Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

It's not that your game is too hard or too easy. You can dive in a little deeper. It's that your difficulty curve is not tuned properly. IMO you can tune it statically (follow most of the advice here, make it harder). Or, you can use some very basic dynamic difficulty shifting (If they complete the first level in >wpm, ramp up the difficulty, or adjust the difficulty curve as needed).

See this great video from Extra Credits on how Bejeweled 2's levelling system works. It's not the same problem, but it's very related. "A designer should always be thinking about how the player experiences the game."

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/puzzle-games

Nice game. I remember playing it some time ago, and quitting because of boredom once getting in the high (30+) levels.

I think it was one of the first "little" games using html5 instead of flash.

I see that they've introduced a new "expert" mode, which is indeed a lot harder. I've reached level 10 so far, but I'll give it a serious try sometime.

The biggest problem for me is the language. I type a lot of English, but not being a native make me hardly write any fancy words. So my finger get "stuck" in some words that have pattern that hardly appear in my native language.

On a side note, this remind me of "The Typing of the Dead" [1], which got recently released on steam (no linux support :( )[2], and the various online clones of it [3].

I feel that games like this one are a really great way of improving the speed/accurateness of typing, while also having a good share of fun.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead

[2]http://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/

[3]http://www.kongregate.com/games/ascott/typing-of-the-living-... http://www.addictinggames.com/funny-games/zombietypocalypse....

Hard to see the words when they start stacking. And worse, you start typing a word and it picks a different word from the one you wanted and you have switch contexts. That's the hardest part of the game, not the typing.

Got to wave 17 and quit from boredom. Harder please! Much, much harder!

(reppin QGMLWB by the way http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization)

A typing hacker would not just enjoy shooting at words such as "specifying" and "establish", but also at #define, for(;;), /bin/bash, *p[1+i], s/[^0-9]/_/g, "%10f\n", ~(str&(b|c)), and so forth. Just saying.

It's fun but it takes a while to get challenging. When you lose it won't tell you what wave you got to but I think I got to about 23?

One thing I don't like is that it would lock on when you were typing something. So if a word was "hackers" and you didn't read it correctly and only typed "hacker" then you'd wonder why nothing was working until you noticed and finished the "s". This wouldn't be so bad if the words didn't overlap each other making it very hard to read them quickly. Also when small missiles are near you you may try to type "hackers" and instead have a missile fire at the letter "h" and then the rest of the work "ackers" is wasted. (or worse the a in "ackers" matches another word, then you have to find the word you started typing accidentally so you can finish it.)

The game is neat, but the fact that there is a "current word" state at all makes it frustrating. If I try to type two words at once, too bad. If my "current word" happens to be drawn below a cluster of other words - I am forced to wait, because I can't even type other words while I'm waiting.

Never force the player to wait for anything in a game that has a primary game mechanic focusing on speed. A better solution is as such:

1) If I really have to type exact words (I assume that this is intended to be a learning game where this makes sense) then when I enter a letter find the nearest word with the first occurrence of that letter. Why can't I shoot multiple enemies at once?

2) Initially, I had thought "Maybe I don't need to type words at all" and started just hitting letters that I saw regardless of which word they were in expecting the nearest one to be shot. This might be an interesting mode?

Also, another cool feature would be a bonus in the game like a math equation the causes all of the items in the level to temporarily move more slowly.

For instance, I might see a blue "enemy" that actually has a math equation below it. We'll say it's 17 * 4 / 2. If I type 34, then all enemies slow down for a duration of 3.5 seconds or so.

Then you can also leverage the fact that this is the only place where people can type numbers, so if someone hits the wrong answer - the powerup can become desaturated and becomes disabled. Just an idea!

Thanks for sharing this game :D

People generally look at me funny when I tell them the most useful thing I ever learned in high school was how to become a touch typist.

Off topic: I knew this domain looked familiar. It's home of Asaph, a great micro-blogging tool: http://phoboslab.org/projects/asaph

This was before I discovered Tumblr and GitHub (where it's currently hosted). I actually used it for a recent side project: http://impecrateur.fr

This is great, but you need a leader board for motivation! I'll resist humblebragging about how easy it was and what level I reached :)

It'd be nice when you got to more advanced levels if it did something like require you to type entire sentences, use punctuation, things like that.

