
Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It - danmaz74
http://phoboslab.org/ztype/
======
natural219
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](http://www.penny-
arcade.com/patv/episode/puzzle-games)

~~~
phoboslab
This is definitely a good idea, but way harder to implement that it looks on
the surface.

I already spent about 40 hours tuning the game to what it is now and it still
sucks. Tuning a dynamic difficulty system would take even more time, mostly
testing.

And then of course there's the question of what happens with the highscores.
If one player is presented with a simpler game than the next, scores are not
comparable at all. So a ranking to "prove you're typing hacker" would be
difficult as well.

~~~
wyantb
Some games solve this by having different modes of play. "Highscore Mode",
"Campaign Mode (Easy/Medium/Hard/etc)". If you did, for example, have a
dynamic scaling system, you could have that in some kind of alternate play
mode that lets the user just practice, vs. a separate/more static mode that
allows eligibility for highscores.

~~~
pjbrunet
I think the dynamic scaling (difficulty multiplier?) could just be the levels
advancing faster like somebody else said. If you solve a level too fast you
could get a "wormhole" advancement that just gives you points automatically
for the levels you skipped over.

I think this is awesome, not just as a typing tutor but as a spelling tutor. I
think adding phrases and word combinations would help teach grammar too. You
could also do a synonyms level, an antonyms level (I think even adults would
like these) then verb levels, adjective levels, etc.

Here's another idea. A convoy of words come at you (as a sentence) with the
verb out in front and you have to shoot the verb first.

Or, totally different game, fly/shoot your way through isometric Zaxxon-like
"sentence diagram" landscapes.

PS: This is how I learned my times tables back in the 80s, very similar game
on the TI99 ;-)

------
Spittie
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Typing_of_the_Dead)

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

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

~~~
baby
I still see no challenge in expert mode. Please make a harder mode :)

~~~
phoboslab
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.

~~~
badave
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.

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

~~~
mkingston
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 :)

------
j2kun
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.

~~~
seszett
I got caught by this too, but it was fun. It's the first time I have actually
done a test that measures my typing speed without becoming bored after two
sentences (I did 43 wpm, I don't even know if it is decent or not anyway).

~~~
bad_user
I got 60 wpm, but in a normal typing test I'm doing 110-120 wpm.

~~~
lucb1e
Ditto, pretty consistently 65wpm but in normal typing I get around 110.

------
chrismonsanto
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](http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization))

~~~
danmaz74
Did you try starting it in expert mode? If you did level 17 there, my respects
to you :)

~~~
chrismonsanto
Yeah, expert mode. Before my hand injury (too much pinky stress), my sustained
maximum was 153wpm on QWERTY. I can still get ~120wpm with the new layout and
my Kinesis keyboard though.

The only trouble I have is if I have to take a break and they advance a bit.
My gun seems to lock on things I don't expect it to (missiles). Otherwise,
they can barely make it on to the screen.

~~~
rickdale
Your pinky stress is actually a recognized phenomenon...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Emacs_Pinky](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Emacs_Pinky)

discussed
here:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2610467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2610467)

~~~
chrismonsanto
I'm a heavy Emacs user. I tried to plan ahead and remap Ctrl -> Caps Lock, but
it didn't help. After all, I still used my pinky to hit Caps Lock. Thankfully,
hearty remapping of defaults + Kinesis did help!

~~~
sokoloff
I use a foot pedal mapped to Ctrl on my Kinesis (in addition to remapping Caps
Lock to Ctrl). For casual use, I use the Caps Lock key; for longer typing
sessions, I "bother with" the foot pedal.

My biggest problem now is that I look like an absolute clown when typing on a
conference room PC (with a standard keyboard)...

~~~
spudlyo
You should really take advantage of those lovely left side thumb buttons on
the Kinesis. I have control and meta on the two largest left thumb buttons,
which works great for me.

~~~
sokoloff
Funny. I read your and eru's comment and thought, "no they're not!". Then I
looked down and said, "Holy crap; they are!"

I may try to retrain myself, but it's been years and years of ingraining
current physical patterns, so I'm not super hopeful. (It took me the better
part of year to get used to the foot pedal, mostly to remember not to futz
with it casually while I was just typing. Holding Control foot pedal while
typing the word 'taxes' is painful in Windows apps...)

------
merraksh
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.

