Typing practice is boring. Nobody wants to sit there hammering out "the quick brown fox" for the ninth time. So I made a game where the practice is the shooting. Enemies shamble toward you from the right, each one wearing a word like a target, and you kill them by typing it. Fast fingers, dead zombies. Miss too much and one of them reaches you and it's over. Every so often a boss shows up needing several words to bring down, and if you take out a bunch in quick succession you get double, triple, quad, penta kills, because obviously you do. That's just the law.

There's a daily challenge where everyone in the world gets the exact same words, so you can lose to your friends fairly. There's a 1v1 battle mode where the enemies you kill get launched at your opponent, which is as petty and satisfying as it sounds. And there's a party mode where you make a room, share a QR code, and everyone piles in on a shared leaderboard. On the technical side I got a bit carried away: no audio files at all, every sound is generated on the fly, and the whole thing renders with plain canvas and WebGL with some chromatic aberration and barrel distortion smeared on top for that old CRT feel. No engine, no libraries. Just a browser being asked to do things it didn't sign up for.

The party mode was actually born out of desperation. I was running the Christmas party for the engineering students at USN, saw an opportunity to test the game on a captive audience, and spent a couple of evenings bolting together a custom event scoreboard. It went better than expected. People spent large chunks of the night hunched over their phones trying to beat each other instead of, you know, attending the party. After that I posted it around on Reddit and some Facebook groups, fixed bugs and added features based on what people actually complained about, and then one day got an email from Jo-Remi Madsen, the guy behind Owlboy, saying he liked it enough to help me get it onto Steam. Three months and an unreasonable amount of back and forth with Steam support later, it shipped. That last stretch is the real lesson here: projects like this are a joy right up until they're eighty percent done, and then it's all configuration and stress testing and paperwork. Getting through that part is the whole difference between a demo and a released game.