Baxter Hills

Mistype Typing Game

Mistype is the result of 48-hours of work at the 2020 Global Game Jam, which was held at The University of Waikato. I co-developed it along with Alex Switzer. All source files can be viewed on Github here: source.

The theme of the Game Jam was "Repair", and all games were to be based around it. Our idea was that you had to fix broken words while racing against an opponent, which was either a BOT or another human player. The speed of the BOT ranges from 5 to 200 words per minute (WPM), so the game is inclusive for all levels of typing proficiency.

The game has 3 types of misspellings. One is a random shuffle of the word, another is that the first and last letters are swapped, and the other is a random single-character misplacing in the word. This can make the game pretty difficult! The misspellings give less of an advantage to faster typists, as winning involves word interpretation, not just raw typing speed.

The game functionality was written in JavaScript. Code quality and maintainability were not the top priority at the event, due to the short-lasting nature of it. The texts that the game uses come from various books, games, and movies, such as The Bee Movie. The text used for each race is randomly selected.

The game also shows race statistics such as words per minute (WPM), and typing accuracy. Another feature is that it has a progress bar, which is a line of Emojis. This helps to increase the pressure on the player, as you can see your opponent's progress relative to your own. Add this pressure with the stress of trying to quickly decipher shuffled words, and it can get pretty intense!

Last modified: 18 May 2021