it over and over if we’d had time.

Book of Mormon Languages

I also made a game called Book of Mormon Languages that shows the covers of several language editions of the Book of Mormon, with the name of each language written on the card.  From plain old English and Spanish, to more exotic scripts like Vietnamese and Japanese, this is a fun introduction to the worldwide nature of missionary work using the Book of Mormon.

So that’s all that I’ve done with LDS-themed memory games.  What can you create on Match the Memory?  A memorization guide for seminary Mastery Scriptures?  A concentration game about the Young Women values?  A colorful game showing different kinds of bugs for your Cub Scout den?  Let us know in the comments.

Match the Memory has been around for more than a year now, so we’ve been through all of the major holidays at least once.  In that time, we’ve built a few holiday-themed concentration games for you to play at home or in the classroom.

Here’s a rundown of the holiday games we have on the site now:

Keep Christ in Christmas (more religious)

Keep Christ in Christmas

Christmas Concentration (more secular)

Christmas Concentration

Thanksgiving Memory Game

Thanksgiving Memory Game

Halloween Concentration

Halloween Concentration

Symbols of the USA (for Independence Day)

Symbols of the USA

We’re planning to other major holidays as they roll around again.

I recently got a request to add a classroom mode to the site.  Someone was creating a personalized memory game and wanted to be able to use it in a large group setting where one person would control the computer, but many people would be able to call out which card to flip over.  It took me a few weeks to get around to coding the solution, since I was also working on the canvas-based version of the game, but Classroom Mode made its debut on the site this morning.

Classroom Mode running on the "Animal Adventure" game

Push a button, and it adds a grid to the game board, plus a label onto each card: A1, A2…, B1, B2…, etc.  This should make it easy for someone to tell the teacher (or whoever is running the game) to flip C5 and B2 if they know that those two match.

Let us know what you think of the new feature, and keep using Match the Memory in your own school classes and corporate presentations!

I made a video showing just how easy it is to make a Match The Memory game in just a few minutes.

Now go create your own game!

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Video transcript:

Hi, I’m Curtis, and I’m going to show you how to make your own personalized memory matching game in just about five minutes right here on Match the Memory.  It’s easy… and when you’re done, you’ll have a completely customized memory game that you can show off to your friends and family.

So, we’ll start at the Match The Memory home page, matchthememory.com.  And just to show you how fast we can do it, I’ll start this stopwatch before we begin.  So I’ll click this big “Create” button to get going.  That’ll take me to this page where I can start deciding what I want my game to look like and what I want my game to be named.

But first, you’ll notice this big warning box up here.  It says I’m not logged in to the site.  I can still create my game, but if I want to be able to come back and edit it later, I need to have an account with Match The Memory.  So I click Log in, and it takes me to a page where there are several service providers that I can use to verify who I am, so that nobody else can come back and change my game later on.  So I click to sign in with my Yahoo account, and it takes me back to the “Create A Game” page where it tells me I’ve been logged in.

So I’ve decided that I want to make a game showing off my daughter when she was a baby.  So I put in the address “baby audrey” — and it tells me this is how people will get to the game … matchthememory.com slash baby audrey.  The game title is what shows up at the top of the page, we’ll call this “Memories of Baby Audrey”.

Now here on my desktop, I have nine pictures that I want to be able to put into my game, so I’ll change the number of matches to nine.  But I can add or remove cards later on if I decide that one of these pictures doesn’t look good, or if I find another cute photo of Audrey that I want to put on the game, I can do that later.

So as I scroll down here, I see some option for what I want — how my game can look.  I’ve got portrait or landscape in the Layout — more of my Baby Audrey pictures are horizontal, so I’m going to stick with Landscape.  But you’ll notice as I change these options, the preview over here on the right updates, so I can see what the cards will look like.

Next, I have these themes, there’s Back to School, Happy Birthday, some cool patterns… but I’m going to stick with “Baby Girl” theme.  I can change what will appear on my cards — just a picture, just some text, and/or a combination of both.  I can tweak the colors by clicking on this color icon and moving it around the wheel, and that updates here.  And I can make the font size bigger or smaller — let’s make this a 30.  And I can pick a different font.  By default, this “Baby Girl” theme gives me the “Kristen” font, but I can decide that I want “Hank” instead and that changes.

I decide that I do want this to be a public game, so everyone can see it from the search function.  I’m finished, and I click create game.

