Experiment: breakout typing game

[Chèvre]

This is an experiment that I made last year and then put aside, because I'm not sure the concept works.

This is a mix between a typing game and Breakout. You control the paddle by typing stuff fast and correctly.

Mechanics:

• As long as you type fast enough and accurately, your paddle follows the ball.
• If you make a mistake, the paddle moves erratically.
• Your paddle gets a big thrust for completing a sentence.
• You get a little boost for every "difficult" character typed correctly (uppercase letters and punctuation).

How to play:

• Open with LÖVE 0.8.0 (will NOT work properly in 0.9.0)
• Position the paddle with H (left) and L (right), and launch the ball with K. (vim keys )
• Then, type away.
• Erase mistakes with the backspace key.
• Start over with the escape key.

This is a prototype, so it still has rough edges:

• There's only one level
• You can't lose or win
• There are no powerups
• The graphics are very basic
• It's more or less adjusted to my own typing speed and accuracy, YMMV
• The code isn't necessarily clean or well-structured

I'm looking for feedback/criticism. Does the concept work for you? If you enjoy typing games (such as Typing of the Dead), would you play this game if it was more polished?

I had big plans for it (networking...) and I got carried away in technical details which made me lose focus of the actual gameplay. This is why I eventually put it aside. But now I'd like to know if it's an interesting game, and if it is, I might pick it up and continue development.

Download

(sorry, the forum's "upload attachment" feature tells me the quota has been reached)

Disclaimer: the music, the font, and a couple sound effects aren't mine. I'll take the time to give proper credit when I do a "real" release.

[Germanunkol]

This is great!

The concept works very well, and I think the graphics are already pretty nice, too.
I like breakout games, and this gives them a really nice new twist!

One problem, though: Since it's 0.8.0, German keyboards won't recognize a lot of special keys, "?", for example. So when I get to the question "Will you go out with me?", I can't play the game any more since there's no way of typing the questionmark (to my knowledge). This would work with 0.9.0's "love.textinput" event - but for that, you'd have to port the game.

What kind of networking features did you want to implement?
I can't really imagine a versus mode - usually, people just have different typing speeds and it's probably never going to be fun if one player is slower than the other...

Nice concept,
keep it up!

[Chèvre]

Hey, thanks for trying it out! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

If I resume development, I'll definitely port it over to 0.9.0. I just switched to a German layout to investigate and it does miss a ton of keystrokes...

I actually made a working, albeit very buggy, network prototype. It's a co-op game, like the 2-player mode in Arkanoid. Player 1's paddle is on top, and player 2's paddle acts as a back-up. When the ball is lost, player 2's paddle goes on top, etc.

I think a VS mode could be possible; difficulty could scale with your typing speed, and/or the weaker player could get better powerups.

The thing is, I spent so much time doing network "plumbing" stuff (designing a protocol, an efficient serialization system...) that the game itself stopped evolving and I eventually got bored of it. If people like it, though, maybe I should pick it up, concentrate on polishing the core game first, and then maybe make networking work properly.

(What prompted me to start writing this game in the first place is that I never got Typing of the Dead's network mode to work )

[Mermersk]

Haha, yeah this is good. I found myself only focusing on typing it fast in, had no idea where the ball was But very original and works pretty well too.