25
votes
password: a game about key presses and reaction time
A simple web game I made to combat depression.
To play, go here. Warning: the game starts as soon as you enter the page.
To view source, visit the GitHub repo.
How to play:
-
Press the keys you see before yourself. The key turns green if it's been "solved".
-
Once all keys are "solved", you start a new round automatically.
-
If the timer runs out before all keys are "solved", the game is over. Press
[Space]to start over. -
There's no score. Play whenever and for as long as you like. Quit whenever you've had enough.
This is very cool. Simple, clean, and engaging.
I'm someone who learned and continues to use a pretty inefficient typing method, so whenever I come across games like these I always try to challenge myself to do "proper" touch typing. Thanks for making and sharing this!
I can see the benefit in using it as a training game. I could see it used on kids, but the speed would have to be adjustable.
The game was meant to be challenging.
Its difficulty is derived mainly from two factors: time per round, and keys per round. You can make your own version, with difficulty balanced to your requirements, by forking the repository and changing one or both of the following:
difficultyproperty of theGameobject (currently 5000 – as in, 5000 ms = 5 s).cellelements in the HTML structure (one.cell= one key you have to get right)I might return to it later and allow settings to be adjusted from the game itself, on the per-instance basis.
Same here about the dislearned typing. I sometimes reach over with my left hand to 6 and 7 and do almost anything to avoid using my pinky. I think I've only embedded the bad habits over the years. But I love simple reaction games like this.
I really enjoyed this :) Thanks for sharing!
I will be honest though, I'm not going to share this to my friends as there is no gamified aspect to it if you understand me? I guess that would defeat the whole purpose of it, but if you are looking for feature requests, an option which you specifically enable to allow it to measure "score" would be my only one.
Fair enough. It's a thing I made in response to the creeping entropy of depression. It wasn't meant to be marketable or presentable: it just had to work in the way I envisioned it.
But people seem to enjoy it. That makes me think I could make it into something better.
Thank you for the suggestion. I'll consider it.
Fully understand. The most enjoyable and motivating things to do are when you get to realize something you envision in your mind. lichess.org have a "zen" mode which I like to play sometimes which doesn't let you see your rating or your opponents and the games have no impact on ratings. Just a game. This concept but by default it's in "zen" mode for your game and with a toggle to enable some stats that you can see which would encourage people to share it around if that's your goal :)
Thanks for sharing your game. Sorry you're battling depression, it sucks and can really be tough to overcome especially in a forced isolation situation like many are in right now.
I played your game and eventually cheated. I realized the game does not care about the order in which the characters are entered. If I mash the keyboard swiping through numbers then letters I can complete the game every time. :-)
I had a feeling I should put time cuts in for pressing the wrong key. :P
@mycketforvirrad, you changed the title of the topic. Is it necessary for the it to begin with a capital letter? The name of the game is in all lowercase.
Force of habit, sorry. Changed it back. :)
All good. :)
I love your game but i'm so bad I fail almost every tries because of stress lmao
That's okay! Trying is how we learn.
But I can see how the game can be difficult for people. It's challenging even for me: I don't fail, but I have to engage very strongly to be able to succeed. There's a reason people start learning something new by doing easy stuff first.
Considering the interest the game's getting, I'm seriously considering adding difficulty selector.
would be neat, usually i'm very fast with my keyboard but things like this just stress me and i fail, i'd love a difficulty selector, i gave you a star of Gh i love it :D
I saw the star. Appreciate it.
Would you like me to mention you when I post about the update on Tildes?
yeah why not :D
Doesn't work in mobile. Oh well. Tried it in PC and it's damn hard.
The goal was to "release what is", not "release excellent". When you're depressed, an imperfect piece of code is better than one that never sees release.
I can't adapt it to mobile as is even if I wanted: it would be a convoluted experience involving flashing key cards or you'd have to waste time scrolling while also managing a virtual keyboard. I'm open to suggestions, though. Might return to fix it later.
And – yes, it's challenging even for me, and I can type blindly very fast.
EDIT: actually, I recall having an idea of using directional swipes for mobile users. Not exactly password anymore, but – mobile support, right?
:p
Can't really react too much to that.
Yeah I'll have to agree. Unfortunately the lack of a physical keyboard is what separate a modern phone from those blackberries from 10+ years ago so it's pretty important. Maybe you could try to make a keyboard in the site/code yourself and let the users be able to toggle it, although delay in typing could mean that's not an option.
Sure.
Neat, but I don't see how this might combat depression.
Given this comment here, it's probably OP's depression.