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."
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.
You don't have to rank based on single game scores. One way to do this would be to have levels that are replayable (ie there is a number n that uniquely identifies each set of level parameters) and use chess' Elo ranking system for both players and levels.
This gives players a ranking score that is comparable, and over time your players will rank your game levels for you. It also makes it possible to matchmake players to levels.
I think sucks is a bit harsh. The curve is certainly off, but the game itself is great fun.
There is something really satisfying about how the impact of the bullets knocks backs the target ships. Also love how fast it shoots when you get on a roll.
I used to play a similar game years and years ago[1]. It's very easy in the beginning, but you quickly reach a point where it becomes very, very hard. I think I never reached level 20, but it doesn't matter, it's addictive, it's challenging, even if you don't go so far in the game you replay and replay until you beat one more level.
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.
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 ;-)
Yeah, it's probably not trivial to test and get the algorithm, perfect, but I think the basic calculus would be incredibly easy and would almost certainly beat baseline:
var wpm = getWPM();
function levelDifficulty(num) {
return getOldLevelDifficulty(num) * wpm * SOME_SCALING_CONST
}
I think it's interesting that you can tune this game's difficulty by deciding to use strategy or not. If you go for the big words first, it's pretty easy. If you ignore them, then you'll increase the difficulty of the "wave."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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? :-)
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.
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?
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 nicest thing about it being in HTML5 is that messing with it's variables it's really easy. To make it harder, you can (for example), load the page, open the developer console, type
Expert mode was easy until you get the bigger ships throwing the whole alphabet in one-letter tiles at you. I keep starting to type a longer word and it only destroys a tiny one-letter item instead, and then starts matching something else entirely and I have to waste time finding what it focused on.
I can get up to around 110wpm without errors in a general typing test, but because of this constant mistargeting, I was capped around 60wpm with 90% accuracy.
> I can get up to around 110wpm without errors in a general typing test, but because of this constant mistargeting, I was capped around 60wpm with 90% accuracy.
Same here, most other tools measure me at ~130wpm (if I'm nicely warmed up) but I couldn't get above ~65wpm/93% accuracy on the game.
I'd agree with the other comments about a faster progression through the game. I'd like it to quickly move forward to roughly the level I want to be on. Shunt me forward a lot, if I die then shut me back half way from where I was (e.g., 1 > 20 > 40 (died) > 30 > 35 (died) > 33 > 34, etc).
In my ideal 'expert mode' I'd want to be playing so that it quickly finds a level that I can complete a certain percentage of the time but allows me to die a few times on a level before assuming that one was too much for me; some times you get caught out by something random that causes you to fail to complete on a level you'd normally have no trouble on.
True. I can usually get 60+ wpm, here I only got 45. Plenty of times I'd be trying to avoid the individual letters flying at my, and trying to make out small words to get rid of them.
Still though, very fun game, even if it's not indicative of actual typing speed...
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.
I type really fast (120+ wpm) and a big problem I had with this game was making one typo and not realizing it until I'd already typed 3-4 more words. Then I'd have to go back, find the one typo I made, finish that word, then re-type all the other words that the game had ignored my typing in the meantime. This is actually what killed me in the end.
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).
Same, I think if the ship was placed in the center of the playable zone, and the words came radially towards it, that I would be slightly better at it.
To easy with Qwerty? Try Dvorak (or one of the modern variants). I'm switching to Dvorak to see if my "muscle memory" can change, and this game is suddenly WAY harder.
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.
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!
Maybe remap it to Vim pedal? Someone came up with the idea to use a foot pedal for vim insert mode. It was a little whacky of an idea, but perhaps it'd be more useful as Emacs' meta key.
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)...
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.
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...)
If you're suggesting I am lying, I assure you there are more substantial things to lie about.
> Typing, Fastest. Mrs. Barbara Blackburn of Salem, Oregon maintained a speed of 150 wpm for 50 min (37,500 key strokes) and attained a speed of 170 wpm using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) system. Her top speed was recorded at 212 wpm.
I (could) absolutely type at 150 wpm. I would not be able to sustain it for 50 minutes. Nor could I type at 170 wpm, let alone 212 wpm.
Did level 18. This is hacker news - people type for a living!
Really like the animation and the sound effects. Would be awesome if there were more surprises, because the novelty (and difficulty) was reduced once I realized that there were always a set of words that I needed to target first, and the manner in which they appear didn't really change much as I progressed.
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.
Pasting in a custom word list would be cool. Also, making sure you don't have two words starting with the same letter on the screen at once. This way you don't accidentally target the wrong ships.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
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?
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.
HTML5/Canvas games are mostly bound by drawing performance. Modern browsers use hardware acceleration where available, but it could very well be that your GPU is black listed for missbehaving OpenGL drivers. Intel GPUs are the worst offender here.
If you have proper hardware acceleration, a game like this should run fluidly even on low end systems. Case in point: the similar looking X-Type ( http://phoboslab.org/xtype/ ) runs with a steady 60fps on an iPhone4S.
JavaScript is not universal unfortunately. You have to run specific versions of browsers from specific vendors to make it work properly. E.g. Chrome v. 30 by Google.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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