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Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

• grey-area 13y ago
  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.
• neals 13y ago
  I like the small single-letter missiles.
• poopicus 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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/)
• scoofy 13y ago
  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.
• chrismonsanto 13y ago
  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)
  • edcastro 13y ago
    second that. make it harder, it gets a little boring after a little time for most of us (i guess). awesome and entertaining, nevertheless.
  • danmaz74 13y ago
    Did you try starting it in expert mode? If you did level 17 there, my respects to you :)
    • chrismonsanto 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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 13y ago
          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!
          • sillysaurus2 13y ago
            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. http://hackaday.com/2012/06/21/building-a-clutch-for-vim/ http://hackaday.com/2012/06/21/building-a-clutch-for-vim/
• usaphp 13y ago
  Lags on Safari 7.0
• plus9z 13y ago
  Does anyone else have trouble seeing the words with the font that they use?
  • rejoinder 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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
  • ishansharma 13y ago
    I had confusion between 'v' and 'y'!
  • tonywebster 13y ago
    Yeah, there's almost no way to tell the difference between certain letters if you're at a comfortable distance from the screen.
• XenithShade 13y ago
  Fun, I personally got 1525, accuracy 88.8%, 38.9 WPM... Creative and fun though
  • huherto 13y ago
    my score 1576, accuaracy 93% wpm 38.2
  • noir_lord 13y ago
    3266 - 93.9% - 46.4. It was easy, easy, easy, hmm, dead. Fun concept though.
• general_failure 13y ago
  This was really fun! I quit at wave 17 though. Make the game faster and words longer, I love it!
  • general_failure 13y ago
    I just discovered experts mode :)
• j2kun 13y ago
  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.
  • j2kun 13y ago
    But I really enjoyed it. Got to level 32 or something before I got overwhelmed
  • seszett 13y ago
    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).
    • alcari 13y ago
      I found myself doing ~45 wpm in this, but in a normal typing test I do ~80 wpm. The non-linear word list is definitely lowering speed.
    • bad_user 13y ago
      I got 60 wpm, but in a normal typing test I'm doing 110-120 wpm.
      • lucb1e 13y ago
        Ditto, pretty consistently 65wpm but in normal typing I get around 110.
  • csmattryder 13y ago
    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.
  • nilkn 13y ago
    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.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• basicallydan 13y ago
  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.
• AeroNotix 13y ago
  Doesn't let me type anything.
• brandonhsiao 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    The current enemy does glow, but it could be more obvious.
• deckiedan 13y ago
  Wow. Slick graphcs. Fun. Impressive.
• riquito 13y ago
  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/
• Ellipsis753 13y ago
  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.)
• moron4hire 13y ago
  "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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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.
        • moron4hire 13y ago
          I thought it was going to be a weird job posting, actually. And it really did take more than 10 seconds for it to load even 50% for me.
        • jader201 13y ago
          For what it's worth, it did seem to take about 30+ seconds to load for me. I also almost gave up.
• bbx 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    And the home of ImpactJS, one of the best HTML5 game frameworks. Dominic is an inspiration overall.
• firesofmay 13y ago
  Good fun typing game, font could be better, can be made harder. Well implemented! :)
• danmaz74 13y ago
  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"!
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• alexeichemenda 13y ago
  it is really cool, but extremely slow (unusble) on a macbook air 2012. It's a shame ;)
  • tehwalrus 13y ago
    was fine in mine, in firefox.
  • nathell 13y ago
    Browser? It's perfectly playable for me on a mid-2007 Macbook w/ Snow Leopard and latest Chrome.
    • alexeichemenda 13y ago
      Weird, using latest Chrome as well, w/ Mavericks. No apps running except for this one tab.
• alexeichemenda 13y ago
  it is really cool, but extremely slow (unusble) on a macbook air 2012. It's a shame ;)
• sarreph 13y ago
  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.
• super_mario 13y ago
  Too choppy and can't keep up with the typing speed.
• kybernetyk 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
  • deckiedan 13y ago
    That's really odd. I'm running on a atom 1.6ghz chromebook (running ubuntu/linux/firefox) and it works great.
  • sirsar 13y ago
    What OS and browser are you using? Firefox and Chrome do much better with JS than the rest.
  • phoboslab 13y ago
    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/ http://phoboslab.org/xtype/ ) runs with a steady 60fps on an iPhone4S.
  • _random_ 13y ago
    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.
• nawitus 13y ago
  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).
• tehwalrus 13y ago
  that is fun :)
• ronaldx 13y ago
  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.
• thejerz 13y ago
  Got to 3,434 points
• baby 13y ago
  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).
• sillysaurus2 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    Too soon, try getting past level 12-15.
• throwaway0094 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    On expert or normal?