It'd be a great way to learn how to type for people who are learning, much better than mavis beacon if you could somehow work in typing in sentences.

The federation starship Dvorak reporting for duty. I enjoyed it, my only problem is that difficulty increases linearly, so it took 13 or so rounds to even begin to be challenging.

Does anyone else have trouble seeing the words with the font that they use?

Sometimes I mistype, think I finished a word, and move on to the next word, effectively freezing me by three seconds. I don't think a typo should penalize me this much because I can generally recover from typos. Would be nice if the unit I'm currently attacking could glow or something.

I like the cuteness and simplicity of the game though. Finally something to make me feel good about all those years spent typing.

This is extremely laggy for me in Safari 7.

A suggestion: It gets frustrating when you try to type one word, but the game thinks you're typing another. Maybe only have maximum one word starting with each letter on the screen at any given time. Bullets (single characters) could also be punctuation, numbers, etc. Then speed of individual entities could be used to ramp up the difficulty.

Anyway, a lot of fun. Thanks!

I remember this game, was the winner in a competition held by Mozilla (Mozilla Game On https://gameon.mozilla.org/en-US/ )

https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2011/02/z-type/

I like the implementation of this game a fair bit, but I never liked the "go until you die" games.

Personally, I really need to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Even if it's a fake light, like an arbitrary point goal to reach, a time to survive to win a stupid little achievement.

"How far can you go" never served as good motivation for me.

So many complaints that it's not hard enough, and my complaint is the opposite, yet, ironically the same:

It's not useful over a wide-enough range of skill levels.

I was hoping it would be a good trainer for my kids, but it starts off too fast. I tried typing at about 5 wpm, and the result is a game that ends after just a few seconds of practice. If they don't start off already good, it won't give them enough practice to get good. They'll get bored with a game that won't continue for more than a few seconds in...maybe a minute.

It's a really nice game, but what I don't like is that sometimes I get stuck on some word that I've hit by mistake or not and I have to search it on the screen, to see what that word is. And especially at high levels, when the screen is full, you end up losing the game. As a suggestion ... write the current word in the bottom right corner or something.

If you like this concept there's a decent cli implementation that's been around for a while and is nice to bring up when you've got a couple minutes to kill: http://typespeed.sourceforge.net/

1) It should show your wpm as your playing or at least between levels. If it also showed your ranking compared to other players that would provide some cool feedback. 2) I played up to level 20 and got bored. How long is it going to go? What's the reward? What's my score? 3) Changing the scenery as you progress would help aleviate a bit of the boredom. Change the color of the ships. Change the background. Change the song. Add different sounds etc. 4) your banner isn't responsive :) http://imgur.com/Dq4PCkh 5) the odd background image makes it look like something is broken on the site 6) This is hacker news. Where is the bot that gives me the high-score!

Pretty fun but real repetitive. I had a peek at your javascript to find out where the words were coming from and discovered the game can be beat with one simple line of javascript:

   window.setInterval(function() {ig.game.entities = [];}, 1000);

hehe :)

Checkout MasterType http://bit.ly/1a03jfe, one of the best selling games of 80s for Apple II, Atari, VIC-20, PC, etc. Sold more than a million copies.

This is same idea with vertical Tetris-like layout with better graphics but little dynamic pacing and learning support.

I worked on Apple II double-res version. Despite bad graphics by current standard, it had two major features:

1. Dynamic learning and pacing 2. Magic Sauce

Sorry "Magic Sauce" is how we described the design factor that made the game much more fun and immersive than it first looks. We spent a lot of time trying to capture and reproduce it in other games but never quite got there.

Absolutely love this game. My only feedback is it would be nice to have an option to stay on the stage you died on so you could keep trying to beat it and get further and further without having to start from square one over and over again.

I'm on expert, having never played this, and this is amazing. I love the music, and I love the game. I'm not sure how much I'll enjoy it after I keep playing, but for now I'm blown away.

I'm asking myself what the minimum system requirements for those web tech demos are. Until some time ago I had an old Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro from 2009 and whenever I tried running something like this the browser came to a halt.

I assumed that it was because of my ancient hardware. But now I got a new Haswell i5 quadcore system and the game still locks up my browser.

So where's the secret to being able to enjoy these tech demos?

