Typing Alchemist - Solo Developed Typing Game

About

Typing Alchemist is a typing game where you race against a growing shadow to fuse and discover new elements. This game started as an entry for Pirate Software's July 2024 Game Jam where the theme was "Shadows and Alchemy".

Development Details

The game was created in two weeks using the following technologies:

  • Engine: GameMaker Studio
  • Languages: GML (GameMaker Language, similar to JavaScript), GLSL
  • Graphics: Krita
  • SFX/Music: Logic Pro X

Retrospective

The Good

This was my first completed game project. I think the shadow mechanic is well designed and implemented. To implement the shadow mechanic, I took it upon myself to learn OpenGL Shader Language and reverse engineer this lighting system. The mechanics of the shadow took some fine tuning in terms of game balance, but I am ultimately happy with the outcome.

The typing mechanic itself required some iterations to get its overall ease of use in a good place that never felt frustrating. The main example of this was being able to clear all of your current typing with the tab key.

Finally, though the game balance is not perfect (is game balance ever perfect?) I am happy with the final result. I included a difficulty modifier that responds to how many games a player has won or lost in a row, an addition that I find to be essential due to people's varying typing abilities.

The Not So Good

I am overall pretty happy with how my first completed game turned out! The biggest lessons learned had to more to do with project management and deadlines rather than the game itself. To summarize, I spent a week creating this game, feeling confident the entire time I would have it done by the deadline. Unfortunately, my estimates did not include some key final actions such as bug fixing and QA on the final HTML5 build.

With only an hour to go for submission, I exported the HTML5 build to upload to Itch.io and (of course) it had bugs. In my defense, GameMaker's HTML5 export is notoriously buggy, but I still should have given myself MUCH more of a buffer for uploading my hard work.

Missing the deadline was pretty devastating because this was my first game jam and I wanted to go above and beyond, but alas, it serves a major learning experience. Game development is always going to take longer than you think it will.

Try it out

You can play the game in-browser for free on Itch.io by clicking the button below.

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