    • throwaway0094 13y ago
      Normal.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• blahpro 13y ago
  This is extremely laggy for me in Safari 7.
  • knowtheory 13y ago
    ditto, i switched to firefox and the experience was fine.
  • eric_h 13y ago
    Odd. Works great in Safari 6.
  • rhapsodyv 13y ago
    Me too. Chrome works fine.
  • phoboslab 13y ago
    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
• NicoJuicy 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
• dangero 13y ago
  I was hoping this was a game about data types.
• JoeAcchino 13y ago
  I use this game to practice touch typing more or less regularly and what I really miss is a way to monitor my progress.
• Spittie 13y ago
  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-dead http://www.kongregate.com/games/ascott/typing-of-the-living-... http://www.addictinggames.com/funny-games/zombietypocalypse.jsp http://www.addictinggames.com/funny-games/zombietypocalypse....
  • baby 13y ago
    I still see no challenge in expert mode. Please make a harder mode :)
    • Spittie 13y ago
      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 ZType.WAVES = {EXPERT: { wave: 0, spawn: [], spawnWait: 0.3, healthBoost: 0, types: [{ type: EntityEnemyOppressor, count: 3, incEvery: 4 }, { type: EntityEnemyDestroyer, count: 5, incEvery: 2 }, { type: EntityEnemyMine, count: 10, incEvery: 1 }] } } And then start a game on expert mode. You can mess up with the values to make it harder/easier.
    • 13y ago
• zackham 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    Typespeed is the standard by which all other typing games should be measured. Highly recommended.
• rhapsodyv 13y ago
  Could have some type of key combinations too...
• gregd 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
• Mustafabei 13y ago
  THIS IS GREAT
• _sabe_ 13y ago
  Brilliant idea! Love it :)
• _mc 13y ago
  brilliant concept, the music is very apt +1
• honzzz 13y ago
  Nice. I also like the music - what is it?
• cheerio 13y ago
  Was this game made to collect metrics on typing - to be able to identify typists using machine learning?
• ryen 13y ago
  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!
• SiVal 13y ago
  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.
• natural219 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
    • ssully 13y ago
      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. Really cool game.
    • eru 13y ago
      Just make the score be the highest difficulty level you can still compete on.
    • natural219 13y ago
      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 }
• reillyse 13y ago
  nice game
• ghostdiver 13y ago
  ctrl+space ?
• antonius 13y ago
  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.
• BrokenPipe 13y ago
  It all hurts now!
• codeoclock 13y ago
  That's awesome. I got to level 35 with 95.8% accuracy and 45 wpm. I need to practice...
  • corresation 13y ago
    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.
• navan 13y ago
  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.
• solomatov 13y ago
  This game is very slow on my macbook pro.
  • maerF0x0 13y ago
    and yet plenty fast on my MBA.
    • SlowButEffectiv 13y ago
      though tragically slow on my 2010 iMac 27. Wait, it's Safari 7.0. No problem on Firefox or Chrome.
  • _random_ 13y ago
    Flash version would be cool.
• paines 13y ago
  This is a great idea imho. How about short stories, poems or wisdoms ?
• nullc 13y ago
  it's boring until 30 or so, and once you die there starting all the way from the beginning is no fun.
• bad_user 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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!
  • spalmrich 13y ago
    love that idea.
• mindcrime 13y ago
  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!
• zacharycohn 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    Play the expert mode.
• manic89 13y ago
  Is there a typing game out there that focuses on characters? I.e. : ; [] {} () \ ? etc.
• gisenberg 13y ago
  The real challenge comes from the font choice.
• christopherryan 13y ago
  GOSPEL ARTIST POSES NUDE! Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies" and "It Is Time" happens to be two of the titles. She even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. How can this so called "Gospel Artist" be a role model is she's posing news? For more on this story.....Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail.
• michaelmior 13y ago
  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!
• dobbsbob 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
• monokrome 13y ago
  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
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• ybaumes 13y ago
  You should design a native app.
• mos2 13y ago
  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
• mos2 13y ago
  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
• jneal 13y ago
  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.
• stirno 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    I guess I am not the only one. It lags pretty bad on my MBA 2013 with Safari.
    • stirno 13y ago
      Further down the author notes its because of an issue with the HTML5 <audio> tag. So thats cool ;)
• andrescala 13y ago
  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.
• GhotiFish 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
• Schiphol 13y ago
  The "Good Browser" message that greets NoScript users is unfortunate. One can use a good browser and still have a whitelisting policy for javascript.
• clamprecht 13y ago
  Make it captchas!
• chrisbridgett 13y ago
  God Mode: iPhone keyboard. :-)
• chaz 13y ago
  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.
• pouzy 13y ago
  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
• dbrannan 13y ago
  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.
• wslh 13y ago
  For children I would add the option to use only uppercase letters.
