Hypnotic Typing Prototype
This is Hypnotype, an experimental game prototype I made for a uni assignment. It’s a typing Cookie Clicker-like game where the longer and faster you type, the more intense the game’s music and visuals get. You can also buy upgrades from a shop to type words faster.
The two upgrades in the game are:
- Pronged Quill: Extra lanes of words are unlocked. Every correct letter you type on the main lane is sent to the other lanes.
- Literate Clover: Gives a 2% chance (for each clover) to automatically correct a typo.
The inspiration for this game was the idea of someone doing something very intently on a computer while on-lookers see crazy, unexplainable visuals happening on their screen. I think I achieved that with Hypnotype, but it’s a very short experience.
Clicker games like Cookie Clicker can be played for many hours because their core game loop is making currency to buy faster ways of making currency, automatically even. Because I don’t want to let players completely automate this typing game, I don’t believe the traditional clicker game loop works for a typing game like this.
There is also no point in playing the game for more than 5 minutes because if you buy at least 50 literate clovers, you can slide your hands across your keyboard and every single letter you type will be correct.
If this game were to be developed further, I’d have to pivot to a different gameplay style. I’ve been suggested the idea of level-based gameplay where you would type out a specific string of text, like a page of a book, similar to Typeracer. The background visuals could also match the words being typed.
I’d also need to change the background visuals to something other than videos, because having several of them playing on top of each other is pretty laggy. I don’t want to release a 2D typing game that has the same minimum requirements as Cyberpunk 2077.
The background videos are mostly copyright free videos from Pexels plus a couple meme videos from YouTube and the music is by mobygratis. I also used the awesome GDE GoZen plugin for Godot because the engine’s native support for videos is currently very limited.
You can download the game here and also read my full dev journal here (weeks 8-11).