That takes us to this next page, where it says I’ve successfully created my game and where I can edit the details.  So I click “Browse” to upload my pictures and find my photos on my desktop.  I can upload all of them at once, and you can see the program chew through all of them, It will add them to my nine cards.  It even renames new cards based on what my pictures were named on my desktop, and since I chose Text over Picture for what the cards will look like, it will put the same file name in for the text on my cards.  So I can look at my cards, I see Audrey eating licorice, I’ll go through them all to make sure the photos look good, there’s nothing weird, change the position of any part of the text that blocks an interesting part of the picture, I can make it go to the top right instead, just checking all my cards to make sure they look nice, all my text fits.

And that’s the basics of making a game.  I can go play my game right now, just a few minutes after I started.  Let’s take a look at that.  It loads the game cards, and my game is ready.  If I wanted I could back go to add a Youtube movie, add some text that pops up, but here we are, 4 minutes and 55 seconds after we started, and we’re finished.  So that’s the basics of making a game, I hope you enjoy your own game here on Match The Memory.  Thanks.

People like to play the concentration games at MatchTheMemory.com — there’s just something so satisfying about getting all of the matches on a game one by one.  Making progress through the game, watching the little cards pop up when you get a match, and hearing the final cheer when you win — it makes you happy.

So it naturally follows that a game is a great draw for making people familiar with your brand or business.  If you’re a business owner, you can quickly and easily create a customized memory game that shows off your products.  Upload your logo for the back of the cards, then add pictures to each card, with a description that pops up when the player makes a match, and a link to your web site where they can order the product.

Scentsy distributor Carleen Sadewasser did just that when she made a matching game called “I Need Scents“.  Her game is visually interesting and has neat little tidbits about several different products that she offers.   If the player is interested in a specific product, she’s got a link to where they can find out more about it and make a purchase.

Author Robert Bauer did something similar to build buzz for his upcoming children’s book, “CJ in a Pickle.”  His matching game shows off some of the clever illustrations in his book, with a link to buy it when you finish the game.

So now it’s your turn — create a matching game for your small business or company.  Promote it on Twitter and Facebook using our built-in tools on the game page, as well as right on your own web site.  Your customers will be more engaged, and you’ll get more clicks.  The rest is up to you!

I’ve created more personalized memory games on Match The Memory than anyone else by far, and in the process I’ve learned what makes a good-looking game stand out from an unattractive or boring one.  Here’s some tips that may help you when you’re making your next custom game.

1. Make the card layout (Portrait or Landscape) match your photos.  If most of your photos are horizontal, make the cards horizontal — and vice versa.  This is important because the cards are really all about the photos you put onto them.   The colored backgrounds are fun, but your pictures are larger on the cards when the orientations match — and I’d rather see a big photo than a bunch of color any day.
   

   The horizontal card looks better because it wastes less space on the background color and instead shows a larger version of the horizontal picture

2. Add some text to personalize it a little bit more.  Many of the games that have been created recently are just pictures on the front, plain colors on the back.  That’s fine, but a little bit boring.  When you put your words onto the cards, it makes the game feel like YOU made it, instead of some cookie-cutter company.  It gives the player a little insight into what you were thinking when you were making the game, what fun memories you were trying to share.  This can be done either as text overlaid on the cards themselves, or in the window that pops up when the player gets the match.  A corollary to this tip: don’t just make the back a blank color — add the game name to spice it up a bit.  (“Best Friends” in the  example below.)
   

   The popup window adds some context and tells what this picture is all about, while the "Best Friends" text on the back describes the whole game.

3. Make the fronts and backs complement each other, but give them some contrast. When I first started building the game from scratch, I only had one option for colors on the whole game — the fronts looked exactly like the backs.  But when I actually started playing the games, I realized immediately that I had to add an option to make the front look different from the back — everything was jumbled together and I couldn’t tell what was going on in the game as I was playing it.  I figured out that they had to be different to show progression as you matched more cards.  One trick I learned was to make the font color and the background color look good together on the front, then use the same colors in the opposite places on the back.  In the example below, the blue background color and yellow font color of the cards are reversed for the back — yellow background color and blue font color.
   

   The backs and fronts are easy to tell apart because their colors are complementary but different

   So there you have it.  I hope these hints will help you make a better game in the future.  If you have any other tips to share, please leave them in the comments.

Celebrate the month of May with a free PDF download of your game. From May 1 to May 31, 2010, you can get a free version of your personalized memory game to print at home. It’s our way of saying thank you to our fans, and a little encouragement to create more custom games on Match the Memory.

Have fun, and enjoy a free PDF download on us!