In addition to what others said, here's my #1 thought. It gets harder way too slowly. It felt like I was replaying the same level many times in a row, rather than advancing to more difficult levels.

Also, a level becomes exponentially harder the more time you wait before getting started. So wasting 2 seconds at the beginning is going to cost a LOT more than chilling for 2 seconds near the end.

Wave 35, score of 4098. Needed to get harder faster. Waves ~25+ were difficult.

Criticism: Overlapping words make it hard to read. The font makes it hard to distinguish i, t, l, j, which is bad when you need to determine which to type quickly.

Accidentally mistyping the first letter of the wrong word locks you on to some rando object; my own failing, but, an unlock button (backspace?) would be nice.

I got to wave 32 before realising how tiring it was and I got a liiittttle bit bored.

Awesome game - but it needs maybe a few more milestones to reward the player for getting quite far. Maybe acknowledge it when they get through a whole mission without making any wrong keystrokes, or every 10 levels give them some arbitrary 'promotion' - something like that.

Anyway, really good job.

I thought this would be tuned to hackers. Should be able to choose your programming language / framework of choice. This is would pepper the vocabulary with words would typically see in those the selected programming environments.

Bonus points for using Sublime short cuts to "type" some standard words.

Here's a game that looks EXACTLY like yours, but for Japanese kana: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/japanese-frenzy/pp...

I like these kinds of games. I usually have a game like this that I bring out a couple times a week to help my brain warm up in the morning.

Could we get a URL that goes straight to a specific level? That would be easier than repeatedly going through the first handful to get to the challenging ones.

Wow, brought back a memory of when Impact first came out and this was one of the initial demos. A few of us went on to build a hackathon app using it a few weeks later, and it was a very pleasant experience. I remember the Impact creator failed a Facebook interview over a sqrt question and it was popular on HN for a few days: https://twitter.com/phoboslab/status/24910672471007232

If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy Typing Maniac. There's a stand-alone version (http://www.mindjolt.com/typing-maniac.html) but also a Facebook version (https://apps.facebook.com/typing-maniac/). I haven't played the FB version in a few years, but it was fun to compete against friends' scores.

Couldn't find the word in expert mode, that i was "accidently" starting to type and lost valuable time :(

Final score: 2914, accuracy 92,9 and words per minute: 62,4.

Fun game for a moment though ;)

I really like it, I saw this a long time ago but I didn't remember the ships shooting. The bad thing is that there is no real difficulty, I stopped playing because I was bored in the end. You should def. add another level of difficulty for people like me, and I wish this game was in french as well as I'm not used to typing in english that much.

ps : and when I say increase the difficulty, you can increase it a loooot. It's way too easy (and yes expert mode obviously).

Fun, I personally got 1525, accuracy 88.8%, 38.9 WPM...

Creative and fun though

The "Good Browser" message that greets NoScript users is unfortunate. One can use a good browser and still have a whitelisting policy for javascript.

My two suggestions:

1. Once a unit has been targeted, put it on top. I accidentally targeted a word I didn't mean to (duplicate first letter), but couldn't figure out what it was I needed to type, as there was another word in front of it.

2. Don't allow duplicate first letters--I'll be half way through typing a word, before I realized that it targeted a different word. Or rather, restrict it to when there are >26 words on the screen.

This is a brilliant concept — the combination of improving typing skills and playing a game is perfect for those wanting to learn to type, e.g. school kids.

Got to wave 8 on expert and quit out of boredom. The enemies didn't even make it past the first 1/16th of the screen.

Needs to be waaayyy harder imo.

My 2c on the scaling / high scores issue: It seems like the only continuous measure of skill is WPM, and the problem seems to be that maximum WPM varies enormously across the population. It would be interesting to see if making score proportional to log(letters typed weighted by WPM they were typed at) helps balance things.

I use this game to practice touch typing more or less regularly and what I really miss is a way to monitor my progress.

What about a two player mode? Where when you type a word, it sends it over to the opponent? My favorite typing game website is http://typeracer.com where you are a car and you race to complete sentences and paragraphs against other people (wpm is car speed).

This game is great fun. I can't find some of the issues with it which people have complained about it before.

Adding some kind of dynamic difficulty system is a bad idea, don't listen to them! The difficulty should remain in the amount of words, and the length of those words in each level.

For what this game is, it's pretty cool.

The game is cool, you need to give people a way to invest in it though.

