TYPE & DICE
MY ROLE
Solo Developer
TEAM SIZE
Solo Project
DESCRIPTION
A typing-based endless runner that starts simple and gets increasingly more intense. Inspired by games like Typing of the Dead, players type the words underneath each enemy to destroy them. For each correct letter typed, players build up combo, which increases their score multiplier but can be spent to activate their "ability word" when in a pinch.
YEAR & PROJECT LENGTH
2022 - 3 months
GENRE
Typing, Endless Runner, 2D
PLATFORM
Engine
Unity
MANAGING DIFFICULTY & ACCESSIBILITY
DESIGN CONCEPT
Type and Dice was born from the idea of creating an endless runner with typing as its primary form of challenge. I wanted players to be rewarded for typing quickly and accurately, without the game feeling like an educational tool or diagnostic test.
KEY DESIGN CHALLENGES
Initially, the project's key design challenge was incorporating typing as a mechanic in an endless runner-style experience, and the technical challenge of accurately tracking player input. Taking inspiration from games like Typing of the Dead, I opted for using typing as a method of killing endless waves of enemies, and leveraged Unity's input strings to track player input accurately.
Beyond these initial technical and conception challenges, the primary difficulties throughout development arose regarding accessibility and difficulty. With typing as the central mechanic, ensuring the text was legible for all players was essential. Furthermore, as an endless runner, it was important for difficulty to increase incrementally, providing an opportunity for players to improve before eventually becoming so challenging that players would lose. Importantly, I wanted to avoid relying on enemy speed as a crutch for increasing difficulty, so I opted for experimenting with the lengths of words in the game instead, which made difficulty balancing more demanding but ultimately, I believe, more engaging for the player.
Finally, these challenges had to be balanced with needing to ensure that despite the game's clean and simple design, there was still opportunity for player agency and expression during play.
ADDRESSING THESE CHALLENGES
To tackle the issues with accessibility, I added a system to facilitate font changing within the settings, including several options including a plain sans-serif for those who found the mroe stylised pixel art fonts too challenging. This was popular with players with dyslexia, who initially found the game intimidating but were willing to give it a go after this feature was implemented.
Addressing the challenge with the game's difficulty was more nuanced. Initially, the majority of feedback was that the difficulty curve was too steep, with many players losing within 60-90 seconds. This was mostly due to the large enemies in the game, which had multiple words underneath them. In my initial builds, these enemies would scale up to having four words of seven or eight characters underneath them after 90 seconds into the game. This was an astronomical jump from the initial state where the large enemies had just two words of four or five characters. After receiving this player feedback, I opted to extend that scaling of the enemies, separating word length increases and number of word increases, culminating in a smoother and more forgiving curve.
Finally, I tackled the challenge of allowing opportunity for player agency and strategy by incorporating ability words. Before starting, the player would select a word to act as an ability. Each word had a unique ability that the player could use to slow down or remove enemies. Ability words could be activated when all the letters in the word had been correctly typed at least once or when the player had accrued enough combo (consecutively correct typed letters).
This mechanic allowed for more and less powerful ability words to exist, as ability words that featured common letters could be unlocked more easily, whilst more powerful abilities had words that featured less common letters. Similarly, by tying the ability to the player's combo, highly skilled players could access the ability more consistently, enabling greater opportunity for skill expression and addressing this challenge. it's important to note that the game lacks visual feedback for the ability words and their effects. Whilst I believe the concept of the ability words is a good one and allows for greater player agency and skill expression, better feedback would have taken the experience to another level.
Font Switching for Accessibility
Example Gameplay
Type & Dice Gameplay Video