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Comment by phoboslab | Hacker News Reader

Author of the game here.

It's quite interesting how damn near impossible it is to balance a game like that. When I first released it, it had no expert mode. I tried to make the normal mode challenging for most people without making it too frustrating. The feedback I got was mostly "it's way too easy", but I also got a few comments, particularly on Kongregate and other sites that appeal to younger users that "it's way too hard".

I also got a few emails from school teachers wanting to use the game with their students. Even the normal mode can be extremely frustrating. To please everyone I would need at least 3 or 4 different settings, I guess.

tl;dr: The touch typing speed among the population is fantastically diverse.

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How did you pick the font? I find myself having problems figuring out is a single letter is a l or an i or a j sometimes. Seems like there's a lot of fonts out there with better readability.

Well, I picked Tungsten because... well, it was pretty. But you're absolutely right. I changed it to Deja-Vu now. Please refresh!

yes it would be great to avoid the words to overlap. And also when I begin to type in a word I cannot switch to another target, I must finish the current one. It is ok! But could you make the current bigger and red instead of orange please? :-)

I find the font colour problematic at times, because it's very similar to that of the opponents; so occasionally a selected word isn't easily visible against it's background, and I'm not certain which letter I've missed.

Also, thanks for a surprisingly entertaining, and maybe even useful game :)

Same thing here. Also when two words come at you on top of each other, hard to see what I should be spelling ;-)

Ideas:

> Smaller words protected by a "forcefield" of a bigger word.

> Wrong letter halfway through spelling could make the enemy ship shoot a "backspace" torpedo that can only be destroyed with the backspace key. So three wrong letters would shoot 3 backspace torpedoes at you.

> Two long words reaching out could a tractor beam.

To make it harder and simultaneously a better learning tool for touch typing you could add a penalty for typing mistakes. The real guru mode would be if a hit is only a hit if the word was typed completely correctly. I mean, first letter selects the target and then you have to press the keys so that the word would correctly appear in your editor, e.g. if you type a wrong letter you'll have to use backspace.

Then we could even have CUA, Emacs and Vim key bindings. The lower levels will be manageable with just backspace and cursor keys. The higher levels will require advanced editing skills.

There could be two high scores too. One for the player and one for the editing method (like drivers' and constructors' standings in Formula One racing).

I'm not sure how the word generation works per say, but I've made a bunch of mistakes in sequence because I started with the letter "t" hoping to kill "technology" and I ended up shooting at "tea"

unless there's careful selection of the starting letters of words that are thrown at you, you will end up targeting something unexpected and taking big penalties.

that doesn't seem fair to me.

How about having a level-set screen, that simply has you type out a couple of given paragraphs. It can then dynamically figure out your overall typing speed, and if there are specific areas that need improvement (certain letter combinations, words, phrases, etc).

Perhaps just let people skip levels once they have completed them, then everyone can find their level and restart there? It does get a bit tedious going through the easy stuff after you've played a few times. I do think sentences would make it fun too, perhaps something from Gutenberg?

Great effort though, thanks!

Perhaps famous quotes about security (or programming) with common/small words removed.

I agree, it would be great if we could pick the level to start on.

Yes, so the levels should be fairly diverse as well. The expert mode might be ok for me, but I noticed that even the entry level game is not that easy for kids of age 5. Could you just make a slider for the difficulty level?

The levels should increase at a faster rate if you don't make mistakes or clear the screen early.

Do you have any plans to open-source this project? I'd love to hack away at it.

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