Once you're finished with the game, you should ask for people's emails to post them on a scoreboard.

You can then re-engage people by sending them an email when their rank starts falling etc

I think this has a lot of potential, you just need to harness it in the right way.

This game makes me realise that I don't do 'proper' touch typing - I use some other system that relies on muscle memory to find the keys, I don't look at the keyboard. One unusual thing I seem to do though is that I never use my pinky fingers, only the other eight - am I alone?

Great game ! Reached level 23. There was a steep increase in difficulty at level 19, and I feel like I could do better but I work on an american keyboard and my personal one is in french.

It's taking the words from random news articles, right ? I had a feel each wave had a lot of words that fit together

I love your game. I discovered it on a forum mid-2012 and used it to break into and get comfortable with an unprinted happy hacking keyboard. Nice choice of music too, I usually turn off background music wherever I find it. Could you tell us what is the music that plays in the background?

Fun but I wish it just presented a list of words closest to farthest, re-ordering as necessary. I would fly with something like that.

I can type much faster than the game would let me but I couldn't read the things I wanted to type. Also had trouble with it starting the wrong words.

That moment when you realise you actually don't so much touch type as four-finger type. :/

Wow. Slick graphcs. Fun. Impressive.

This was really fun! I quit at wave 17 though. Make the game faster and words longer, I love it!

Awesome game. While most commenters want it faster, can the game creator make another level to start even slower for kids. My 5 year old wants to play, but ends up crying because she can't keep up. This game would be great for her to learn the keys.

Just played two rounds, not the best typist and got 40WPM. Only thing I would change is the addition of lives (must die three times and then the game restarts) and/or the ability to start from a previously achieved level. Other wise really fun.

That's awesome. I got to level 35 with 95.8% accuracy and 45 wpm. I need to practice...

Very clever --things have come quite a ways since Mavis Beacon. I see the WPM in this, but what about accuracy? Should you be able to recover the word when you mistype it?

In any case, a fine example of game-reward theory tying into feedback loops for education.

Very nice. I played up to level 20 on "normal" mode, will go back for a go on "expert" mode later. I can definitely see how this could be very useful for beginners who are learning to type, or anyone trying to ramp up there speed.

Good job!

It needs the active word to be highlighted more, and ensure that it's z-index is on the top. Ultimately lost the game because the word I'd locked onto got covered up by a bunch of other words. Fun game though, would play again.

Just to clarify to many people who find the game boring after some time: I found it among the Chrome GL experiments, so it probably wasn't meant as a fully featured game.

And, if you find it too easy at first, try starting in "expert mode"!

Haha, great. This reminds me of The Typing of the Dead and its sequel(s?), which were basically The House of the Dead games re-written so you had to type rather than point a gun. Brilliant stuff, this game.

All I want to say is I got to level 27 on expert mode and I'm quite proud of this fact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDpF3qymPqA

I am typing on the TypeMatrix 2020. Best feature, the dvorak key.

http://www.typematrix.com/2030/features.php

Tons of fun for a while, but way too easy. I got to wave 22 without any of the ships getting more than one ship-height down the screen. Would love to see them moving a lot faster.

Add an option to return to main menu from the game. Also, I found random single letters the only hard part. And reading stacked up words (or finding the active word from a stack).

minor pivot:

One of the major pieces of advice for up and coming writers is to transcribe the books of an author you love/admire. Teaches you to learn their cadence, and, on some level, think about why they choose certain words.

Now, the speed here would SORTA kill some of that but... I could see wanting to transcribe a great novel while playing a game, and I would be forced to consciously think about each word. So, let people upload RTFs or text files to download. Or choose from open source books.

The difficulty level increased in an unusually neat way for this type of game - at a pace which you could improve and keep up with.

HN readers advised to start on 'expert' level.

I'm a teacher and this is great practice for students learning to type. I thought a full screen mode would be helpful. I had a hard time reading the words at times.

Along with the game being quite enjoyable, anyone else enjoy the nice instrumental in the background? Quite relaxing while trying to type like a mad man.

Amazing game... that kind that you can be hours playing... It's like pinterest for me... first time for hours but never came back again.

I really really really enjoy this game - I wish it worked better for me in Safari 7 on the mac but its great in Chrome on Windows.