~~~
sltkr
If that's what you're looking for, try [http://typing.io/](http://typing.io/)

~~~
merraksh
Nice! But where is my spaceship and what do I shoot? :-)

------
Ellipsis753
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.)

------
monokrome
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

------
gregd
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.

~~~
mindcrime
LOL, good point. I never thought about it that way specifically before, but I
took typing my freshman year of H.S., and ya know what... I think I would make
the same observation, now that I think about it.

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

~~~
Kiro
And the home of ImpactJS, one of the best HTML5 game frameworks. Dominic is an
inspiration overall.

------
grey-area
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.

------
scoofy
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.

------
plus9z
Does anyone else have trouble seeing the words with the font that they use?

~~~
rejoinder
yes, hard font to read, looks like impact. And it's too small. When the
letters scatter - the radial bursts - never sure if it's an l an i or a j?

~~~
gavinpc
The font got to me eventually. But I'll be back.

What I'd like to see is a report of keys I need to work on. Or the game could
just emphasize them in challenge rounds. Even after twenty years of touch
typing and a hacked keyboard [0], I still have trouble with the 'xcvb'
cluster. So yeah, I guess I know my problem area.

Update, it was the 'j' that did me in. I couldn't decide if it was an 'i' or
an 'l'. Impact culpa.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6287701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6287701)

------
brandonhsiao
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.

~~~
LukeShu
The current enemy does glow, but it could be more obvious.

------
blahpro
This is extremely laggy for me in Safari 7.

~~~
phoboslab
To quote myself from Twitter:

Aaaaand here's the reason why Z-Type is extremely slow in Safari 7
[http://phoboslab.org/crap/html5audio/pause.html](http://phoboslab.org/crap/html5audio/pause.html)
\- surprise, it's an <audio> bug. _sigh_

~
[https://twitter.com/phoboslab/status/396732243273453568](https://twitter.com/phoboslab/status/396732243273453568)

------
michaelmior
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!

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

[https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2011/02/z-type/](https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2011/02/z-type/)

------
GhotiFish
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.

~~~
roryokane
Milestones based on how far other players get would be great for this. I had a
decent time playing when my goal was to reach wave 17, which another commenter
said they reached.

The game could list four milestones: the highest wave ever reached by other
players, the median wave reached, and the 75% and 25% quartiles. So the goals
for expert mode might be wave 5, wave 14, wave 21, wave 53 (making those
numbers up). And those numbers would change as more people play the game.

------
SiVal
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.

------
bad_user
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.

~~~
mindcrime
I noticed that too... it's easy up until you make your first mistake, and that
can really throw you off. But maybe that's exactly part of what makes it fun!

------
zackham
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/](http://typespeed.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
flyingyeti
Typespeed is the standard by which all other typing games should be measured.
Highly recommended.

------
mtsmithhn
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](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!

------
__brian__
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 :)

~~~
__brian__
Actually, that's too slow.

    
    
      ig.game.nextWave();
    

I advanced to wave 10,000 and while its probably impossible for a human, the
difficulty doesn't seem to scale as I expected.

------
donpark
Checkout MasterType [http://bit.ly/1a03jfe](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.

~~~
c3kwue
Obfuscated link goes to
[http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/293124/10-educational-p...](http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/293124/10-educational-
pc-games-of-the-1980s/3)

------
billmalarky
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.

------
jneal
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.

------
kybernetyk
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?

~~~
Lagged2Death
I've got a Core 2 Duo from 2006 and it runs great on Firefox 25.

Until you get stuck in the middle of a word that's off-screen (or something)
and you can't tell what letter it's demanding you _must_ type next and you die
on level 22 (normal).

Needs a better font, especially for the single letters. And a better way of
seeing what character is next when you miss one.

------
shurcooL
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.

------
throwaway0094
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.

~~~
Malician
On expert or normal?

~~~
throwaway0094
Normal.

------
basicallydan
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.

------
stevewilhelm
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.

------
freshlog
Here's a game that looks EXACTLY like yours, but for Japanese kana:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/japanese-
frenzy/pp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/japanese-
frenzy/ppdpefainafnhpooofjdfeoiagagilom/related?hl=en)

------
B-Con
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.