When I first decided to create Match The Memory, it was a lightning-struck-my-brain kind of moment.  I didn’t know anything about what other kinds of games existed, either to play online or for purchase of a physical game.  It was just an idea while I was at my parents’ cabin: I could create a pretty cool game that someone could personalize, play online, and print.

Once I got home and started creating the site, I looked into my competition, and I what I found didn’t impress me much.  There are three basic kinds of memory games out there, and I’ll go through each of them and discuss their shortcomings and how Match The Memory overcomes those faults to make for a great game experience.

1. Download a program to personalize and play on your computer
2. Flash-based online games
3. Photo-printing services

Download a program to personalize and play on your computer

The first memory games I found when I started looking online were Windows-based programs that you would install on your computer, add your pictures to, and play right there on your machine.  The first problem is that these programs were only available for Windows operating systems — I never found one single game that worked on a Mac or on Linux.  On the other hand, Match The Memory, being based on the web, works on any platform that has a web browser.

Which leads to the second problem: sharing.  You could create the game on your own computer, but if you wanted your mother who lives across the country to be able to play it, you were out of luck.  Most of these games didn’t let you export a finished product as an .exe file, and even if you could, those are usually blocked by email programs.  (And if your mother-in-law is a Mac person, she couldn’t use it anyway.)  Match The Memory makes it easy to share your games on Facebook and Twitter, right from the game page.  And you can easily copy and paste the address into a blog entry or an email.

The third problem was that while these programs were simple enough to use, the end result was pretty crummy.  The games looked like they’d been created in 1995.  You could usually customize what the front of your cards looked like (your photos), but the backs looked like a silly shareware playing card, or worse, were emblazoned with the name of the software.  The cards were also really small — you could hardly see what the personalized photos looked like.  Meanwhile, I had already decided that on Match The Memory, a user would be able to customize every visual aspect of their cards, both front and back, with their own choice of text, photo, font, and color.

Finally, these programs were just about the pictures themselves.  They had no way for you to add extra stuff to them — descriptive text on top of the pictures, more explanation about what was going on, or links to a whole blog or web site about the adventures you’d had and the memories you’d made.  Match The Memory was conceived as a way to share the details of life, not just through images, but also words, links and videos — opening the whole Web to your imagination.

Flash-based online games

There are a few websites that allow you to upload your photos to make a personalized online game.  The problem with these sites is the same as the final two problems above:  after you’d put all of this effort into making a game, it wasn’t something that you would care to share with your friends and family.  The cards were small and ugly, and the game didn’t let you share what was most important to you about the photos — the memories themselves.

They also have little to no eye candy during the game play — you click on a card and the back side appears in its place immediately, with no animations or sound effect to give it any pizazz.  I think those things are essential to getting kids to play your game over and over.  (My daughter’s favorite feature of Match the Memory is when you click on a card that’s already flipped up and it shakes, like the Mac OS X login screen when you get your password wrong.)

With both of these kinds of programs, you have no way to get a physical version of the game you’ve created.  Which leads to the final category…

Game-printing services

In this group, I lump together several kinds of companies (big printing companies with lots of other products, specialized memory-game companies, Etsy vendors who cut out your photos by hand) into one big category of services that do one thing — give you a printed version of your memory game.  Some of them make it easy to submit and build your game (but none easier than Match the Memory), and some require you to jump through unnecessary hoops.  (Sending photos through the USPS instead of over the Internet?  How quaint!)

The quality of the finished product from these services varies from “professional” to “some crafter cutting out your photos and slapping them onto a recycled Memory game with Mod Podge”.  Some of the services don’t give you the back of the card to work with, instead putting their logo in the space that could have been personalized by you.

None of these services give you the ability to share your creation with a wider audience on the Internet.  None let you have the degree of control and customization that you get from Match the Memory.  None of them let you easily print your memory game at home within minutes.  None of them have a better price than Match the Memory offers.

Now that I’ve dissected what I consider to be the weak points of my competition, I’d like you to chime in.  If you’ve used another one of these services, tell me about it.  What did you dislike or like about those services?  What did they get right that I don’t quite have down yet?  How do you think Match the Memory is better than the Other Guys?  Tell me about it in the comments.

Match The Memory has been my baby for more than six months, and I’ve worked on it hundreds of hours during that time.  I’m adding to it every day.

But I can’t do it alone.  Mine is only one opinion, and I want to make the best memory matching game possible.  That means I need your input.  Let me know in the comments what you think could be done to make this a better web site.

I also need the input of your friends and family.  Share the site with them (via email, blog, Facebook, Twitter, whatever!) and ask them to come check it out, and leave their mark on the site by contributing a great game and some feedback.

Together we can make this an awesome site!