Great job by the author

I got to level 23 on normal and then I got bored. It needs to be /much/ harder. But it's a really fun game. Good job.

Lags on Safari 7.0

There goes a half hour :)

I'm now seeing weird ghosting of text elsewhere on the web, like the text is continuously falling from itself. Weird!

To the author: if you're filtering this word list at all, you should probably know that I encountered "cumming".

What in tarnation is a “typing hacker”? Imagine my disappointment when I realized this was not a Type Theory quiz game.

Using Chromium on Linux Mint (an Ubuntu-based distribution), the loading bar freezes near the end. Firefox works fine.

This game is very slow on my macbook pro.

I like the small single-letter missiles.

Great work! Take that Mavis Beacon!

Like some noted, the difficulty curve could use a tweak or two -- but overall it was fun.

Cute game! I remember playing something like this when I was younger, though your effects are way better.

Was this game made to collect metrics on typing - to be able to identify typists using machine learning?

3876 points, 95,3%, 57 wpm loaded very fast, executed without lags on chrome,macbook air mid-2011

Can we get some brackets and other symbols? Just typing words is not really helpful to us coders.

Having a lot of fun with it over here. Our request is cooperative (or coopetition) multiplayer.

dvorak ftw, learned dvorak as a project for an art class in college. If you are learning dvorak or interested you can DM me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay_e-GAoN30

I clicked this after seeing it on HN for a day straight.. was not disappointed and now hooked.

Good fun typing game, font could be better, can be made harder. Well implemented! :)

If only I had this in middle school instead of that lousy Mavis Beacon program.

made it to level 33 then failed horribly as the game thought I was typing a different word, since there was like 100 characters on the screen. wonder if I can script every alpha character per second and cheat :P

This is a great idea imho. How about short stories, poems or wisdoms ?

Firefox nightly and the search box kicks in sometimes. Is it only me?

I got up to level 13 then got thrown off kilter by the cluster bombs.

Is there a typing game out there that focuses on characters? I.e. : ; [] {} () \ ?

etc.

very cool stuff - I would love to learn this way "standard expressions" in coding language, i.e. per level you programme a specific function or so....(off the top of my head)

jammed some edm, hi bpm in the background to keep me alert. when things got hectic i got some lag but that only helped me catch up. I couldn't stop playing.

I would like to see a leaderboard too

Good idea, could you also show the high scores(all time or daily)?

For children I would add the option to use only uppercase letters.

An awesome way to learn glossary?

Gamification to school learning in a fun way?

Too choppy and can't keep up with the typing speed.

Got pas wave 20 and called it a day. Fun game though!

Hit the 40s with 5189 points, 92.7% accuracy 61.5wpm

Great! typespeed on steroids! perfect music! :)

Could have some type of key combinations too...

can't play this on Safari 7.0 (9537.71) on mac osx 10.9 (build 13A3017) ... game stops and starts, jittery, very uneven animation

on chrome it seems fine

?

The real challenge comes from the font choice.

I was hoping this was a game about data types.

Nice. I also like the music - what is it?

it's boring until 30 or so, and once you die there starting all the way from the beginning is no fun.

Thanks for posting it on a weekend!

THIS IS GREAT

Great game! Keep up the good work!

WHERE DO I CLICK ON THE COOKIES??!

Doesn't let me type anything.

it is really cool, but extremely slow (unusble) on a macbook air 2012. It's a shame ;)

Love it. This is brilliant fun.

You should design a native app.

God Mode: iPhone keyboard. :-)

Great game, horrible title

awesome game, but I thought my typing speed was way more than that :)

its very cool.

the difficulty and panic when making a typo make it for me. :)

Got to 3,434 points

Make it captchas!

It all hurts now!

brilliant concept, the music is very apt +1

Sweet music!

Yes.

love playing this game.

that is fun :)

ctrl+space ?

nice game

This game is over 5 years old. Come on guys :(

Brilliant idea! Love it :)

"Made with Impact" made me bounce before the page could fully load after waiting a full 10 seconds and it was still only halfway done. Maybe I would have stuck around if I had a clue what I was waiting for. From the other comments I'm guessing it's a game? I know, I could go back and do it now, but a typing game doesn't interest me personally too much.

Just my mood right now, I'm sure your game is fun. Hope you have success with it. Hope my criticism is constructive, don't mean to be a downer.