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Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

phoboslab.org

201–210 of 261 posts

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#201
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.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#204
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.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#205

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…

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…

Sucks?! No way! I played this game for a little over an hour today and love it!

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#206

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.

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.

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.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#207
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.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#208

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.

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.

Re: Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It

#209

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.

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.

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