------
yesimahuman
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](https://twitter.com/phoboslab/status/24910672471007232)

------
chaz
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy Typing Maniac. There's a stand-alone
version ([http://www.mindjolt.com/typing-
maniac.html](http://www.mindjolt.com/typing-maniac.html)) but also a Facebook
version ([https://apps.facebook.com/typing-
maniac/](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.

------
NicoJuicy
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 ;)

~~~
manilafolder
Same problem for me. I couldn't make out the letters in the word I was typing
because the word was hidden behind other words.

The word that is being typed should automatically move to top z-index. Maybe
that word could also get a little larger than the other words to make it more
obvious which one you are targeting.

------
baby
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).

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

Creative and fun though

~~~
noir_lord
3266 - 93.9% - 46.4.

It was easy, easy, easy, hmm, dead.

Fun concept though.

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

------
LukeShu
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.

------
sarreph
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.

------
sillysaurus2
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.

~~~
ricardobeat
Too soon, try getting past level 12-15.

------
aaronsnoswell
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.

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

------
matznerd
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](http://typeracer.com) where you are a car and you race
to complete sentences and paragraphs against other people (wpm is car speed).

------
eponymous
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.

------
LouisSayers
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.

------
rowdyrabbit
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?

------
pouzy
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

------
unhappyhippie
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?

------
obsurveyor
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.

~~~
gamegoblin
Not even that, just the _current_ word I am shooting at. Sometimes when it
would pick one I didn't intend, it takes too long to find which one it wants
me to type among the soup of words.

EDIT: I mean I would like it off to the side, not just highlighted in orange.

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

------
deckiedan
Wow. Slick graphcs. Fun. Impressive.

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

~~~
general_failure
I just discovered experts mode :)

------
navan
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.

------
andy9775
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.

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

~~~
corresation
I didn't make it that far, but with 62 words per minute. As the worlds started
piling atop each other, the greatest difficulty was trying to figure out which
word it believed you were working on to finish it up.

------
hoprocker
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.

------
mindcrime
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!

------
arbutus
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.

------
danmaz74
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"!

------
poopicus
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.

~~~
saulr
It's funny you should say that, as The Typing of The Dead: Overkill was
released a couple of days ago on PC (see
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/))

------
intenex
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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDpF3qymPqA)

------
mos2
I am typing on the TypeMatrix 2020. Best feature, the dvorak key.

[http://www.typematrix.com/2030/features.php](http://www.typematrix.com/2030/features.php)

------
zacharycohn
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.

~~~
bad_user
Play the expert mode.

------
nawitus
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).

------
philmcc
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.

------
ronaldx
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.

------
dbrannan
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.

------
antonius
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.

------
andrescala
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.

------
stirno
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

~~~
fierycatnet
I guess I am not the only one. It lags pretty bad on my MBA 2013 with Safari.

~~~
stirno
Further down the author notes its because of an issue with the HTML5 <audio>
tag. So thats cool ;)

------
ShaneCurran
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.

------
usaphp
Lags on Safari 7.0

------
ryen
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!

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

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

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

------
solomatov
This game is very slow on my macbook pro.

~~~
maerF0x0
and yet plenty fast on my MBA.

~~~
SlowButEffectiv
though tragically slow on my 2010 iMac 27. Wait, it's Safari 7.0. No problem
on Firefox or Chrome.

------
neals
I like the small single-letter missiles.

------
stevewillows
Great work! Take that Mavis Beacon!

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
mos2
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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay_e-GAoN30)

------
xpop2027
I clicked this after seeing it on HN for a day straight.. was not disappointed
and now hooked.