• mikeflynn 13y ago
  Got pas wave 20 and called it a day. Fun game though!
• freshlog 13y ago
  Here's a game that looks EXACTLY like yours, but for Japanese kana: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/japanese-frenzy/ppdpefainafnhpooofjdfeoiagagilom/related?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/japanese-frenzy/pp...
• merraksh 13y ago
  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.
  • Agathos 13y ago
    Also, the other kind of typing. Like if "traverseWithKey" appears at the top of the string, I have to hit it with: Applicative t => (Key -> a -> t b) -> IntMap a -> t (IntMap b)
  • cgriswald 13y ago
    It would be interesting to have the option of different typing sets. I'd also like to see the end game panel report the max multiplier achieved.
    • Guest98130 13y ago
      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.
  • sltkr 13y ago
    If that's what you're looking for, try http://typing.io/ http://typing.io/
    • merraksh 13y ago
      Nice! But where is my spaceship and what do I shoot? :-)
• berto77 13y ago
  awesome game, but I thought my typing speed was way more than that :)
• sTevo-In-VA 13y ago
  Yes.
• SteveDeFacto 13y ago
  Can we get some brackets and other symbols? Just typing words is not really helpful to us coders.
• adamrwexler 13y ago
  Hit the 40s with 5189 points, 92.7% accuracy 61.5wpm
• rowdyrabbit 13y ago
  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?
• stokedmartin 13y ago
  Thanks for posting it on a weekend!
• shurcooL 13y ago
  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.
• __brian__ 13y ago
  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__ 13y ago
    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.
• djrconcepts 13y ago
  love playing this game.
• philmcc 13y ago
  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.
• donpark 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    Obfuscated link goes to http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/293124/10-educational-pc-games-of-the-1980s/3 http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/293124/10-educational-p...
• curiousdannii 13y ago
  That moment when you realise you actually don't so much touch type as four-finger type. :/
• billmalarky 13y ago
  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.
• obsurveyor 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
• matznerd 13y ago
  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).
• unclesaamm 13y ago
  Great game, horrible title
• hoprocker 13y ago
  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.
• maciekp 13y ago
  3876 points, 95,3%, 57 wpm loaded very fast, executed without lags on chrome,macbook air mid-2011
• csense 13y ago
  Using Chromium on Linux Mint (an Ubuntu-based distribution), the loading bar freezes near the end. Firefox works fine.
• stevewillows 13y ago
  Great work! Take that Mavis Beacon! Like some noted, the difficulty curve could use a tweak or two -- but overall it was fun.
• yesimahuman 13y ago
  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
• B-Con 13y ago
  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.
• owenfi 13y ago
  Having a lot of fun with it over here. Our request is cooperative (or coopetition) multiplayer.
• unhappyhippie 13y ago
  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?
• xpop2027 13y ago
  I clicked this after seeing it on HN for a day straight.. was not disappointed and now hooked.
• yOutely 13y ago
  This game is over 5 years old. Come on guys :(
• chilldream 13y ago
  To the author: if you're filtering this word list at all, you should probably know that I encountered "cumming".
• NAFV_P 13y ago
  I got up to level 13 then got thrown off kilter by the cluster bombs.
• intenex 13y ago
  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
• LouisSayers 13y ago
  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.
• tbsmartens 13y ago
  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)
• ShaneCurran 13y ago
  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.
• mtsmithhn 13y ago
  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!
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• herinkc 13y ago
  Cute game! I remember playing something like this when I was younger, though your effects are way better.
• krisajenkins 13y ago
  Love it. This is brilliant fun.
• enterx 13y ago
  Great! typespeed on steroids! perfect music! :)
• plg 13y ago
  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 ?
• stevewilhelm 13y ago
  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.
• eponymous 13y ago
  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.
• tmirani 13y ago
  If only I had this in middle school instead of that lousy Mavis Beacon program.
• relampago 13y ago
  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
• aaronsnoswell 13y ago
  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.
• arbutus 13y ago
  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.
• slantview 13y ago
  WHERE DO I CLICK ON THE COOKIES??!
• LukeShu 13y ago
  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.
• phill_andrade 13y ago
  Great game! Keep up the good work!
• jonsterling 13y ago
  What in tarnation is a “typing hacker”? Imagine my disappointment when I realized this was not a Type Theory quiz game.
• arunc 13y ago
  Firefox nightly and the search box kicks in sometimes. Is it only me?
• theuri 13y ago
  Sweet music!
• sc90 13y ago
  Good idea, could you also show the high scores(all time or daily)?
• jheriko 13y ago
  its very cool. the difficulty and panic when making a typo make it for me. :)
• jorkvist 13y ago
  An awesome way to learn glossary? Gamification to school learning in a fun way?
• andy9775 13y ago
  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.