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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
"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.
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"!
260 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] thread(reppin QGMLWB by the way http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization)
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Emacs_Pinky
discussed here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2610467
http://hackaday.com/2012/06/21/building-a-clutch-for-vim/
My biggest problem now is that I look like an absolute clown when typing on a conference room PC (with a standard keyboard)...
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...)
> 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.
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.
great job!
I ended up constantly triggering on the little ships and couldn't target the big ones
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
Creative and fun though
It was easy, easy, easy, hmm, dead.
Fun concept though.
Awesome game - but it needs maybe a few more milestones to reward the player for getting quite far. Maybe acknowledge it when they get through a whole mission without making any wrong keystrokes, or every 10 levels give them some arbitrary 'promotion' - something like that.
Anyway, really good job.
I like the cuteness and simplicity of the game though. Finally something to make me feel good about all those years spent typing.
https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2011/02/z-type/
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.)
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.
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.
FYI - I had the same experience.
I waited for like 20-40 seconds for the stuff to load and then left the site...
Do you think such user experience feedback would be valid for your own project?
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
And, if you find it too easy at first, try starting in "expert mode"!
HN readers advised to start on 'expert' level.