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

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

------
dobbsbob
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

~~~
elohesra
Great (or perhaps just lazy :p ) minds think alike. After about 25 levels I
started inspecting the javascript for ways to break the game, rather than
playing the game properly. It turns out that the game keeps track of all the
entities on the screen (both player and NPC/enemies) as an array, and that on
each call of draw it checks if any are still alive, and if the player has
collided with an enemy. It doesn't actually check if the player still exists,
or if there's any way that the enemies could have been killed. As such,
replacing the draw function with:

ig.game.draw = function (){this.backdrop.draw(0,0);var
d=this.lastKillTimer.delta();ig.system.context.globalAlpha=d<0?d*-2+0.3:0.3;for(var
i=0;i<this.backgroundMaps.length;i++){this.backgroundMaps[i].draw();}
ig.system.context.globalAlpha=1;for(var
i=0;i<this.entities.length;i++){this.entities[i].draw();} for(var
i=0;i<this.entities.length;i++){this.entities[i].drawLabel&&this.entities[i].drawLabel();}
if(this.mode==ZType.MODE.GAME){this.drawUI();} else
if(this.mode==ZType.MODE.TITLE){this.drawTitle();} else
if(this.mode==ZType.MODE.GAME_OVER){this.drawGameOver();}
if(this.menu){this.menu.draw();} if(ig.game.entities.length > 0) { while
(ig.game.entities.length > 0) ig.game.entities.pop();} }

causes you to auto-win every round. Just goes to show that, as per usual,
programming hacks for the game is more fun than the game itself. Programming
vs anything else? Well, programming is gonna win every time.

EDIT: In case it isn't obvious, it's the last line of the function which I've
modified:

if(ig.game.entities.length > 0) { while (ig.game.entities.length > 0)
ig.game.entities.pop();}

So, for each call to draw, the game will run as per usual and then end the
call to draw by popping all entities from the entities array, which ends the
wave.

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

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

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

------
manic89
Is there a typing game out there that focuses on characters? I.e. : ; [] {} ()
\ ?

etc.

------
tbsmartens
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)

------
relampago
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

------
sc90
Good idea, could you also show the high scores(all time or daily)?

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

------
jorkvist
An awesome way to learn glossary?

Gamification to school learning in a fun way?

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

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

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

------
enterx
Great! typespeed on steroids! perfect music! :)

------
rhapsodyv
Could have some type of key combinations too...

------
plg
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

?

------
gisenberg
The real challenge comes from the font choice.

------
dangero
I was hoping this was a game about data types.

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

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

------
stokedmartin
Thanks for posting it on a weekend!

------
Mustafabei
THIS IS GREAT

------
phill_andrade
Great game! Keep up the good work!

------
slantview
WHERE DO I CLICK ON THE COOKIES??!

------
AeroNotix
Doesn't let me type anything.

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

~~~
nathell
Browser? It's perfectly playable for me on a mid-2007 Macbook w/ Snow Leopard
and latest Chrome.

~~~
alexeichemenda
Weird, using latest Chrome as well, w/ Mavericks. No apps running except for
this one tab.

------
krisajenkins
Love it. This is brilliant fun.

------
ybaumes
You should design a native app.

------
chrisbridgett
God Mode: iPhone keyboard. :-)

------
unclesaamm
Great game, horrible title

------
berto77
awesome game, but I thought my typing speed was way more than that :)

------
jheriko
its very cool.

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

------
thejerz
Got to 3,434 points

------
clamprecht
Make it captchas!

------
BrokenPipe
It all hurts now!

------
_mc
brilliant concept, the music is very apt +1

------
theuri
Sweet music!

------
sTevo-In-VA
Yes.

------
djrconcepts
love playing this game.

------
tehwalrus
that is _fun_ :)

------
ghostdiver
ctrl+space ?

------
reillyse
nice game

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

------
_sabe_
Brilliant idea! Love it :)

------
moron4hire
"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.

~~~
AbraKdabra
You can't critic something if you don't even try it. I've been reading this
kind of messages really often at HN and I wish these people can't even enter
HN to post, it should be forbidden.

~~~
moron4hire
Look, I'm just saying that there is no information about what we're trying to
wait for going into a long loading process. Perhaps there are more people who
are bouncing, too. I'm just trying to provide a bit of information about my
experience that might help the OP enhance their thing to help people
understand it better.

~~~
Raphmedia
What long loading process?

The pages load in less than a second.

Personally, from the title of the post I knew I was going to get a typing
game.

~~~
jader201
For what it's worth, it did seem to take about 30+ seconds to load for me. I
also almost gave up.

~~~
herinkc
Strange. Mine took less than a second.

